May You Live in Interesting Times

Eight thoughts on the campaign, the candidates, the polls, and the future of America

We’re less than two weeks out, and almost 23 million Americans have already cast their ballots. The weather is cooling down (although less so here in Florida than most of the country), while the takes are getting steadily hotter. Depending on who you believe, early voting is going great for Democrats, or possibly for Republicans. Either Harris or Trump is going to beat their polls and win bigly. And for a sizeable chunk of the electorate, a victory by their disfavored candidate means almost inevitable doom - the death of democracy, capitalism, truth, justice, or the American way.

I don’t pretend to have any idea what’s going to happen on November 5, but as a political scientist and avid discourse-enjoyer, here are my thoughts on the 2024 election, as we finally head down the home stretch:

1. The polls have clearly tightened, and Trump is now in a stronger position than he’s been in at almost any point since August.
   On this, almost every data point that we have is in agreement. Harris currently leads by 1-2 points nationally, depending on your polling aggregator of choice, down from a 4 point lead in the immediate aftermath of the DNC, and a pretty consistent 3 point lead throughout much of September and October. The polls in the key swing states that will decide the election, including the Blue Wall states in the Midwest that Harris almost has to carry to have any realistic shot of winning, are essentially tied. Forecasting models, prediction markets, and betting odds have all shifted from slightly favoring Harris to slightly favoring Trump. This may be because Trump is consolidating the support of GOP voters who had been wavering earlier on in the campaign. As Seth Masket pointed out this week, Trump also closed strongly in each of his two previous presidential bids.

2. Even though the polls underestimated Trump in both 2016 and 2020, there’s no particular reason to expect them to do so again.
   This is something that I’ve written about before, so if you’re interested in learning more about why I think it’s the case, I’d encourage you to check out my earlier piece, “What if the Polls are Actually Right This Time?” I will say that my confidence in this take is less than overwhelming. It certainly remains possible that there’s some kind of inherent undetectable base of Trump support that simply doesn’t show up in polls. But based on my conversations with pollsters over the last 8 years, it does appear that the sources of bias in the 2016 polling (failing to account for education polarization), and the 2020 polling (COVID-related nonresponse bias), have been accounted for. And the fact that polls were pretty accurate in both 2018 and 2022, elections where opinions of Trump were a potent factor in people’s vote choice, even though he wasn’t on the ballot, cut against the notion that polling is fundamentally broken. It also remains a possibility that, by increasingly weighting based on recalled vote, pollsters may have overcorrected from these past mistakes, making Harris’s support appear weaker than it actually is. All of this is a major source of uncertainty, but I would caution against assuming that Trump beating his polls is an inevitability. I highly recommend some of Nate Cohn’s recent coverage of this topic for the New York Times.

3. Early voting numbers tell us almost nothing about what the final vote totals will look like.
   This is a key point, because we’re already being deluged with hot takes about what the early voting numbers mean, and my advice is to ignore it all, because anyone who claims to be able to read the tea leaves is talking out of their ass. I highly recommend this piece by Gabe Fleisher, which summarizes all of the many reasons to be skeptical about early voting prognostication. The bottom line is that we have no idea how representative of the final makeup of the electorate the early vote will end up being, and even in states where early voting totals are reported by party, this still gives us very little insight into who people are actually supporting. Voter registration is generally considered to be something of a lagging indicator. Much depends on exactly what percentage of registered partisans actually end up pulling the lever for their party’s candidate, and 53% of registered American voters are not formally affiliated with a political party, either because they’re registered as independents, or their state does not allow for it.¹ Polls, as imperfect as they are, remain a much better predictor of voting behavior than registration statistics or early voting numbers.

4. The fact that the race is even close is an indictment of Trump’s weaknesses and unpopularity as a candidate.
   There’s really no way to sugarcoat this. The electoral environment right now is extremely favorable to the Republican Party. Joe Biden’s approval ratings are underwater, with a clear majority of Americans (55%) expressing dissatisfaction with his administration, and with the direction of the country. No previous incumbent administration has ever been reelected with numbers this bad. The two issues of greatest concern to voters in the campaign are inflation and immigration, and polls show that people trust Republicans more than Democrats on those issues by wide margins. Things were so bad that the incumbent Democratic president was forced to drop out of the race after a disastrous performance in the first debate, something that hasn’t happened in modern American history. If Nikki Haley, who I voted for in the Florida Republican presidential primary earlier this year, were the GOP nominee right now, we’d be looking at a clear popular vote victory and a likely electoral college landslide.

