Insults. Affronts. Charges. Countercharges. Welcome to a presidential campaign unlike any in the past five decades: a convention-free, free-for-all August.
August is uncharted presidential campaign territory in the modern era. Not since 1960 have both political conventions ended before August.
As a result, “This is not going to be a normal August,” said Jeffrey Horwitt, senior vice president at Hart Research Associates, a Washington-based pollster.
It’s an August where the Summer Olympic Games, which will hold opening ceremonies Friday and run until Aug. 21, will compete for the public’s attention. But even that global spectacle is unlikely to nudge Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton out of the Twitterverse or the headlines, for at least three reasons:
One, the campaigns are in a social media smack-down that won’t end. Look at the blowup in recent days over Khizr Kahn’s criticism of Trump. The grieving father of a fallen U.S. soldier spoke at the Democratic convention last Thursday. Trump fired back.
1 The campaigns are in a social media smackdown that won’t end.
The relentless social media and 24/7 news coverage – and Trump’s knack for using it – keep the flames smoldering. Trump issued a statement Saturday night “setting the record straight.” He called the Khans’ late son, Army Capt. Humayun Khan, a “hero to our country,” and added, “Mr. Khan, who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things.”
Khan told CNN on Sunday that Trump had a “black soul,” and Khan appeared in more televised interviews Monday, calling the candidate “ignorant.”
We are private people. We'd rather sit home and enjoy the political discourse as the rest of the world is. But we felt compelled from within to say something about it.
Khizr Khan on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
Trump tweeted a response, saying Khan “viciously attacked me from the stage of the DNC and is now all over TV doing the same – Nice!”
Get ready for more of this nanosecond-by-nanosecond coverage of all things political.
“You have 15,000 reporters with no convention to cover. How many times can you write about the Clinton bus tour in Johnstown?” asked Terry Madonna, the director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll in Pennsylvania.
Two, the race is too close to call. No one quite knows what will move the 15 to 20 percent of the electorate that’s still undecided.
2 The race is too close to call.
Trump and Clinton have each consistently held on to about 40 percent of the electorate. A CBS News poll taken Friday through Sunday found 91 percent of Trump supporters and 92 percent of Clinton backers say their minds are made up.
Both Trump and Clinton are unusually disliked for major presidential candidates.
Clinton led Trump 46-39 percent in the latest CBS News poll, taken Friday through Sunday. Before the conventions, they were tied at 40 percent.
A McClatchy-Marist poll last month found Clinton viewed unfavorably by 60 percent and Trump seen that way by 64 percent. Fifty-six percent of Trump supporters said their votes were largely votes against Clinton. Forty-eight percent of Clinton backers said they were largely voting against Trump.
Three, while the campaigns tend to agree that only a handful of states are in play, Trump keeps aiming for a broader audience.
3 While the campaigns agree that only a handful of states are in play, Trump keeps aiming for a broader audience.
So campaigns are “going to be hard to avoid when you have one nominee who is running largely a national media campaign rather than state by state,” said Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute in New Jersey.
Adding a note of unpredictability is that the election so far is a race between two widely disliked people.
“It’s actually not unusual for a large number of voters to seem fairly locked in at this point,” Murray said. “What is unusual is the amount of that support which is being driven by a ‘lesser of two evils’ vote rather than straight partisanship.”
The first clue as to level of interest is due Tuesday in Michigan. The state will hold primaries for its legislative and congressional seats, and three of those seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are considered competitive.