Just 11 days ago, we caught David Frum on CNN virtually stamping his feet in frustration at the prospect that Donald Trump had a good chance of winning the election. Frum fumed over the "probably stupid" American system under which a candidate can lose the popular vote but still win the presidency in the Electoral College.
Frum, who in addition to being a CNN regular writes for The Atlantic, was in a much more sanguine mood on today's CNN This Morning. Citing one new poll that shows Kamala Harris with a five-point lead over Trump. Frum analogized the race to that of 1980, in which it was "close, close, close" until Reagan pulled away from Carter in the last month-and-a-half.
Frum sees Harris as the candidate now pulling away. Frum was, in essence, predicting a Kamala victory. And he wondered what lesson the Trump campaign, and by extension Republicans at large, would learn from the loss.
Would they conclude that Trump lost because he was older and didn't work hard enough, and that the party simply needs to find a younger, harder-working version of Trump? Or will they realize that, according to Frum:
"[Trump's] kind of authoritarian, racist, corrupt style of politics doesn't work. It doesn't work in North Carolina. It doesn't work for Donald Trump. And it doesn't work when you give it a law degree and a better haircut and J.D. Vance."
Nasty stuff.
Frum reached back 44 years for his Reagan-Carter analogy. It wouldn't have suited his argument to look to a much more recent election, that of 2016. There, the poll consensus was that Hillary Clinton would win rather easily. FiveThirtyEight's final prediction gave her a 71.4% chance of winning, Trump a meager 28.6%. And speaking of pulling away, FiveThirtyEight's polling of the popular vote showed Hillary getting a notable bump in the final days, and an Electoral College mini-landslide of 302-235.
So confident of a Clinton win were the pollsters and Hillary that she chose for her anticipated Election Night victory speech a venue that literally had . . . a glass ceiling.
We all know how that turned out.
Here's the transcript.
CNN This Morning
9/23/24
6:05 am EDTDAVID FRUM: We opened this segment by saying there there are new polling this weekend that show Kamala Harris probably five percentage points ahead of Donald Trump in the polling, but it's closer in the battleground states. Now what if we rephrase that? Kamala Harris is five points ahead in national polling, which translates to an advantage of probably seven or eight million votes. But in the states where it's close, it's close. Because the way you get to be a battleground state is the state where it's close.
But this election is widening. And it's very much what happened, I think, this year, what happened in 1980 with Ronald Reagan, where between Reagan and Carter, it was close, close, close until suddenly, it wasn't close in the last month-and-a-half of the election, when the leader pulled away. What we're watching is the leader pulling away.
And I think one of the questions I am contemplating is, when it's all said and done, will the Trump campaign say the problem was that the president was kind of older and he didn't, he got lazy. He didn't work very hard, and we need to find a harder working, younger Trump?
Or do they learn some real lessons here? About what the country is like, and that this kind of authoritarian, racist, corrupt style of politics doesn't work. It doesn't work in North Carolina. It doesn't work for Donald Trump. And it doesn't work when you give it a law degree and a at a better haircut and J.D. Vance.
