With less than 40 days until election day, how can it be that Trump has taken a small lead in Arizona and Georgia – two swing states he lost to Biden in 2020? How can he be narrowly leading Harris in the swing state of North Carolina? How can he now be essentially tied with her in the other key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin?
More generally, how can Trump have chiseled away Harris’s advantage from early August? How is it possible that more voters appear to view Trump favorably now than they did several months ago when he was in the race against Biden?
How can Trump – the sleaziest person ever to run for president, who has already been convicted on 34 felony charges and impeached twice, whose failures of character and leadership were experienced directly by the American public during his four years at the helm – be running neck-and-neck with a young, talented, intelligent person with a commendable record of public service?
Since his horrid performance debating Harris, he’s doubled down on false claims that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Ohio. He’s been accompanied almost everywhere by rightwing conspiracy nutcase Laura Loomer. He said he “hates” Taylor Swift after she endorsed Harris; that Jewish people will be responsible if he loses the election; that the second attempt on his life was incited by the “Communist left rhetoric” of Biden and Harris. And so on.
He’s become so incoherent in public that Republican advisers are begging him to get back “on message”.
So why is he neck-and-neck with Harris?
Before we get to what I think is the reason, let’s dismiss other explanations being offered.
One is that the polls are understating voters’ support for Harris and overstating their support for Trump. But if the polls are systematically biased, you’d think it would be the other way around, since some non-college voters are probably reluctant to admit to professional pollsters their preference for Trump.
Another is that the media is intentionally creating a nail-bitingly close race in order to sell more ads. But this can’t be right because, if anything, more Americans appear to be tuning out politics altogether.
A final theory holds that Harris has not yet put to rest voters’ fears about inflation and the economy. But given that the American economy has rebounded, inflation is way down, interest rates are falling, wages are up and the job engine continues, you’d think voters at the margin would be moving toward her rather than toward Trump.
The easiest explanation has to do with asymmetric information.
By now, almost everyone in America knows Trump and has made up their minds about him. Recent polls have found that nearly 90% of voters say they do not need to learn more about Trump to decide their vote.
But they don’t yet know Harris, or remain undecided about her. More on this in a moment.
Trump is exploiting this asymmetry so that when it comes to choosing between Trump and Harris, voters will choose the devil they know.
This requires, first, that Trump suck all the media oxygen out of the air so Harris has fewer opportunities to define herself positively.
Americans who have become overwhelmed by the chaos are tuning out politics altogether, especially in swing states where political advertising is nonstop. And as they tune out both Trump and Harris, Trump is the beneficiary, because, again, he’s the devil they know.
In other words, Trump is running neck-and-neck with Harris not despite the mess he’s created over the last few weeks but because of it.
Trump’s strategy also requires that he and his allies simultaneously flood the airwaves and social media with negative ads about Harris, which are then amplified by the rightwing ecosystem of Fox News, Newsmax and Sinclair radio.
Trump’s campaign has given up trying to promote him positively. The Wesleyan Media Project estimates that the Trump team is now spending almost zero on ads that show him in a positive light. There’s no point, because everyone has already made up their minds about him.
Instead, the ads aired by Trump and his allies in swing states are overwhelmingly negative about Harris – emphasizing, for example, her past support for gender transition surgery for incarcerated people.
Researchers on cognition have long known that negative messages have a bigger impact than positive ones, probably because in evolutionary terms, our brains are hard-wired to respond more to frightening than to positive stimuli (which might explain why social media and even mainstream media are filled with negative stories).
Finally, Trump’s strategy necessitates that he refuse to debate her again, lest she get additional positive exposure (hence he has turned down CNN’s invitation for a 23 October debate, which she has accepted).
Behind the information asymmetry lie racism and misogyny. I can’t help wondering how many Americans who continue saying they “don’t know” or are “undecided” about Harris are concealing something from pollsters and possibly from themselves: they feel uncomfortable voting for a Black woman.
Having said all this, I’m cautiously optimistic about the outcome of the election. Why? Because Trump is deteriorating rapidly; lately he’s barely been able to string sentences together coherently.
Harris, by contrast, is gaining strength and confidence by the day, and despite Trump’s attempts to shut her out, more Americans are learning about her. As she gets more exposure, Trump’s “devil-you-know” advantage disappears.
Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I’m nauseously optimistic, because, to be candid, I go into the next five weeks feeling a bit sick to my stomach. Even if Harris wins, the fact that so many Americans seem prepared to vote for Trump makes me worry for the future of my country.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
