What's Behind Creeping Democratic Doomerism?
It's mostly just free-floating anxiety—things actually look pretty good in general!—but there's at least one coal-mine canary.
The political media tends to treat the New York Times/Siena poll as gospel. For both defensible reasons and bad ones, they do this particularly when it reflects good news for Republicans. But it’s a pretty general thing. When the poll matches conventional wisdom, political talkers treat it as confirmation of the conventional wisdom; when it cuts against conventional wisdom—for instance, if it shows a tighter race than aggregators and modelers do—they call the conventional wisdom into question.
That’s a happy dynamic for Democrats this morning, because Times-Siena has Kamala Harris up three points in its most recent survey, timed perfectly to shake liberals out of their latest restive fit.
Over the past week or so, the vibe in liberal politics has taken a turn toward—it’s hard to say. Something short of panic, but well into unease about the state of the presidential race. A psychic shift palpable enough to bleed into horserace coverage.
It’s fuzzy and hard to distill, but it’s a real phenomenon. Josh Marshall calls it “vibe-o-chondria,” which is a bit hard to figure as a coinage, but refers to the same darkening mood. Perhaps the only value political gambling provides the world is to help observers gauge optimism and pessimism among core voters. And for no discernible reason, Donald Trump regained the lead in Polymarket’s “forecast” in recent days. Polling couldn’t be the motive force behind the crossing of streams because polls haven’t changed. I’m not familiar enough with these markets to know how easily Trump’s rich supporters could waste pocket change to create the illusion of MAGA “momentum.” But whether that’s what’s happened or not, it’s consistent with an iron rule—Democrats are by disposition more neurotic and anxiety prone than Republicans, who have embraced chest-puffing as a cultural value. Give Democrats a few less-than-stellar news cycles, and Polymarket will capture the ensuing crisis of confidence.
Here’s what I think’s going on with the vibe-o-whatever, and where I stand on the following question: Is there any good reason for liberals to worry more than they did a week or two ago? The tl;dr of it all is: I don’t really think so. But not because nothing has changed. It’s because I’ve seen new, encouraging signs out of the Harris campaign, offset by at least one alarming weakness.