For the first time this century, the Democratic Party is truly in the wilderness. Although it has lost presidential elections before in recent years, those defeats—usually narrow and in spite of the popular vote—did not fundamentally change the party. They still ran the same kinds of candidates, kept the same network of people in charge, and stuck to their same worldviews after each of their losses. This is not guaranteed to happen now. Unlike the narrow defeat the party faced in 2016, Trump’s victory this year has left little room for interpretation. It was remarkably complete and thorough, at least by the standards of modern elections. He won the popular vote, carried the decisive swing states relatively handily, and made massive gains among groups and states at the heart of the Democratic coalition. The verdict from voters, including many who voted for Democrats down ballot, was clear: they are deeply unsatisfied with the Democratic Party as represented by the Biden administration to such an extent that they are willing to take a major risk with an alternative that they also broadly dislike.
In light of this, something obviously needs to change, at least at some level. Even those closely in line with the party establishment have been able to recognize this, and, indeed, some of them have used this moment to re-examine their priors. In the immediate aftermath of the results, no less than David Brooks admitted that Kamala Harris’ campaign was centrist, that it failed, and that perhaps “the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption…that will make people like me feel uncomfortable” in order to win. But a great many more have used this moment to push the narrative that this result primarily represents a repudiation of the left. As this story goes, Kamala Harris and the party at large were doomed from the start due to a destruction of the Democratic brand at the hands of what they refer to as “The Groups”—a constellation of left-liberal think tanks and pressure groups that supposedly exerted an undue leftward influence on the party during the 2020 presidential primaries. Had it not been for them, it is argued, there never would have been that “Kamala is for they/them” ad, no Democratic candidate would be associated with defunding the police, and America’s working class would have never run towards the right. If the party is to have a path forward, it is said, it must repudiate this nexus and re-center itself around inoffensive, right-of-center platitudes that stand no chance of alienating anybody, ever.
If this sounds familiar to you, it’s for good reason. It’s not just that the main idea behind this argument is identical to what the party’s centrists have said, and implemented, for decades on end. It’s that the same exact figures making this argument now have been making it for years, and they won. Their proposals carried the day among Democratic elites years ago and formed the heart of the party’s strategy during much of the Biden era. What’s more, many of the same exact people now play-acting as Cassandras had nothing but praise for these efforts back when it looked as if the party would win. They got the exact campaign they wanted, knew that they were getting the exact campaign that they wanted, said it was great when it was happening, and sometimes played major roles in the campaign itself. But now that it hasn’t worked out, they’re acting as if their wing was ignored the entire time.
They’re banking on you not knowing what they’ve been up to for the past four years, and they shouldn’t get away with it. Here’s the history of Biden-era centrist politics that America’s popularists don’t want you to know: how they won their battles, got exactly what they wanted, and left us all worse off for it.
If you want to pinpoint the moment that popularism began its long march to controlling the commanding heights of the Democratic Party, the first place to look is a Tweet posted on May 28th, 2020, just three days after the murder of George Floyd. The author of this tweet was a Democratic data scientist by the name of David Shor, then employed by Civis Analytics, a Chicago-based data science firm. As America was reckoning with the public execution of an innocent Black man in broad daylight, Shor decided that it was his place to tell those protesting against racial discrimination how, and why, they should be doing it. Referencing a recently-published study Princeton’s Omar Wasow on the effects of the MLK assassination on the 1968 election, he said that those who engaged in “race riots” (his words, not mine) were likely responsible for tipping that election to Nixon. The implicit criticism of the then-ongoing Black Lives Matter movement was obvious, as was the assertion that the foremost concern of those protesting should be the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party. It wasn’t exactly well-received. Shor’s replies would be inundated with commenters calling him tone-deaf, if not outright racist, for trying to shift the conversation away from the actual issue at hand and towards what was supposedly best for Joe Biden. He would issue a non-apology the following day in which he essentially just said “I’m sorry I made you upset” that, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to stem the anger towards him. He would be fired from his job at Civis within the following days, making him one of the most high-profile early casualties of BLM-era sensibilities.
It would be the greatest thing to ever happen to his career.
The degree to which Shor deserves sympathy over this is still up for debate. While it’s easy for even those on the left to see his firing as an undeniable example of cancel culture gone too far, there was a lot about his Tweet that was and is objectionable even beyond its obvious insensitivity and presumptuousness. Even working from his assumption that the protesters in 2020 should have been primarily focused on electing Democrats—a pretty incredible thing to say given that the murder that inspired them had occurred in a city with a Democratic mayor, city council and governor—Shor’s post was still incredibly one-sided, flatly presenting just one study as the end-all, be-all conclusion for an intensely debated topic. For just one contradictory example, a 2019 study on the 1992 Los Angeles Riots found that the violent protests in that city actually “caused a marked liberal shift in policy support at the polls.” Even the consequences of the post-King riots were hardly as clear-cut as Shor made them out to be; in 1999, no less than former Maryland Senator Charles Mathias, a Republican who served in the U.S. House in 1968, credited the violent protests after the assassination for “educat[ing] citizens and Congress about the stark reality of an enormous social problem” and facilitating the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Why Shor refrained from bringing up these findings and perspectives when the impacts of the 2020 protests were entirely unknown is still an open question.
Still, none of this would matter at the time. The backlash against Shor never delved into these specifics, thus constructing an image of a bull-headed woke left that was unwilling to listen to perspectives that weren’t what they wanted to hear. This was mana from heaven for a certain class of centrist writers who had long felt pressured, if not outright persecuted, by the new wave of progressive thought that had risen in influence over the course of the Bernie movement and Trump era. Before, they could only just gesture towards a supposed culture of intolerance. Now, they had an (allegedly) clear-cut case of emotional groupthink coming out against Facts and Logic. Their pet issue had become an outright social problem, at least in their minds, and they were going to make sure that the whole world knew about it.
