Will the race go to the Swift? It seems that Taylor Swift is the favorite candidate for the presidency of Democrats and Independents. The New York Times has tested Swift’s favorability ratings and discovered that 44 percent of likely voters favor her. Swift, of course, has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, much to the ire of former President Donald Trump, who recently declared, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” Democrats, however, do not. 70 percent of Democrats apparently have a favorable view of her, while only 23 percent of Republicans regard her with affection.

The yearning for Swift forms a revealing backdrop to the barrage of polls that have dropped in the past day or so about the presidential race. While Harris has made enormous strides since President Joe Biden exited, she has not closed the deal. The Marist poll, for example, has Harris ahead by 5 points in Michigan, one point in Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania is effectively tied. The Washington Post has Pennsylvania tied as well. It also indicates that voter enthusiasm is sky-high, with 78 percent indicating that they are “extremely motivated” to cast a ballot.

As Harris continues to climb in the polls, Trump is doing very little to combat it. The redoubtable Bill Scher calls it “Trump’s laziest campaign.” In 2016, following the first nineteen days of the general election campaign after Labor Day, Trump held eleven rallies in 2016 and 2020. And 2024? A grand total of four. One of them just took place in the great swing state of New York.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Trump’s support may be irrefragable, and doubts about Harris may be widespread enough to ensure his victory in November. But it’s a big risk to take. You might even call it weird. As Scher observes, the “shock of Sunday’s second assassination attempt on Trump overshadowed something truly odd in mid-September of a presidential election year—the oddity of one of the two major party nominees taking a golf day with less than fifty days to go. He must decide if the presidency is worth less time on the links.”

When he’s not devoting himself to golf, Trump is working overtime to stymie the GOP’s ability to retain control of Congress. His obsession with voter fraud has prompted him to demand that House Speaker Mike Johnson pass a six-month extension of government funding that includes a measure called the SAVE Act. The bill would require proof of citizenship for voter registration in federal elections. The result of the vote was a humiliation for Johnson. The House Republicans repudiated their own funding bill by a vote of 202-220. 

Should a government shutdown occur on the eve of the presidential election, the GOP, as Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell stated, would receive a political black eye: “One thing you cannot have at the government shutdown would be politically beyond stupid for us to do that right before the election because certainly, we'd get the blame.” 

Trump doesn’t appear to care. He’s demanding that Johnson defy the holdouts. Writing on Truth Social, he declared, “If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form.” For good measure, he complained that Democrats are “registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS” and concluded, “BE SMART, REPUBLICANS, YOU’VE BEEN PUSHED AROUND LONG ENOUGH BY THE DEMOCRATS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN.”

Bravado is never in short supply with Trump. Yesterday, at the Nassau Coliseum in New York, he declared, “We are going to win New York?” before going on to condemn Rob Rue, the mayor of Springfield, Ohio, for having the temerity to offer English lessons to Haitian children. “What the hell is wrong with our country!” he declared. “November 5,” he said, “will be your liberation.” However, as Harris rises in the polls, that may increasingly look like an empty boast.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

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