5. The last two months of this campaign have been surprisingly uneventful, given the chaos that came before them.
   I remember clearly the moment when I was sure the 2024 election was over. I was vacationing over the summer with my wife in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and we’d been out hiking in Grand Teton National Park. As soon as we’d returned to an area with cellphone signal, I started getting news alerts about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. Returning to our Airbnb that evening, I pulled up the New York Times app on my phone, and saw the picture. That picture. A bloodied, yet defiant Trump, raising his fist while being swarmed by Secret Service agents. There was no way, in my mind, that he could possibly lose the election after that. But I’d underestimated both the extreme polarization of public opinion on Trump, and the competence of the Democratic Party as an organization. Within two weeks of that photo being taken, Democrats had a new presidential nominee, and Trump’s lead in the polls had all but evaporated.

   

   “Fight!” - Evan Vucci/The Associated Press

6. This is close to the best situation Democrats could have ended up in given the circumstances.
   The pressure campaign by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and other senior Democrats to convince Biden to withdraw from the race was masterfully executed. Biden’s decision to immediately endorse Harris, and her ability to rally the entire party around her candidacy in short order, effectively reset the race with enough time left for her to mount a solid challenge and take advantage of the existing Biden campaign infrastructure. And while there are certainly Democrats who I think would have been more effective standard bearers for the party, the simple fact is that a contested convention would have sowed further chaos, undercut the ability of the eventual nominee to get their campaign off the ground, and most likely would have ended with Harris as the nominee anyway. Given Biden’s refusal to step aside until it was almost too late, and fact that those closest to him who may have forced his hand earlier chose instead to cover up his decline, things could have gone much worse.

7. The Harris campaign has made some missteps, but has generally been reasonably effective at outlining their vision for America.
   Despite their efficient handling of the candidate switcheroo, running Biden’s VP against Trump has brought with it its own disadvantages and challenges for Democrats. The baggage of Harris’s hard pivot to the left in 2020, and her association with the unpopular policies of the incumbent administration, have provided a strong headwind against her attempts to define herself to the electorate. The choice of Walz as her running mate over Mark Kelly and Josh Shapiro was, in my mind, a mistake, as has been her unwillingness until late in the campaign to put herself out there in the media, particularly in the kinds of venues that are most likely to reach undecided voters.² Her moderate, bipartisan, optimistic, and generally positive campaign messaging has been refreshing after so much relentless partisanship and negativity, and she executed the major campaign set pieces (the debate and the DNC speech) with aplomb. The Democrats were dealt a bad hand in this campaign, party by circumstances beyond their control, and partly due to their own mistakes, and have played that hand about as well as could reasonably be expected.

8. This too shall pass.
   It’s tempting to attach existential stakes to an election such as this one, where the contrast between the two candidates, their worldviews, and their stated plans for the next four years is so stark, and the polarization among our body politic is so great that it seems ever on the verge of tearing apart the fabric of society. But while the policies of a Trump administration will undoubtedly be very different to those of a Harris administration, it would behoove us to attempt to turn the temperature down a little on our overheated political rhetoric. Presidents are powerful, but they are not kings, nor does our constitutional republic allow them to operate as if they were. The checks and balances in the system prevented Trump from stealing the 2020 election, and they will do so again if he loses in 2024 and attempts a similar gambit. A Harris administration may push the boundaries of what can be accomplished with executive authority alone, as both the Biden and Trump administrations did before her, but Congress and the courts will stand in the way of any dramatic transformations of our economy or society.

   American public policy is not made by presidential decree, but by the incremental grind of administrative rulemaking, legislative maneuvering, competing tradeoffs, and shifting equilibria, what Max Weber called “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” No matter who wins in November, the American experiment will continue. There will be another election in four years, another opportunity to steer our vast, lumbering ship, her momentum so great and controls so unwieldy that each captain may only hope to make minor adjustments to her course. And we will beat on, boats riding the current, borne forward ceaselessly into the future.

1. 30 states currently allow voters to declare a partisan affiliation on their voter registration forms and also report their total partisan registration numbers publicly. The remaining states either don’t allow voters to declare partisan affiliation when registering or do not publicly report those breakdowns.

2. As I write this, Harris is still not scheduled to be interviewed by Joe Rogan, even though it was reported that they were in discussions more than a week ago. Trump will reportedly sit for an interview with Rogan on Friday.