The articles started coming out immediately. Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine would publish a long feature piece on Shor within days of his firing, parading the saga as proof that he had always been right about the excesses of PC culture. Notably, his story included the detail that “some employees and clients on Civis Analytics complained that Shor’s tweet threatened their safety,” further reinforcing the image of the analyst as an innocent victim of hysterical, illogical brats. This framing would only be pushed further by other centrists writers like Yascha Mounk, who would write about his case in an Atlantic article simply titled “Stop Firing the Innocent.” Matthew Yglesias, writing for Vox, would also present his firing as evidence of a major social problem and declared that even leftists who said that Shor may have gotten a raw deal were still complicit in his suffering as long as they continued to deny the all-encompassing power of cancel culture.
That such a high degree of attention was given to the firing of one data scientist in the midst of an election year, a once-in-a-generation pandemic and the largest civil rights protests in decades was strange, no matter what perspective you took towards the importance of cancel culture. It was especially unusual given that Shor’s public profile had massively increased in the aftermath of his supposed “cancellation.” On July 17th, 2020, only a month-and-a-half after he published his infamous Tweet, he would sit down with Eric Levitz of New York Magazine for a feature interview. The topic? Nothing less than his “unified theory of American politics,” as New York Magazine’s editors styled the headline of the interview. That’s right: with the credibility he had supposedly gained as a martyr for the cause of facts and logic, Shor had been transformed from a lowly data scientist to someone supposedly capable of explaining the core causes behind macro-level political trends in not just the United States, but the entire Western world.
Of course, just the fact that Shor received this degree of coverage, and was treated with this level of credibility, doesn’t itself explain why he became as influential as he did. It’s to Shor’s credit that the theory he laid out in this interview was legitimately compelling in a number of ways. At a time when the leading theories of how to win elections always came across as conveniently self-serving in one way or the other, Shor’s perspective stood out as notably—even refreshingly—contrarian and multifaceted. He put forward a cautious, Clinton-esque view of a perpetually reactionary electorate while also throwing bones to left-liberals with nods to the power of populistic economic messages and references to his own supposedly socialist beliefs. Speaking to post-2016 liberal anxieties, he blamed the rise of Trump, and the possibility of a Trump second term, on the ignorance and “weirdness” of college-educated leftists who didn’t understand how radical they were. In order to win, he said, these staffers needed to be muzzled, and the party needed to focus solely on things that polled well. While this sort of argument might have been met with rolled eyes when put forth by someone like Bill Clinton or Joe Manchin, it seemed far more compelling coming from Shor, who himself was one of the very “weird” college-educated young leftists he was talking about. He seemed to have no dog in the fight other than the truth—at least as long as you ignored that the exact people he was blaming for all the world’s troubles had just gotten him fired.
There was, however, just one small problem for Shor and his budding movement of hard-nosed realists: the precise thing he had warned about in late May—that violent protests could win the election for Trump—didn’t seem to be coming to pass. Despite the violence that occurred in cities around the country, and despite those much-maligned left wing activists pushing controversial slogans like “Defund the Police,” Biden’s lead against Trump in the polls only expanded throughout the summer, ballooning from five points on the day that Shor published his tweet to more than ten points less than a month later. On the day that Levitz’s interview with him was published in mid-July, even the most biased right-wing aggregation sites still had the former VP up by nearly nine. It was compelling evidence that a movement led by the very activists he had scorned had succeeded in changing hearts and minds in a way that he said wasn’t possible.
Levitz would ask Shor about this, and although Shor would admit that it wasn’t what he had expected to happen, he still refrained from giving any credit to the mostly-nonwhite protesters who had seemingly put his party in the best position it had been in decades. Instead, he said that Democrats had gained in polling because they used the moment to demonstrate moderation by disavowing slogans like “Defund the Police,” which he said didn’t get any play outside of Twitter beyond clips of Democrats denouncing it. As such, he declared the saga a “success story for everyone involved.” All credit given to the white man running for president, of course.
While this moment of contorted logic was just one section of a generally well-received interview, it illustrated the awkward situation that Shor and his compatriots had found themselves in. The entire draw of his theory was that it provided an elegant, all-encompassing explanation for Democratic electoral woes—a Guns, Germs and Steel for the modern center-left. That’s quite alluring during moments of high anxiety and self-flagellation among liberals, but it doesn’t come across as nearly as compelling when the supposedly broken party being referred to is seemingly on track for a landslide victory. The profiles of and articles about Shor would largely dissipate after the July of that year as attention moved on to other things and the polls remained steady for Democrats. Had they ended up being accurate, Shor would have likely gone down in history as a little-known data analyst, remembered mostly as someone who got fired for a kind of unfair reason and had somewhat interesting ideas that he was inconsistent about.
This, however, would not be what happened. While Joe Biden would, in fact, defeat Donald Trump, it wasn’t by as much as what the polls said, and it didn’t even come close to matching what liberals had come to expect after a year of jawdroppingly strong data. This sense of disaster was particularly pronounced on Election Day itself, which was defined by shock Trump gains across the country, strong Republican wins in states that were expected to go down to the wire, and swing states left too-close-to-call for days on end. A Democratic House majority that practically all experts expected to grow was sharply cut down. Hopes for a durable Senate majority seemed completely dashed as liberal darlings like Jamie Harrison and Amy McGrath went down in landslide defeats. While the overall picture wouldn’t end up being quite so bad for Democrats once the dust settled, this initial feeling that what should have been a landslide win had given way to an unmitigated trainwreck would never end up going away. It was a seemingly strong vindication of the Democratic Party’s pessimists, and David Shor stood as chief among them.
