Joni Mitchell played 2 nights at the Hollywood Bowl this past weekend. She reached back for one of her rarely-performed political songs, “Dog Eat Dog,” adding “like Donald Trump” to the line “and big wig financiers,” and, at one point, shouted “Fuck Donald Trump… Everybody get out and vote. This is an important one. I wish I could vote— I’m Canadian. I’m one of those lousy immigrants.”
Joni’s core of fans— mostly white, mostly Christian, New Left or Old Left— have never left the Democratic Party, but might feel that the Democratic Party has left them. The people who thrilled to her words and music, and the words and music of Stephen Stills and Neil Young, and Bob Dylan— like the people who thrilled to the words of Martin Luther King— no longer have a dime’s worth of influence in the Democratic Party, because of the leveraged buyout of the party by those who have a lot more than a dime to spend. Joni’s fans may or may not vote for Harris/Walz— despite this possibly being the most liberal national ticket that we’ve seen for a long time— because a lot of them feel, sadly, that we feed politics all our woes, and the ghostly garden grows. Joni’s fans haven’t seen any shotguns in the sky turning into butterflies on any recent occasion, so they don’t dream about it anymore. Her underlying truth is still there— if we are kind to each other, and we all agree on the common good, then everyone would be better off; we would be a Great Society. After all, no one ever even questions universal healthcare in Canada, where Joni was born and grew up. So many Joni fans try, despite all of the palpable failure, because they think they have got to get themselves back to the Garden.
Still, somehow I assume nearly everyone at the 2 concerts— and everyone who cares who Joni Mitchell endorses (for or against)— is, whether they have lost their class consciousness or not, already a Kamala voter, or, at the very least, not a Trump voter. And at this point in the race— 2 weeks from today, but who’s counting— both campaigns are desperately looking for undecided voters. Yesterday Reid Epstein and Shane Goldmacher reported that the two campaigns “are carrying out a virtual house-to-house hunt for the final few voters who are still up for grabs, guided by months of painstaking research about these elusive Americans.”
I don’t think “Joni fan” is a category but Kamala’s “campaign, analysts have spent 18 months curating a list of which television shows and podcasts voters consume in the battleground states. Her team has assigned every voter in these states a ‘contactability score’ from 0 to 100 to determine just how hard that person will be to reach— and who is best to deliver her closing message. The results are guiding Harris’ media and travel schedule, as well as campaign stops by brand-name supporters. For instance, the movie star Julia Roberts and the basketball great Magic Johnson earned high marks among certain voters, so they have been deployed to swing states.” Yesterday Dan Pfeiffer explained why she’s spending so much time and energy trying to woo disaffected Republicans and GOP-leaning independents.
Meanwhile, Epstein and Goldmacher reported that Señor T’s “team recently refreshed its model of the battleground electorate and found that just 5 percent of voters were still undecided, half as many as in August. The Trump team calls them the ‘target persuadables’— younger, more racially diverse people with lower incomes who tend to use streaming services and social media. Trump has made appearance after appearance on those platforms, including on podcasts aimed at young men.
This furious search for a fickle sliver of the country has grown more urgent because the presidential contest is as close as any since the advent of modern polling, with the two candidates nearly deadlocked across the battleground states. The election could now ride on undecided Americans who have unplugged almost entirely from political news— making them tricky to find even for billion-dollar campaigns.
“These people are not super political,” said James Blair, the political director of the Trump campaign, “and so we’re doing non-super-political media.”
In interviews, senior Harris and Trump advisers divulged some details of whom, exactly, they still view as up for grabs. Both see a group that is younger, with a disproportionate share of Black and Latino voters. The Harris campaign believes it can still win over some white college-educated voters, particularly women, who have historically voted Republican but are repelled by Trump.
An analysis of polling in the battleground states from the New York Times and Siena College found that a mere 3.7 percent of their voters, or about 1.2 million people, were still truly undecided.
The Times analysis closely mirrored what the campaigns describe: a group heavy on younger voters, people of color and those without college degrees. Black voters make up about 21 percent of the undecideds, which helps explain Harris’ explicit push for them.
Many undecided Americans are unsure if voting is even worth their time.
Some don’t want to be inconvenienced but if a ballot is delivered to their front door— the way it is in California (something that drives Republicans apoplectic)— they might fill it out. They’re not watching debates or following political news and have other things on their minds. Apparently neither candidate’s message has broken through— or they assume “all politicians lie,” especially when literally, almost every promise Trump makes is a lie.
