21 days
By 
A few Monday morning election thoughts:
(1) Ezra Klein makes a good argument for simply ignoring any polls between now and November 5th. Klein’s basic point is that the current state of polling is such that each candidate appears to be well within the margin of error in each of the seven swing states, so it really wouldn’t be much of a surprise, statistically speaking, for either Harris or Trump to sweep all seven (in fact those are the two most probable outcomes, although neither outcome is probable in the sense of being anywhere close to more likely than not. But the odds that either Harris or Trump will win all seven swing states are collectively probably close to even, because of course the odds of who ends up winning each individual state are not independent probabilities).
So a toss up in other words. Two months ago I thought that the huge upwelling of enthusiasm for Harris’s candidacy was going to carry her to a really decisive victory. This is still possible, but seems increasingly unlikely. Instead what we seem likely to get is something like a two to four percentage point win the popular vote, and nail biting races in all seven swing states. (Another disappointing thing about the last two months is that it doesn’t appear that any of the 43 other states have come into play).
(2) I was talking to a high up Dem operative this weekend, and asked him what he thought things would look like if Biden were still the candidate. He laughed and said “we would be getting slaughtered up and down the ticket.” His view is that the persuadable electorate, both in the sense of people who can be persuaded to vote for a particular candidate and who can be persuaded to vote at all, is so disconnected from politics that the narrative that Biden was too old to serve another term was going to be an absolute killer, because it was so simple, repeatable, and at least superficially plausible.
(3) This story in the NYT is about how “respectable” Trump voters — high SES people who don’t wear MAGA hats and are basically voting for tax cuts and deregulation — rationalize their votes by simply refusing to believe he’s going to end up doing all the terrible things he keeps saying he’s going to do. Part and parcel of this is a narrative about how the Trump presidency was all about “peace and prosperity,” as if 2020 (not to mention January 6 2021) just didn’t happen. What these people really mean is that they’re basically indifferent to the horrors of mass deportation, authoritarian persecution of one’s political enemies, turning local police forces into fascist paramilitaries etc. Good Germans in other words.