Once again, the articles and interviews about this unjustly ignored prophet would start flooding political media—quite curious for somebody who had supposedly been canceled by an unthinking mob, but I digress. Eric Levitz would bring Shor on for another New York Magazine interview just three days after the election was called to discuss what this “devastating victory” and “down-ballot disaster” meant for the Democratic Party. In this piece, Shor’s analysis was even more pessimistic than what he had laid out in his prior interview that summer. As he put it, the results that week revealed that the Democratic brand was so shot as a result of the influence of educated leftist staffers that the party now faced a massive, all-but-insurmountable structural disadvantage in both the electoral college and the Senate. His prognosis for the upper chamber was particularly bleak. As he put it, the decline of ticket splitting combined with all of the important swing states voting to the right of the nation implied that Democrats now needed to win decisive, Biden-sized national victories year after year just to contend for a Senate majority—a feat without precedent in the modern era. In this light, he stated that the party now only had one of two choices: either “changing the rules of the game” by admitting new states to the union, or to “make the hard choice of changing our party so that we can appeal to these non-college-educated voters who are turning against us.”
Boosted by this sense of intense urgency, Shor’s analysis of American politics would be transformed into nothing less than new centrist ideology for the Biden era. First referred to as “Shorism” and later branded as “popularism,” this school of thought was often defined as simply the idea that Democrats should focus on things that polled well while doing their best to ignore things that voters didn’t like. Not only was this basic concept hard to disagree with, but it stood alone in the world of left-of-center political strategic thought as practically the only theory that hadn’t been discredited in some form or another by the results. Centrist hopes that the strength of America’s institutions would throw Trump into the dustbin of history had been dashed by the close result. Leftist claims that mobilizing new voters could allow the party to have its cake and eat it too felt hard to believe when the highest turnout in American history only yielded major Republican gains among nonwhites. In this moment, popularism gave both sides of the aisle something to grab onto, both denigrating the median voter as ignorant and racist in a way leftists felt inclined to agree with while recommending the rightward cultural pivots that centrists had advocated for for decades.
Still, those who took a close look at Shor’s arguments could notice some things that were a bit off. Most notably, Shor never really reckoned with the fact that these results had occurred under the leadership of Joe Biden, an arch-centrist who stood as the antithesis of everything the leftist staffer class represented. If the party’s problem was primarily one of cultural and ideological signaling, it was hard to see where Biden had screwed things up, especially when even Shor himself had given the former VP ample credit for supposedly neutralizing the impact of “Defund” through his high-profile disavowal of it. But while the fact that these swings to the center didn’t win over low-trust, uneducated voters was easily explicable to anyone who looked at Biden’s deeply establishmentarian background, those sorts of factors weren't considered in Shor’s ideology-focused rubric. By and large, the popularist thesis paid little attention to candidate quality, generally seeing it as one of many things that had been rendered largely irrelevant by ever-increasing polarization. As long as someone out there was increasing the salience of unpopular ideas, it was said, even the most diligent national politician out there would be helpless in the face of the tainting of their partisan branding.
Not only did this do a lot to further highlight ideological signaling as the only truly relevant thing in politics, but it also gave popularists a way to perpetually move the goalposts in the face of any setbacks. Such losses, they could say, were not the fault of either them or their candidates, but were due to irresponsible left-wingers out there saying unpopular things and damaging the party brand in a way that even the most disciplined politician was now powerless to counteract. Through this, popularists had, as Adam Johnson of Citations Needed put it in a recent article for In These Times, created an “unfalsifiable vibe,” providing themselves with “an obnoxious pink haired nonprofit caricature to bash every time the Democrats fail.”
This focus on ideology above all else may look overly simplistic now in the aftermath of an election that saw no less than four states vote Trump for president while electing Democratic Senators. But in 2021, it would grant Shor a massive audience among those in power as the Biden administration settled into the White House. Along with new profiles and interviews in Vox and Politico, Shor would also land a live interview on MSNBC and a guest spot with Bill Maher. Former president Barack Obama—his former employer—would link one of his interview with Levitz on his Twitter account, a strong implication that Shor had already become very influential among the highest of the Democratic Party’s higher-ups. This implication would be explicitly confirmed in an April 2021 Politico article titled “The cult of Shor,” which stated that the data scientist had an “audience in the White House,” wherein “aides…pay close attention to Shor’s analysis and have talked with him about his data.” Less than a year after his supposed cancellation, he and his compatriots had already reached the commanding heights of the Democratic Party, establishing a degree of influence that would only grow with time.
It also wasn’t just the center-left that was intrigued by Shor’s analysis. On the far-right, many would take his take that “the GOP has very rosy long-term prospects for dominating America’s federal institutions” and use it to justify doing practically anything they wanted. In a mid-2021 report entitled “MAGA after 2020: How the GOP Can Win Again and Save America,” the transphobic American Principles Project would extensively quote Shor to argue that the GOP should double down on the most conservative aspects of their agenda in anticipation of the 2022 midterms, especially on issues of gender. While Shor would eventually Tweet a year later that he didn’t regard trans issues as a liability for the left, it wouldn’t make a difference. The overall story he had told of a conservative public that primarily viewed politics along ideological lines had left its mark, and the result was an empowered far-right on a warpath against a center-left administration scared of its own shadows.
As 2021 went on, Shor, still referring to himself as a socialist, would emerge as something of an explicit centrist partisan. As per articles published about the parties he hosted in his 2,000 square foot Manhattan apartment, he and his newly converted compatriots would celebrate establishment-aligned victories ranging from the defeat of Nina Turner in an Ohio special election to the resounding triumph of Clinton regime bagman Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial primary. Soon after, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan would cause President Biden’s approval rating to collapse, providing yet another seeming vindication of Shor’s pessimism. While that event may have had absolutely nothing to do with Biden’s ideological positioning, that fact didn’t matter. Anything that put Democrats in a worse position was a victory for the overall popularist message, even if their preferred candidates were the ones falling to negative disapproval nationally and being defeated in solidly blue states locally.
