Is Trump getting cocky way too early?

The 2024 election is just a little over two weeks away now and most Democrats are down to their last nerve with worry. This is nothing new, of course. That's just the way they roll. Republicans, meanwhile, are already cracking the champagne and strutting around saying they have it in the bag: No need to worry. Well, that's how they roll. Both of these phenomena are indicative of a certain kind of temperament but they are also real political strategies. It's worth asking how effective they really are.

I've written before about the Republican love of the bandwagon effect, which basically relies on the idea that if you act like Donald Trump and pretend you've definitely got it won, some people will naturally follow along because they want to go with the winner. They've been doing that long before Trump came along, but nobody in politics has ever been more naturally adept at deploying it than he is. And we've discussed, ad nauseam, that Democrats are suffering from post-2016 PTSD and are inherently more likely to believe the sky is falling. Many of these races have been so close for so long that they are rationally worried that it will fall the wrong way.

Former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer recently explained why these behaviors may be counterproductive this time around, particularly on the GOP side. The political strategy behind the bandwagon effect was meant to target the high-propensity voters to whom Republicans have traditionally appealed: older and mostly college-educated people who always turn out. That is why they would win the low-interest midterm elections while Democrats are more likely to win big popular-vote victories driven by people who vote only sporadically or rarely, which to some extent counteracts the GOP base of regular voters in the presidential years.