Assassi(nation)
In this week's video chat, Neil and I follow up on Monday's post about the second overt attempt on Donald Trump's life
On July 18, 2024, delegates at the 2024 Republican National Convention put large white bandages on their right ears that mimicked the one Donald Trump was wearing. Photo credit: Ben Von Klemperer/Shutterstock
We welcomed Neil back to the Political Junkie video chat (thanks for your star turn last week, Leah Wright Rigueur!) Neil was off working at the OpEd Project, and he began the show by explaining how this organization helps boost new and diverse voices into the public sphere.
We have 46 days to go until the election, early voting has begun in many states, and the polls are, as usual, all over the place. Here’s a couple of topics that Neil and I touched down on:
A New York Times/Sienna College poll released this week has the presidential race deadlocked at 47% of the vote each for former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. But dig this: the same poll gives Harris a 4-point lead in Pennsylvania. By a 27-point margin, the national sample acknowledges that Harris won last week’s debate.
Nate Silver, on the other hand, gives Harris a three-point edge nationally and only a 1.4 point lead in Pennsylvania (margin of error is 2-3 points, so that isn’t a lead.) Silver is still giving Trump a 52% chance of winning the race, but his most recent analysis shows Harris’s chances of winning rising sharply. Tune in next week: this is getting exciting.
Control of Congress is also still up in the air, but Harris’s rising numbers are encouraging for Democrats in tight races. At The Hill, political reporter Juan Williams argues that a strong Harris performance could drag Democrats across the line.
Here’s what Neil and Claire feel a bit grim about: citing The Cook Political Report, the election tracker 270 To Win has moved the Montana Senate race from tossup to leans Republican. Since the Democrats will lose Joe Manchin’s West Virginia seat, it’s ten other races that will decide the Senate majority, and two—Republican incumbents Ted Cruz in Texas and Rick Scott in Florida—are possible, but tough, flips. Watch the video for Neil’s prediction in Florida.
What cheers Neil and Claire up: There are 24 tossup seats in Congress. This gives the Democrats many opportunities to claw back the five seats they need to win back the Speaker’s gavel. A chunk of those seats—maybe all of them!—could come from flipping New York State’s five Republican districts back to Democrat. We want to give a special shout-out to Rob Lubin in NY-2 (Long Island), who hopes that the six-point Harris bump in that state will push him over the top. The electoral analysis site Split Ticket gives the Democrats a 58% chance of winning back the House, and districts like NY-2, which went to Trump by a hair in 2020, are where that will happen. So if you have a second, give Rob five dollars.
Today, we returned to the topic I covered on Monday, presidential assassination, which most of the press has rapidly walked away from. We began by elevating a comment on that post from a subscriber named Athena. She wrote that political violence is “as old as time,” but what is new in the United States is to have that violence originate in a political party. Thank you, Athena, for giving us food for thought!
We also noted that there have been two overt attempts to assassinate Trump in nine weeks, but we must assume there are many more threats we have not heard about; ditto threats against VP Harris. For example, Wikipedia lists 20 instances in which arrests have been made in plots against Barack Obama’s life.
Neil mentioned a piece by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic (September 16, 2024) comparing Trump’s vitriolic responses to the violence against him to Gerald Ford’s muted, workmanlike return to his losing campaign.
Neil and I also discussed the normality of American political violence, when we expand the category to include rebellions, the Civil War, lynching, anti-Black and anti-Asian voter intimidation, and domestic terrorism.
As always, we ended with what we want to go viral:
Neil chose a new podcast at The Atlantic hosted by Lauren Ober and Hanna Rosin. We Live Here Now tells the stories of friends, allies, and relatives of the January 6 defendants who have moved to Washington D.C. The first episode features (wait for it) Ashli Babbit’s mother. Babbit, who has become a martyr in MAGA world, was an insurrectionist who was shot by a Capitol policeman as she tried to enter the Speaker’s Lobby through a shattered window.
Claire boosted an article by media journalist Brian Stelter, who has recently returned to CNN, about the Harris-Walz media strategy. The campaign is going small, doing sit-downs small with local news outlets and podcasters, creating original content for social media platforms, and micro-targeting voters.
The fun video is below the paywall!
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
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