With a seemingly brutal midterm election looming in 2022, popularist predictions would only become more and more fatalistic. By the start of that election year, Shor’s new line was that unless the Democratic Party underwent “big structural changes,” the “modal outcome” for 2024 was Trump coming into office with a minority of the vote and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The case for centrism never seemed so urgent, while the case for progressivism never seemed so self-indulgent and untimely. But at the same time he and his allies were posting such dire predictions, America’s top reactionaries were about to make a major move—one that would change politics in a way that would shake the popularists to their core, but not to such a degree that they would lose their grip when it mattered most.
Continued in Part II
]]>When I first decided to write articles titled “The Art of Losing,” I did so with the knowledge that I would eventually have to write one about myself when I got an election wrong. I knew that this was inevitable, so if you went back a few months or a year and told me then that I would be writing this article now, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised.
What would have surprised me, though, is that I would be writing it in reaction to the specific set of results we just got: one in which a Biden administration member underran the rest of their party and lost at the same time that most down ballot Democrats won in the country’s most competitive states. I had feared that exact possibility from the moment I first started writing about the 2024 election, all the way back in the spring of 2023. I didn’t buy the then-existing consensus that Democratic success in the 2022 midterms was necessarily a good sign for the White House, thought that even an economic boom might not be sufficient to fix Biden’s possibly permanently broken public image, and believed that only a nominee from outside of his administration would be actually well positioned to tap into the success Democrats had been seeing outside of him.
Had I stuck with this thinking through the end of the race, I would have ended up closer to the actual results. But when that time came, I did not. Because of that, I was wrong. Full stop. You will never hear me say that I “actually” forecasted the results due to what I said in prior articles or because I didn’t say that Harris was a 100% lock to win. The only reason I mention what I said earlier in the cycle is so I can explain what brought me from saying that there was “no single person on Earth doing more to assist the Republican Party long-term than [Kamala Harris]” to calling her the favorite to win in my final map. That story, in a word, is this: I prioritized a particular list of pre-election signals, all of which correctly indicated the results of previous Trump elections but failed to do so this year. Here is what they were, why they were wrong, and why I thought that they would be right.
Special Elections
During my earliest days of writing about the 2024 election, the first non-polling signals I looked at were special elections: the off-cycle state and federal elections that occur periodically around the country in order to fill vacant seats. Those sorts of elections rarely received coverage from mainstream pundits, but I thought they were worth paying attention to because of my experience following the 2022 elections. That year, a series of Democratic overperformances in Congressional special elections held in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision were what convinced me that the midterms would not be a red wave, which ended up coming to pass. I thought that these races would continue to be useful for the 2024 election for the simple reason that they had been so in every election that their results had been compiled for. Going back to 2018, the average partisan swing of all of the special elections held in the two years before each November election always ended up being very close to the final national results. This was the case in years where the polls were right, like 2018, but also in 2020, when pollsters saw historically large errors.
What made me believe such a trend could be more than just a coincidence was that it fit perfectly within what one would expect as a result of the preeminent trend over the last decades of American politics: polarization. While local races like special elections might have been dominated by local issues during prior political eras, those kinds of unique considerations had become steadily less and less important to how voters were making decisions at all levels in cycle after cycle. Instead, voters had become more purely partisan, voting for candidates of all sorts just based on the R or D next to their name. This had made American politics a lot less interesting, but it also seemed to allow local races to serve as proxies for the overall national environment, with data coming straight from the voters themselves. And over the course of 2023, those of us who had been following the special elections since the end of the 2022 midterms began to notice something quite surprising. The special elections during that year were collectively showing results consistent with a national Democratic advantage, even stretching into the double digits.
In early 2024, however, Nate Cohn of the New York Times would drop a bombshell article that called the usefulness of these races in projecting the national environment into serious question. As he explained it, the data from his polls on the presidential race had found a massive difference in attitudes between the most and least engaged voters in the country. According to his data, there were massive differences in voter preferences between voters who turned out in special elections and voters who only turned out rarely, if at all. While Biden had lost practically no ground with voters who voted in low turnout races like special elections, he was seeing substantial losses among voters who only turned out rarely.
It was a finding that explained practically all of the discrepancy between the strong Democratic numbers in special elections and the strong Republican numbers in polling. While the former included only high-turnout, highly-engaged voters, the latter included voters of all stripes. To the extent that special and off-year elections could be said to represent anything at all, it was just that Democrats were holding strong with voters who always vote—possibly a strong sign for their chances in something like a midterm, but not necessarily bullish for them in a high-turnout presidential race. Cohn would get quite a lot of shit for this analysis, all of it coming from partisan Democrats who had spent the past year hanging on to the results in the specials as a reason to hold out hope that Biden was on track to win despite what the polls said. The posts calling him arrogant and his numbers unrealistic were constant, but none of them were convincing. Cohn, on the other hand, provided a tremendous amount of backing for his claims, even going as far as to perfectly model the result of a strong special election for Democrats in Florida using nothing but data from his polls showing Trump ahead nationally.
Since it was hard to think of any reasons as to why he may be wrong, I would publish a new article arguing that the new best-case scenario for Democrats was that this gap between hyper-engaged and unengaged voters might be expected to dissipate when the election came closer and unengaged voters tuned in. Cohn would publish an article making a similar point that spring. Past that point, I would only reference special elections as a positive sign for the party in conjunction with other indicators presenting similar signs, which would eventually come in spades.
The Washington Primary
Around this time, I would become increasingly convinced that the worst-case scenario I had feared when Biden began his reelection campaign—that he was a uniquely incapable candidate—had come to pass. As I put it in my article going over the state of the presidential race at the start of the year:
Biden, based on all the information we have right now, is a uniquely weak presidential candidate. It’s the only honest conclusion you can come to…the simple fact is that voters want to vote for Democrats, especially against Trump, but they’re also very reluctant to vote for an octogenarian they broadly dislike, see as a failure, and don’t think is capable of governing.
