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There’s no question she has more to lose. The Kamala Harris campaign team apparently based their debate strategy assuming that ABC News would prove as pliable and willing as the rest of the media toward their efforts, expecting that the rules requiring muted mics between answers would be thrown out. They assumed wrong, and now they are reportedly “scrambling” for a new plan, describing Kamala’s position as “handcuffed” by the rules agreed to when Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate:
Trump’s worst moments in the debates are when he gets upset and snaps,” said an aide to Harris in her 2020 presidential campaign, granted anonymity to speak freely. “And they have neutered that.
That the vice president was counting on a rule change as essential for her debate strategy is like expecting a professor to cancel the final exam — which is never a good approach. What we’ve learned about Kamala Harris to this point on the debate stage is that she is easily knocked off her game, even with basic frontal lines of attack. She lost her debate to Mike Pence in 2020, which is why all that anyone remembers about it is that at one point a fly landed on his hair. And the Tulsi Gabbard effect which led to the Harris presidential campaign’s collapse is still very much in her head.
All this sets up a debate where Harris will have to accomplish a lot more than Donald Trump, who really just needs to run it back for a repeat performance from June. Trump has momentum on his side after a polling reset that saw Harris’s post-coup bump disappear, troubling the readers of the New York Times and reframing the storyline around the trajectory of this election from joy to anxiety, Inside Out 2-style.
The Trump team shouldn’t change anything about its approach. Letting the moderators and Kamala go back and forth on key questions about the economy, the border and foreign policy should be the plan, and if the moderators don’t ask those questions, bring them up yourself. Discipline has benefited Trump, and focusing on policy — avoiding the temptation to personally attack Kamala’s personal inauthenticity or her life story — helps define her as the candidate of the past four years and reiterating yourself in the minds of voters as the candidate of change.
This is likely to be the only debate this cycle, and the stakes are extremely high. The last debate was devastating for the administration and the Democratic Party, and this one could be damning as well if Republicans can get the best version of Trump. Expect a massive number of people to tune in. Let’s get ready to rumble.
In the weeks since a group of secretive Democratic powerbrokers pushed President Joe Biden out of the race, the party as a whole has embraced Vice President Kamala Harris with astonishing speed. Now, on the eve of the first, and possibly only, debate with former President Donald Trump, Harris is still riding a seven-week “sugar high” of celebratory media coverage and polls showing increased Democratic enthusiasm for a race many once viewed with dread. Watch a Harris rally and you’ll likely see the audience chant a trance-like KA-MA-LA, KA-MA-LA. They’re in love — for the moment.
But it wasn’t too long ago that many Democratic insiders, and many in the party in general, considered Harris a failure at the job of vice president. Their unhappiness with Harris, which started with disappointment and evolved into something stronger, spilled into media reports and the general political conversation. There was broad agreement that Harris had just not been a very good pick for the nation’s second-highest position.
In February 2023, the New York Times published an article titled, “Kamala Harris Is Trying to Define Her Vice Presidency. Even Her Allies Are Tired of Waiting.” The headline was generous, given what followed. “The painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and around the nation … said [Harris] had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country,” the New York Times reported. “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.”
The New York Times went on to note that Harris’s vice presidency is notable largely because of her race and gender, as opposed to her accomplishments in office. “She has already made history as the first woman, the first African American and the first Asian American ever to serve as vice president,” the paper said, “but she has still struggled to define her role much beyond that legacy.”
Given all that, the New York Times reported that “a quiet panic” had “set in among key Democrats about what would happen if President Biden opted not to run for a second term.” Harris made the situation even worse by retreating to “a bunker” for about a year, the New York Times said, “after her disastrous interview with Lester Holt of NBC News.”
In November 2021, three months before the New York Times published the “lost hope” piece, CNN published “Exasperation and dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris’ frustrating start as vice president.” CNN reported that “key West Wing aides” — meaning people close to Biden — were “worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus” from Harris. The aides, CNN continued, “have largely thrown up their hands at [Harris] and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now.”
In June 2021, Politico published a story headlined, “‘Not a healthy environment’: Kamala Harris’ office rife with dissent.” The vice president’s office, the article reported, was an angry and chaotic place. Some blamed her top aides, but other Biden administration officials blamed Harris herself. “People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses, and it’s an abusive environment,” said one person “with direct knowledge of how Harris’s office is run.” The person continued: “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s***.”
Those are just a few examples, but there were many more, all of which could be summarized by one, brief sentence: Kamala Harris made a mess of the vice presidency.
If there’s one catch phrase in my little corner of the social science world it’s, “The God Gap.” It’s the simple idea that the Republicans have become the party of religious folks, while the Democrats are much less religiously inclined.
If you read a bunch of papers that use that term and try to trace it back to its origins you get a lot of different answers. It certainly plays a significant role in Geoffrey Layman’s first book The Great Dividewhich was published in 2001. He had already noticed that there was a great divergence in the religiosity of Democrats and Republicans. He wrote on page 11:
[C]onservative Protestants abandoned their apolitical moorings in the late 1970s and early 1980s. With encouragement and assistance from organizations such as the Moral Majority, the Religious Roundtable, the Christian Voice, and later the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council, religious conservatives became actively involved in battles over cultural issues such as abortion, the place of religion in the public schools, pornography, gender equality, and homosexual rights, and they infiltrated the ranks of the Republican party to fight these battles.
