Axelrod: Harris momentum leaning heavily on 'irrational exuberance' - what's his problem?

[Bucky]

98. If you don't recall exuberance about Dukakis, then you don't remember the polling

Dukakis was up by 10 points in May 1988

and

Up by 17 points after the convention in July '88

We weren't just ecstatic about Dukakis, we thought we were getting Camelot back. If you don't remember Dukakis fever, it's cause you got 20/20 hindsight. When we were in the thick of it, however, Democrats were high.

For Gore, yes the enthusiasm wasn't too strong there. As I recall he was just a hair behind Dubya all autumn long. Whenever a candidate is behind, everyone in the party starts sniping at the campaign staff---every decision they make seems wrong and everyone questions their every step. When a candidate is ahead, everything they and their staff do is genius. We lose critical focus.

We remember these things afterwards based on final results. Gore actually ran a pretty competent campaign. He won the vote (by half a million), but not the election. God help us if that happens again. It easily could. We probably have to beat Trump by 5 million votes to clear the EC bias.

Enthusiasm matters, but it needs to be informed and level-headed and at least a little cynical about our chances. I value Axelrod's warning. He's right on the money to tell us to keep our noses to the grindstone. History tells us two things: Trump always beats his final polling numbers by a couple of percentage points and Republicans are getting better and better each year at suppressing our voters.

We have a shot, but we are serious underdogs, even if Kamala is 3-4 points ahead in the polling averages.