Kamala’s campaign, the two Times reporters wrote, “considers its audience of winnable swing voters to be up to 10 percent of voters in battleground states, slightly larger than what the Trump operation sees for itself or The Times polling indicates. That is because the campaign includes a large number of Republican women who it believes dislike Trump, particularly on abortion policy, but want to hear Harris’ message on the economy and the border before they are persuaded. This strategic thinking has informed the vice president’s campaign speeches. On Thursday in Wisconsin, she made a direct call to Republicans, particularly those put off by Trump. She reminded the audience that she had the backing of Liz Cheney, the conservative former congresswoman from Wyoming, whom Harris is campaigning with in three states on Monday. Last week, Harris appeared in Pennsylvania with dozens of Republicans.”
The undecided voters, said Meg Schwenzfeier, the chief analytics officer for the Harris campaign, “are very hard to reach— they are not watching traditional news platforms or other programming with large, mainstream audiences. To talk to them, we have to take a layered approach— we have to be on TV, nontraditional platforms, door-knocking, billboards, digital ads, mail— everything really.”
I found the most interesting part of their report to be that her campaign figured out which moments of her media interviews had helped change minds. One example came during her appearances on The View and with Howard Stern, “where she announced a plan to extend Medicare coverage for at-home care for seniors. Of the more than 100 clips during her media blitz that were tested for their effectiveness at increasing her support, that proposal ranked at the top, a campaign official said.” Ummm… more than Dick Cheney’s endorsement? Who’da thunk? And then there’s the way the Biden administration has screwed the pooch in Gaza. “The Trump campaign’s research found that up-for-grabs voters were about six times as likely as other battleground-state voters to be motivated by their views of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
The campaign also found that undecided voters were less likely to be white than those in the battlegrounds overall and more likely to be Black. About 25 percent of undecided voters are Black, according to the Trump team.
“The fact that they don’t have younger Black men locked in with less than three weeks to Election Day is a big problem for them,” Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director, said of Harris and Democrats. “Historically, that would be part of their base.”
The Trump team’s research shows that undecided voters are particularly focused on the economy, and are often financially struggling. They are more likely to work two jobs, and on average they earn $15,000 less per household than the battleground voters who have made up their minds.
About a quarter of the undecided voters in the Trump team’s research describe themselves as nonideological, and the campaign has for months studied what issues move them the most.
By late summer, voters targeted by the Trump campaign said they were most concerned about immigration and inflation, particularly the prices of groceries and housing. Not surprisingly, two of Harris’s first economic plans sought to directly address price-gouging on groceries and housing costs.
Trump’s team typically tends to project bravado, and his aides believe that voters who made their decision in the last two months have tilted in his favor.
In the campaign’s refreshed model, the Trump campaign moved 1.5 million voters out of the persuadable category and into its camp. It shifted just 924,000 to Harris’s side.
Jim Messina, who was the campaign manager for Obama’s 2012 re-election bid and is now the chairman of a Democratic super PAC, said he viewed the remaining undecided voters as fitting into two broad groups: young people and people of color in one, and suburban women in the other.
“She now leads the suburbs, and this is where I think she has room to grow and he doesn’t, because these are the voters we’re talking about,” Messina said.
Harris allies think they can win over voters like Angela Beers, 44, a real estate agent from Brookhaven, Pa., who said she would not vote for Trump but remained unsold on Harris.
Beers was a fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when he was running as an independent and said she might write him in as a protest.
Beers said she was aware of some of Harris’s policies to help first-time home buyers, but thought they would serve only to make housing more expensive and drive inflation.
“This whole concept of, ‘give everybody money, let’s help people with down payments, let’s get the interest rates lower’— all it does it make prices go higher,” Beers said. “I don’t see either of the candidates talking about the supply issue.”
Whether Harris can break through to voters like Beers in the next two weeks will determine whether she can carry the key battleground states.
Really? Reaching voters as patently stupid as this moron who was backing RFK Jr? That’s what it comes down to? People who are too dumb to be allowed out of the house by themselves, let alone into a voting booth?
i'm naturally a pessimist but i think Harris is going to get rolled
Joni Mitchell's song for the undecided voters should be, "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone..." It would all be gone with the orange menace back in the white house.