For the next seven months up until Biden dropped out, this analysis was what I used to square the circle between Democratic success in 2022 and Biden’s own polling struggles. The release of the special counsel report calling him an “elderly man with a poor memory” convinced me that practically anyone—even the poorly-polling Kamala Harris—stood to be a better candidate than him. As matchups for the U.S. Senate became set and new polls began to consistently show Democrats down ballot outrunning Biden, I posited that it showed that his age and record of presiding over chaos at home and abroad was preventing him from appealing to a mass of voters didn’t necessarily love Trump, but disliked him. While Trump’s 34 felony convictions in late May seemed to be a possible turning point, it would ultimately only have a marginal impact, raising serious questions as to what might be needed for that voter pool to “wake up” and start shifting left. Although the debate stood as a potential wildcard due to Trump’s past history, it was becoming hard to say what more people needed to see to remember that they hated Trump more than Biden.
Around this time, many commentators would work overtime to explain why Biden looked set to lose without addressing the elephant in the room. Some said that his unpopularity was due to wokeness tainting the Democratic brand, an explanation that flew in the face of the strong numbers that the party’s down ballot candidates were seeing. Others relied on often-cherrypicked data to declare him an innocent victim of a malevolent media environment. In my mind, the most likely explanation was that he was simply too old, and presided over too much chaos, for voters to have confidence in him. At the end of June, the debate (AKA my previous worst prediction) would put this in the sharpest relief possible. While Trump wouldn’t put in a spectacular performance, Biden’s 90-minute medical episode would end up stealing the show and end any chances he had of winning a second term. A push to force him out of the race would begin before he even stepped off the stage.
I went to bed that night feeling the most optimistic I had felt about the election for as long as I could remember. With two months left until the DNC, there seemed to be some runway for the party to nominate a candidate with a profile resembling their well-polling nominees for Senate: young, experienced, and not connected to an administration that had been languishing at Jimmy Carter-level approval for three years. When the consensus became that Kamala Harris was the only possible replacement at such a late date, whether it be over worries about where Biden’s funds would go or outright lies about state ballot access, I disagreed. To me, the benefits of a nominee representing a clear break from the Biden administration outweighed even the prospective chaos of a contested convention. While I ranked Kamala above the likes of Gavin Newsom when considering potential Biden replacements, I also had her below alternatives with a more demonstrable appeal to swing voters.
The next few weeks would be Hell. Rather than facing reality, Biden and his toadies would spend weeks engaging in a doomed battle to stay on the ticket, choosing to let their bid slowly and painfully die in public. When he finally quit the race, the sheer amount of time he had wasted froze out even the most optimistic plans for a non-Kamala replacement. Within minutes of this, the party instantly consolidated around her out of fear of further chaos. It was the biggest, most dramatic move in presidential politics in half a century, and the net effect of it was to replace the losing nominee with someone with all of his problems besides age.
Still, just this one fact would end up making a difference. After being stagnant for nearly an entire year until crashing towards Trump following Biden’s debate, the race would rapidly move leftwards immediately following Kamala’s ascension. It caught me off guard, just as it did practically everyone else. Hardly anyone had taken her seriously as a national figure following her flop in the 2020 primaries and nonexistent presence as Biden’s VP. When she gave her first speech after being named the de facto nominee, it amounted to the first time many of us had heard her speak in years. It was a complete revelation compared to Biden, even if it was only because she could speak in complete sentences and mentioned things besides NATO and AUKUS as campaign issues. Many voters who had been unwilling to back Biden agreed. Polls conducted within days of the swap would show the Vice President suddenly well within contention for an electoral college majority. Despite having done practically nothing to define herself, and despite being connected to her administration at the hip, just the basic fact that she was not Joe Biden appeared to be enough to turn the election into a real race once again.
It was a dizzying two weeks. By the end of it, even the most right-leaning aggregation sites would show Kamala up in their averages, something they hadn’t seen for Biden since September of 2023. Most encouragingly, these gains occurred predominantly among the exact Democratic-leaning voters that Biden had been unable to win over. As Nate Cohn put it following the release of a series of New York Times/Siena polls that showed her leading in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania:
If you drew up a list of President Biden’s challenges this cycle, you could probably find a demographic group corresponding to each one on this list of Ms. Harris’s biggest gains. There’s young, nonwhite and low-turnout voters, and the places they tend to live. There’s the lowest-income voters, who suffered through rising prices. There’s even the TikTok users immersed in the bad vibes of the Biden era. The Muslim and Arab voters angry about the war in Gaza don’t make the list, but only because of their small sample size (just 55 respondents in August) — they would have been No. 1 on the list with a net swing of 49 points toward Ms. Harris.
The sense was that, under this new candidate, the race had turned back to “normal,” with Democrats unburdened by Biden’s unpopularity and now able to benefit from the country’s disdain for Trump. That it happened despite Kamala not doing much of anything at all other than entering the race appeared to be doubly encouraging. With the DNC and an upcoming debate standing as possible opportunities for further gains, the sky seemed to be the limit. Suddenly, Democrats had moved on from hoping that the polls were somehow wrong to hoping that they were right. And fortunately for them, that month of August would provide them with a seemingly perfect test if they were: the Washington primary.
Although only directly relevant to those living in Evergreen state, the few election cycles preceding 2024 had made Washington’s August primary something of a legend among those who follow elections very closely. They fell into a very rare category of pre-election indicators that had both foreshadowed the countervailing misses in 2020 and 2022 without being discredited by Nate Cohn’s analysis. And when the results came in, they showed something incredibly encouraging for Democrats: a down ballot environment better than that of 2020. Even after removing the nationally unrepresentative Seattle metro area from the equation, the rural and predominantly white parts of Washington still put in their most Democratic numbers in years. This was easily the most encouraging aspect of the results for Democrats. While unrepresentative leftward shifts in the Seattle area had caused Washington state at large to miss larger movement towards Trump nationally in 2016, the large gains his party saw in the rest of the state did prove to be representative of his gains among white working class voters nationally. Now, it didn’t show that at all, seemingly providing credibility to the polls showing Kamala up in the election-deciding Great Lakes swing states.