However, it also plays a prominent role in Putnam and Campbell’s seminal book American Grace which was published in 2010, especially in Chapter 4 in which they describe recent American religious history. Their narrative is that the counter-culture movement of the 1960s and 1970s led to a backlash among people of faith. In other words, the rise of the Religious Right was a direct result of the hippies of a decade or two earlier. They write, “[V]irtually every major theme in the Sixties’ controversies would divide Americans for the rest of the century, setting the fuse for the so-called culture wars.”1
How this happened, exactly, is still a matter of fierce debate among political scientists, sociologists, and historians - but the upshot of all this is the same - the modern Republican party is a whole lot more religious than the modern Democratic party. That’s all I wanted to do today, is make that evidence clear. Not really come up with my own explanation for why this is this the case.
As I have written elsewhere, religion is conceived to run on three dimensions:
Belief - this is measured in a variety of ways including view of the Bible, belief in angels, demons, God, heaven, hell, etc.
Behavior - this is almost always measured by religious attendance
Belonging - this is what group you identify with on a survey - Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, No Religion, etc.
So let me visualize how the two major parties have diverged on these metrics over the last couple of decades. Let’s start with belief in God, a question that has been included in the General Social Survey with regularity since the early 1990s.
As can be seen from the top row of bars, there was very little difference in the religious beliefs of the average Democrat and the average Republican in the 1990s. About two-thirds of Republicans had a certain belief and it was just a few points lower for the Democrats. Also, the share who didn’t believe in God was small for both groups. It’s not like there were a bunch of atheists on either side of the aisle in the 1990s. About 80% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans chose the two most certain responses on religious belief.
That gap does begin to widen the next couple of decades, though. While the gap in certain belief was just four points in the 1990s, it was eight points in both the 2000s and the 2010s. In fact, by the 2010s, the share of Democrats with a certain belief in God had dropped eleven points. For Republicans the decline was only three percentage points. The share who took an atheist or agnostic view of God was still fairly low for Democrats, though. Even into the 2010s, just one in ten Democrat gave one of these two response options.
The 2020s data only reflects two total surveys, but it’s clear from that the God Gap is huge when it comes to religious belief now. The share of Democrats with a certain belief in God dropped thirteen points in just one decade, while the Republican share hasn’t budged. In total, certain belief for Republicans has dropped by four points. It’s twenty-four points for Democrats.
Years of changes to the kickoff, all of them designed to make a notoriously dangerous play safer, also had the consequence of reducing how often the ball was actually returned. Most of the time, kickers just blasted the ball through the back of the end zone in what was starting to feel like a waste of everyone’s time.
Which is why, over the offseason, the league instituted one of the most radical changes to the game since the introduction of the forward pass. The new dynamic kickoff, as the league calls it, orders the two sides to line up closer to each other and creates an area between the end zone and the 20-yard line where the ball has to be returned.
When it finally made its regular-season debut, this funky new twist produced a mix of fireworks—along with signs that it may not revitalize the play quite as much as the league had hoped.
Heading into Monday night’s action, 34% of the kickoffs in Week 1 were returned. That’s an uptick from only 21.8% of kicks that were returned last season, but it’s hardly the surge some expected. And there’s a reason it produced such a modest increase: teams have quickly learned that a seemingly innocuous late tweak made to the bold, new format means there’s hardly an incentive to give the returning team a shot to bring the ball back.
When NFL owners, coaches and league brass assembled in March and discussed this new rule, there was a late amendment to the proposal. Initially, if the ball were booted past the landing zone and into the end zone, the returning team would get to start their drive at the 35-yard line. Instead, that was changed so that touchbacks would result in bringing the ball to the 30.
It was a seemingly small adjustment, but those 5 yards powerfully warped the calculation every kicking team faces. The NFL’s internal projections for the new kickoff showed that it expected returns to be brought out to around the 28- or 29-yard line on average, which is exactly what happened over the course of this preseason. That means under the old version, teams could have saved themselves six or 7 yards by allowing the ball to be returned. Under the current one, though, the kicking side risks giving up a big play—all to save maybe a yard.
That’s why it wasn’t terribly surprising that some teams seemed perfectly content to operate just as they had last year—turning the play into no more than a perfunctory touchback. In the season-opening game on Thursday night, when the reigning champion Kansas City Chiefs escaped with a dramatic 27-20 win over the Baltimore Ravens, Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker launched the ball into the end zone on every one of his kickoffs.
Granted, there were also some glimpses of what the NFL was looking for: a kickoff that comes with more juice. The Arizona Cardinals’ DeeJay Dallas delivered the signature highlight when he took one 96 yards for a touchdown—the first return for a score in the opening week of the season since 2018. Even before Monday night’s game, there have already been more return yards than in any week from last season.
Still, going forward, Dallas could become a victim of his own early success. That’s because he’s already shown what he’s capable of when given a chance to return the ball. And there’s barely any penalty if opposing teams choose to never give him that shot.
“The Bears are what we thought they were. Th-they're what we thought they were. We played them in preseason. I mean, who the hell takes the third game of the preseason like it's bullshit? Bullshit! We played them in the third game, everybody played three quarters... the Bears are who we thought they were! That’s why we took the damn field! Now, *hits microphone* if you want to crown them, then crown their ass! But, they are who we thought they were, and we let them off the hook!”
