Good vibes, bad vibes

In a flat Presidential race, the media are looking for a hook and boy did they get one

Will Kill Tony kill Donny? American politics this week has played out the key maxim of our age: it’s only OK if Donald Trump says it. When hangers-on, hell even the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, say borderline insane or ‘racially provocative’ things, they pay a price that Teflon Don doesn’t. Teflon, it seems, is not contagious.

There is a growing furore about a pro-Trump comedian calling Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage’. Apparently this was a joke. The consequences for the Trump campaign may be equally unfunny (at least from their perspective).

There are a LOT of Puerto Rican voters in the US, including in the seven swing states on which the election hangs. For my non-American audience a quick explainer: Puerto Rico is a US territory and its inhabitants are US citizens but they can only vote for US President if resident in one of the 50 states. So the three million residents of Puerto Rico can’t directly affect the election but their six million relatives (perhaps very long-run relatives) living on the mainland (or in Hawaii) absolutely can.

And as a number of people have noted, there a lots of Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania (almost half a million) and sizeable populations in North Carolina and Georgia (100,000 each). There are over a million in Florida but that one-time perennial swing-state appears to have swung red and out of reach for Democrats. There are also many famous Puerto Ricans with huge social media followings - Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, Marc Anthony, and Ricky Martin, to name a few.

But look, Trump and his associates have said a lot of things that would get you thrown out of polite company. It’s a feature not a bug. Why would this one event matter more than the countless things they have said over the years about Mexicans, Haitians, Venezuelans etc?

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Timing

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We are one week away from the election. Readers of my last post will recall my argument that the race was essentially flat in polling terms. OK slight addendum to that since the post dropped - Trump has narrowed the gap slightly. But Harris is still carrying a national poll average of around two points, maybe just under. A few national polls have given Trump a lead of a point or two. A few polls still give Harris something like four to six point leads. Referring back to last time, that’s what you would expect from random samples from a population where Harris had a marginal lead.

Her lead also looks slightly more robust in terms of state polls, where she is still just edging the Blue Wall of PA-MI-WI on average. And, oddly, polls of bellwether Congressional districts (NE-2, PA-5) indicate that Harris would actually have a comfortable win. At the same time, her polling has been poor in deep blue states such as New York, which might indicate a closing of the Republicans’ electoral college gap.

Blah blah blah. Boring. Even I’m struggling to go through this list of results that show, yes it’s close, a proper coin flip, we can’t know, maybe someone will run away with it in either direction if the polls are off.

This does not make great broadcasting. But you know what does? Vibes. And the vibes given off by the two campaigns over the past month have been strikingly different. Trump’s campaign have been in pre-emptive victory mode, projecting strength and certainty, showing leads in (possibly dodgy) betting markets, and even permitting Martin Prince in human form, Elon Musk, to gallivant awkwardly around Trump’s stage.

Harris’s campaign meanwhile has been beset by that time-honoured American tradition - despondent Democrats. Since American voters seem determined to fit themselves into the Big Five personality traits beloved of psychologists - Democrats are the party of neuroticism. All kinds of people vaguely - or perhaps centrally, who knows - associated with the Harris campaign have been calling Politico, the NYT, Axios, etc to express their anxiety. As many commentators have noted, it would probably be helpful for Democratic operatives not to use journalists as therapists.

What has set off this vibe shift? A tightening of the polls that people like David Plouffe, who actually runs the Harris campaign, telegraphed would happen months ago. Shifts in the betting markets that I alluded to above that yes are partly driven by ‘whales’ seeking to shift the market directly but also reflect a change in beliefs by people who set odds directly (e.g. British betting firms).

And perhaps above all, the never-escapable quasi-midwit argument that Trump will necessarily beat his polls because he did so in two previous Presidential elections. Look I get that past data is the only solid basis to go off but two can play at that game - e.g Trump has never beaten 46.8% in Presidential elections, so how could he this time? Well, probably quite easily. Maybe the pollsters, despite all their model and sampling changes, still can’t capture Trump voters - quite possible. But I wouldn’t hang my hat on it just because it happened before.