It all gave me a degree of confidence that the Democratic strength we were seeing in those states was real instead of just being a product of 2020-esque nonresponse bias. Given that special elections were said to be no longer representative enough to disprove that that was the case, I had always thought of another nonresponse bias miss as something of a live wire, but this indicator with far higher turnout showing that it wasn’t in the cards stood as a strong sign against it. And, as fate would have it, the primary would end up being quite predictive—but just only in Washington. After years of shifting back and forth in line with the rest of the country, Washington in 2024 trended intensely leftward. Although votes remain to be counted, Kamala Harris’ overall vote share in the state is higher than what Biden received in 2020.
It’s not even just that Kamala Harris would have won the election if the rest of the country behaved as Washington did. If it did, she might have outrun Biden’s 2020 performance in the national popular vote. As of now, Washington is set to be one of the single most Democratic states in the entire country, with a result solidly to the left of California and New York. As for why this one state specifically bucked every single trend seen in the rest of the country, God only knows. Perhaps the Biden administration’s messaging that funding wars overseas boosted the economy won his party support among Boeing workers but nobody else.
Prioritizing 2022’s Best Pollsters
Despite this promising-if-ultimately-unrepresentative sign for Democrats, the Washington primary results didn’t fully convince me that Kamala was a solid favorite. Although her early moves appeared to indicate that she had something of a sense of what she needed to accomplish to win the election—i.e., establishing herself as something of a generic Democrat separate from the Biden administration—a noticeable shift occurred right after she picked Tim Walz as her running mate. At the DNC shortly thereafter, the entire first day was dedicated to honoring Joe Biden, throwing away what should have been the opening effort to introduce their very new nominee to the country. Things hardly improved from there. Rather than presenting an affirmative message for their own agenda, the party would use its own showcase event to highlight Republican speakers and demonstrate its fealty to Republican immigration policies. When the Vice President gave her acceptance speech, it was heavily oriented around inoffensive biographical details and attempts at what would later be referred to as “vice signaling” meant to show that she was not, in fact, woke.
Centrist pundits—many of whom are now backpedaling to declare that Trump’s win a result of liberals refusing to give up 2019-era wokeness—absolutely loved it. Some said that their only concern was that they liked it too much. But when I finished watching the proceedings, it made me feel extremely nervous. Even assuming that she would get at least some kind of bounce just by introducing herself didn’t stop me from worrying about what her rhetoric represented. Not only was there the obvious rightward swing on policy, but the overall approach of the event was deeply and disturbingly reminiscent of the Biden campaign. The campaign was jumping at any chance to move to the right, no matter how tenuous the justification, while outwardly rejecting gift-wrapped chances to explicitly break from Biden on some of his worst issues. Instead of the new party focused on winning that was promised, we got something far more familiar: a self-indulgent elite putting its own feelings and preferences above all else.
In retrospect, I wasn’t negative enough. Not only did Kamala fail to see a boost after the convention, but her numbers would outright slide downwards. It was a clear sign that the campaign had entered a new stage, one in which the benefit of the purely superficial signaling that dominated the DNC had been exhausted. The remaining voters to be won over were looking at her with a far more critical lens than the demographic that had moved towards her side by virtue of her not being Joe Biden. But instead of shifting into a higher gear, her campaign would behave incredibly sluggishly. She would only sit down for her first sit-down interview in late August, more than a month after she became her party’s de facto nominee. Her website wouldn’t publish a policy page until September 8th, less than two months before Election Day. Instead of a break from the status quo, it appeared to be a literal copy-paste of the sitting President’s agenda, complete with unedited metadata referencing “re-electing Joe Biden.”
These were all small things, none of which might have swung any votes by themselves. But when put together, they added up to a portrait of a campaign that just wasn’t on the ball. My new concern, as I laid out in an article prior to the first and only Harris-Trump debate, was that this approach could cost her the election in spite of all of the positive signs Democrats were seeing by making her fail to qualify as a “generic Democrat” in the minds of voters. This potential outcome—wherein the top of the Democratic ticket failed to replicate the success their party had seen in 2022 and was seeing in down ballot polling throughout 2024—was exactly what I had feared would happen with Biden for more than a year, and it would end up being what came to pass on Election Day. Although the rest of the party wouldn’t reach the strength implied by the numbers put up by Washington Democrats, they would still universally outrun her numbers, ultimately winning at least one election in no less than five Trump-won swing states. Had the party managed to carry those states at the national level, they would have reached 270 electoral votes and won the election.
Of course, just that I warned of this during the campaign doesn’t mean that I got the election “right.” This specific outcome wasn’t my final prediction, and while I would still publish pieces criticizing her strategy over the following months, the bulk of my coverage after the debate was more bullish than bearish. My reasons for this were twofold. First, the first debate ending with Trump ruling out a rematch suddenly turned an election that had just been dominated by countless impending live-wires into one with no scheduled big moments left until November. My understanding of this was that it put us in a position where we generally knew what the main dynamics of the election would be, and that these dynamics favored the Democrats. I thought that, for as flawed as her campaign was, her success at the debate had moved her towards achieving the basic task of her campaign: making herself appear like a credible leader to the country’s most important swing voters. Post-debate numbers—most notably from the New York Times, which I personally held in high esteem after their unique success in the 2022 midterms—seemed to confirm this, at least in the all-important Midwestern swing states.
Second, I was already anticipating that October would inevitably see improvements in Trump’s polling numbers, and this would end up meaning nothing. I had seen exactly that occur two years prior, when firms on record denying the veracity of everything from the 2020 election results to the Holocaust had pumped out surveys showing shock Republican gains, scaring many mainstream pollsters into following their lead. Given that the 2024 race had been defined by stagnancy for most of its existence, I expected that whatever rightward shifts we saw in October were more likely to be the result of right-wingers aiming for Fox News appearances and untrustworthy firms trying to hedge than a reflection of any real shifts in the electorate.
