Polls polls everywhere, and not a drop to think ...

After a week off in sunny SoCal, it seemed like a good time to take a look at polling in the presidential contest. As it turns out, not much has changed, especially at the national level, although the small changes that have emerged favor Donald Trump. A new NBC News national poll shows Trump in a dead heat with Kamala Harris, a five-point shift in the month since their previous survey. ABC/Ipsos went from Harris +4 in September to +2 last week; CBS went from +4 to +3 Harris. 

Maybe that's not momentum, or perhaps it could show the start of a preference cascade. That argument looks stronger in the betting markets, where Harris' prospects have begun to fade -- and perhaps rapidly. Since getting anointed as the Democrat nominee, Harris has mainly led in these markets. Even when Trump briefly regained the lead in the RCP aggregation of the seven betting markets, he only got to a 51.1/47.0 amplitude. 

Nine days ago, Harris still had a narrow edge, but suddenly the betting markets are shorting her significantly:

That looks pretty significant. And as I have noted before, the betting markets seem to anticipate polling shifts by somewhere between a few days and a week or so. This data would indicate that Harris can expect more erosion in her standing in the final three weeks before Election Day.

What could explain this sudden shift? First off, the US electorate usually has some sort of late preference cascade as voters lock in on their choices. It's not unusual to see this, although betting markets may make it easier to spot as it happens; sometimes polling only shows it in retrospect. In an environment where net disapproval of the incumbent administration is -14.7 and the net wrong-direction sentiment is as large as -32.9 (the current RCP aggregate scores), a late collapse in the incumbent's position is scarcely surprising.

Or perhaps voters saw something that either changed their minds or made their choices easier over the last nine days. If October 5 was the inflection point for a voter reaction, what may have caused it? My friend Monica Showalter has a more specific theory, proposed with caution: 

One, President Trump held his return rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, an extraordinary act of courage, a Douglas MacArthur moment, as AT contributor Paul Binotto put it, where they sang 'Ave Maria.' It reminded voters of everything they liked about him, and what they wanted to see in a leader who leads. He did his part to shift momentum completely independent of Kamala Harris.

As for Harris, and the Harris-Biden administration, based on what I found, the top story was FEMA issuing a rumor-checking website page to counter all the talk about FEMA interfering with aid to Hurricane Helene victims in North Carolina, and FEMA not having enough resources to help them, owing to its illegal alien commitments for transport, shelter and package deals for millions of illegal border crossers.

Incompetence, seen up close, combined with the ongoing border failure, placed right out front apparently was lethal for Kamala. And voters must have believed the first story, which came out a day or two earlier, that illegals were getting all they needed from FEMA while residents caught up in a terrible natural disaster were getting little to nothing. Didn't matter which pot the cash was in, this skewed priority was lethal for Harris in a disaster.

These may not explain Harris' erosion sufficiently. This, however, is a more convincing explanation:

Lastly, there were the word salads -- Kamala's handlers could see the momentum falling, and decided to get her out into the public a bit more, with friendly and jejeune interviewers and television appearances -- all of which she blew. AT's Andrea Widburg noted a few of those salads in the days building up to Oct. 5 here. She was suddenly doing a lot of them.

I suspect these sank her betting odds more than anything. Young black and Latino voters have told pollsters they want to know more about her and what she plans for the country. All they get in reply is gibberish, or 'joy,' like she's trying to sell them a can of Pepsi. It's not real joy, see, it's just what the ad promises -- life, love, good health, the works. Been there, done that -- and not even young people who weren't born before those Coke and Pepsi ads promising world peace were around were fooled.

That looks more like the proximate cause. But that points to perhaps a longer erosion in polls we don't normally see. For some reason, Team Kamala felt the need to stage a media blitz for Harris after keeping her and Tim Walz tightly under wraps for two months. That ... did not go well, to put it mildly, Harris spent most of her time cutting ads for Team Trump, even apart from the word salads, and making herself look even more a part of the radical status quo.

Reince Priebus laid it out on ABC News' This Week yesterday:

ABC just destroyed Kamala’s whole campaign.

👀pic.twitter.com/V1fLzUSO33

— American AF 🇺🇸 (@iAnonPatriot) October 14, 2024

The only reason to send Harris out on this media blitz would have been to shore up an already eroding position. The betting markets may not even be a leading indicator in that sense, but they have caught the whiff of desperation nonetheless. And as Morrissey's First Axiom of Dating and Politics states, desperation is not an aphrodisiac.