So the Trump campaign has got a bit cocky. And Trump loves New York - his hometown that just never gives him the respect he deserves. So what better than a celebratory pre-victory campaign event at Madison Square Garden?

Now you might say, why choose a venue associated with the famous pro-Nazi rally hosted by the German American Bund in 1939, especially after weathering a news cycle where your previous Chief of Staff called you a fascist? But perhaps you are not an edge-lord 4chan-posting liberal-tears-drinking alt-right campaign team. So much of too-online conservatism in America has been deliberately ‘ironic’ fashposting - recall the mad Ron De Santis campaign video that superimposed the Florida Governor’s face on a Nazi sonnenrad.

But flying this close to the sun, this close to the election? It only takes one shock-jock internet comedian - a certain Tony Hinchcliffe from the podcast Kill Tony - to massively offend an important voting base. Now Hinchcliffe also made a variety of horrendous ‘jokes’ about other racial groups - blacks, Latinos, Israelis and Palestinians - which seem to have avoided creating a sensation. But the Puerto Rico gag has somehow hit home in a way the other ‘bits’ didn't. It was also allegedly pre-vetted by the Trump campaign.

Quite why it was this particular piece of nastiness that stuck, as opposed to the litany of other things that were said at Madison Square Garden, is hard to know. In part, it must be that the joke was unfunny and even the audience groaned - which removes the ‘get a sense of humour libs’ argument. It’s probably also because it’s repeatable by news anchors in a way that the others might not be (because of sexual content or because they drew on a racial stereotype).

Whatever the reason, this has actually stuck and is front page news at CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times. And probably as importantly it has made waves in the Puerto Rican community in WhatsApp groups, as well as in denunciations by the head of the Puerto Rican Republicans and the Bishop of St Juan. It has legs as a story, not least because there will be pressure on Trump to apologise personally (his campaign already has), which he will HATE. Plus Trump has an upcoming rally in Allentown PA, which, guess what, has a large Puerto Rican population.

And again, we are days away from the election. Each campaign has to be thinking, what is the overall story we want the press to be obsessed with in an otherwise tied race without clear polling ups and downs? This was of course the period in which the Comey investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails dropped in 2016, quite possibly costing her the election. What was important about the Comey story was how it galvanised existing concerns about Clinton - her secretiveness, her reputation among Republicans for dishonesty. And it also came about because of a member of her campaign, Huma Abedin, had her emails examined because of an entirely different case involving her husband Anthony Weiner and a sexting scandal. In other words, not from the Presidential candidate but an associate.

And here we are again. The Kill Tony Puerto Rico incident has news legs because it gets at a fundamental weakness of Donald Trump - his apparent disrespect for various ethnic groups, his harsh language, his incompetent and uncaring responses to natural disasters when President (remember Trump throwing paper towels to the crowd after the Puerto Rico hurricane disaster). And like the Comey case, it was someone else associated with the campaign - really vaguely this time, since Tony Hinchcliffe was a warm-up act. But that’s the thing - it’s always hard to get at Trump directly because everything just rolls off him. It’s usually been various nefarious hangers-on or supporters that give him grief (e.g. Charlottesville, Project 2025).

Now maybe Trump will apologise. I doubt it. But there’s a day or two more of news cycles. And all this builds on the claims by John Kelly, General Mattis, Mark Esper, and other members of Trump’s last administration that he is a dangerous authoritarian (you can see me talk about this on Newsnight last week). So if you like, there’s context for the Madison Square Garden farrago.

Now maybe this will all burn out over the next few days. Maybe something else is coming down the line. An October surprise that derails Harris. Or maybe that’s too late and this is the last thing on Americans’ minds as they cast early votes or wait to vote on Tuesday. Live by the vibe. Die by the vibe.