So, if I wasn’t willing to trust the results from Emerson and RacismElections, who did I decide to look to for reliable information? To me, the answer appeared to be the rare pollsters who had been willing to buck the red wave narratives in 2022 and publish surveys that proved to be accurate. Nationally and across the swing states, this meant pollsters like the New York Times and Marist College. At the state level, this included select local pollsters that either didn’t fall to local red wave narratives and correctly depicted the environments in their states. I chose to prioritize this list of pollsters not because I thought they had some kind of secret sauce, but because the numbers produced by GOP-aligned pollsters in 2022 were so egregious, and the ways in which many nonpartisan pollsters played me-too with their numbers were so blatant, that I found it hard to trust the veracity firms without a proven record of post-2020 accuracy.
After a brief polling drought at the start of the month, these pollsters would finally begin to start publishing new surveys. And as fate would have it, these good firms showed largely strong numbers for Kamala, starting a pattern that would persist until the end of the cycle. The Times national poll, published on October 8th, found her up by four points among likely voters, the first national lead the paper had found for any Democratic candidate against Trump the entire year. Most importantly, they said that this was because their results found her improving exactly where I always believed she needed to improve: representing change. The Times would follow this up with another poll showing her up by four points in Pennsylvania, seemingly further validating my read of the race. Around the same time, Marist would publish a poll showing her up by five points nationally.
It was all quite a different story from the numbers and narratives coming from the rest of the political world. After presenting a tied race for months, betting markets started swinging intensely to Trump in the middle of October. Leading statistical forecasts, where her chances had been dropping since the end of September, started to show Trump as the nominal favorite once again. It gave me a strong sense of déjà vu. The narrative shifts we were seeing were the exact same that I had seen in 2022, almost down to the day that they started to come out. My take on it was that it primarily reflected an industry scared of ever going out on a limb for Democrats again following their 2020 misses—something that, if still true, would mean that all of the movement we were seeing for Trump meant practically nothing.
This was the argument that I made in my article presenting the case that the polls were on track to underestimate Democrats. Forming the basis for this beyond just precedent in 2022 was another series of articles by Nate Cohn that went over the state of play in the polling industry and how firms had changed since the 2020 election. All of the changes he said he had made had the effect of increasing Trump’s support, which I thought could have stood to overclock his numbers if it turned out that they were being too reactive to pass misses. It was a phenomenon with global precedent; as Nate Silver brought up in his newsletter, this exact fear had caused British pollsters to dramatically underestimate the left in the 2017 parliamentary election in the United Kingdom.
After putting this case together, I decided to enter wait-and-see mode before publishing my final predictions, keeping an eye on the upcoming final results from the country’s most reliable firms as the best way to accurately gauge Kamala’s strength in swing states. As this drip-drip-drip of polling came out, things were generally very positive for the Democratic side, especially in the must-win Midwest. Marist’s final slate of midwestern polls had Kamala up between two and three points in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Marquette’s final poll of the Badger state had her up there by one, while two polls of Michigan from firms that nailed the state’s 2022 results found her up by three. At the same time, all the polls giving Trump his best numbers were the usual suspects, either aligned with the GOP outright or with strong post-2020 records of overcautiousness that had often resulted in them overestimating Republicans. The same split-screen that we had seen in 2022 looked as if it was appearing once again.
And that was before the Selzer poll. Of all of the polls I had paid special attention to because of their success in 2022, there was always a lingering worry surrounding them: the fact that they had underestimated Trump during his runs before. For as much as I believed that those errors were best explained by specific factors unique to those years (something that it seems was, in fact, the case—the errors this year were not nearly the size they were in 2016 and 2020 even among pollsters that didn’t weight by recalled vote), the specter of this happening again was always a lingering worry of mine. This was exactly why I had always put a premium on things like the Washington primary—they had served as early signs that the polls would be off multiple times in the past. And in this opera of canaries in the coal mine of the polling world, none had been quite as good, or had such illustrious of a reputation, as J. Ann Selzer. She had managed to find Trump strength in her state that the averages missed in 2016; when they missed his strength again in 2020, she did so again. And unlike the Republican-aligned pollsters who had clearly only managed to find numbers in line with the results by putting the thumb on the scale for their party, Selzer had managed to near-perfectly estimate the results in her state in 2022. There was no sign of any systemic bias, no history of missing silent Trump voters or bedevilment by nonresponse bias.
It was the last plausible gold standard we had. And when it came out, it was the best individual poll result Democrats had seen in decades.
With a D+3 final result, Selzer didn’t just provide no evidence that pollsters were missing Trump support, as she had in the past. She strongly indicated the exact opposite was happening, and it hit the political world like an atom bomb. Democrats celebrated a potential landslide. Republicans accused her of being bribed by P. Diddy to demoralize their voters. One pollster that had shown strong results for Trump published a preemptive mea culpa for underrepresenting core Democratic constituencies in his likely voter model. My take on it, as reflected in my final ratings article, wasn’t that it represented proof of a Democratic landslide or even a win in Iowa, but that it was a strong sign for the party in the Midwestern states that they needed to win. The following day, the New York Times would release a set of surveys showing Kamala leading or tied in every swing state but Arizona, while Jon Ralston would project her to be the narrow victor in his state of Nevada.
All of that was what got me to my final map: one that I said leaned in the Democratic direction. It didn’t predict a blowout or rule out a Trump win by any means, but it was still wrong all the same.
If you’re still here, thank you. Even if you’re hatereading. As for what this newsletter will become, I hope to return to the long, retrospective pieces a la the Stacey Abrams article from 2023. I can finally start working on that long-awaited Bernie piece. More analysis of the failures of the Biden years, too. If it’s not too depressing, maybe some analysis of Trump’s cabinet and legislative priorities. And if nothing else, I hope to be a counterweight to the centrist media that are already salivating about returning the Democratic Party to 1997, if not 1897.
Regarding forecasting, things like the Washington primary can no longer be assumed to be consistently useful outside of Washington, and the gold standards—Selzer, Marist, the New York Times, Ralston and the like—are a lot less gold now. Broadly, polling is in a strangely familiar state. The best did the worst, the worst did the best, and the industry as a whole did basically fine. There is no existential crisis on alert for either polls or pundits, so it's best to start following aggregates again. Congrats, Nate Cohn; RIP, J. Ann, especially with how awful her explanations for her miss this year have been.
As for what the past four years taught us, the main story is this: the Biden administration was a test case for the viability of establishmentarian, hawkish liberalism, and it failed. He, Kamala Harris, and their White House saw an army of reactionaries and a completely captured judiciary gut the rights of people across the country and either did nothing or outright capitulated, and lots of people who praised both of their strategies for representing actually existing sanity are now backtracking to pretend that they ran on defunding the police and open borders. It’s just further proof of what we’ve already known: that the strategy offered by the Atlantic writers of the world is center-right ideological hackwork disguised as Hard Truths, as well as a way to guarantee Democrats hurt as many people as possible on the way to their next defeat. Even if there isn’t a clear ideological throughline for which Democrats managed to outperform the top of the ticket the most, one side was the one in charge here, and they need to own it the same way they were positioning to own a potential victory. It begs the question: did they care more about winning or winning on their own right-wing terms? I’ll let you think about Bill Clinton’s speech in Michigan, Walz’s debate slip-up about Iran, and all the campaigning with the Cheneys to reach your own conclusions there.
Going forward to a fascist regime that will destroy the country at worst or just keep chugging along against a Biden-less Democratic party at best, the deciding question of the future will be what shape the opposition takes, just as it was the deciding question going into 2020. There will probably be no #Resistance this time around, which is depressing for the center-left but liberating for the rest of us. People are more introspective than outraged, which is a good thing. We have a window of opportunity to change what has facilitated the success of the self-destructive centrist class that brought us to this moment: their ability to establish a narrative that they are always the best bet at the ballot box. Their failure this year—and it is indeed their failure—needs to change that. Those of us who want to create a better world will need to reiterate that their vision of the world is neither popular nor “common sense.” We’ve been able to show how they’ve been wrong morally; now, it’s time to break the spell that their approach is not only good electorally, but acceptable at all.
]]>Well. I certainly thought that this was going to be a lot more straightforward last week.
Back then, my plan was simple. Because of the mistakes made and questionable practices implemented by many pollsters since 2020, I decided that it would be best to come to my final conclusions about the race stood by only looking at the cream of the crop of pre-election indicators. These included polls by the few firms that didn’t flinch at projecting Democratic strength at the end of 2022, predictions from historically accurate local commentators, and takes from friends with impressive records of their own in their home states. At the start, this went along about as I expected. Marist put out its set of Rust Belt polls, and they showed roughly what one would expect from prior indicators like the Washington Primary. The final set of swing state surveys from the New York Times told a similar story. Seeing results like these, I was cautiously optimistic that what I had posited at the end of October—that fears of 2016 and 2020 had causing many pollsters to miss real Harris support—could end up actually happening.
And then there was the Selzer poll.
Those of you who weren’t aware of J. Ann’s record and the importance of her surveys prior to this weekend are probably quite well informed right now, so I’ll spare you the exposition. The crux of it is that it put me in a position that I did not expect to be in: willing to say that the race is not, in fact, a pure tossup, or even a tossup that leans one way over the other. Instead, I’m going to stick to what I said after the debate—that, while this is a race that both candidates can very well win, it’s also one where one candidate just has more signs pointing in their direction than the other. As for who that is and what the map looks like, just read below.
Final Official Ettingermentum Electoral College Map. No tossups.
At long last, here it is. After everything we saw over the past month, the race is, fundamentally, in the same position that it was back in September: just barely Lean D due to signs of Democratic strength in their easiest path to victory in the Midwest and comparative Republican unsteadiness in their must-win Sun Belt states. The net effect of this is a total of 308 electoral votes that are in Kamala Harris’ column to at least some degree—a surprisingly solid total that also isn’t quite as intimidating as it may appear. We can learn a lot here from mistakes made by pundits in 2016, when it was assumed that Hillary Clinton’s supposed competitiveness in must-win Trump states (Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, etc.) meant that Trump faced an impossible climb. While the idea here was that these states would function like moles in a game of whack-a-mole, where just getting one of these must-win states down didn’t mean that Trump didn’t still have problems with the others, their results ended up being correlated with each other. All of the states that were said to be putting him in an impossible position ended up falling in his direction early on into election night, putting him right at the doorstep of winning the election, which he ultimately did.
It’s best to understand this map somewhat similarly. Together, North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada put Trump a bit of a ways away from 270, but if Trump is winning one of the two big states here (NC and GA), he’s very likely winning the other unless the margin is exceedingly close. Both have polled very close to the other throughout the year and voted very similarly in both 2020 and 2022; notwithstanding some subtle (but important) differences that I’ll get to in a bit, they and their combined 32 electoral votes are likely to be a package deal. If Kamala wins them, she’s very likely to be the next President. Past that point, Trump’s only path to victory would be a clean sweep or near-clean sweep of the Midwest running through Pennsylvania and Michigan. If Trump wins them, on the other hand, he’d be right on the door of 270 electoral votes (assuming a win in Lean R Arizona) even without Nevada, only requiring one of three of the Midwest swing states to seal the deal.
In other words, it’d be a lot like what happened in 2016, even if the punditry is completely different this time around. But to be said to be in the kind of position that would make this race a tossup despite his uneven Sun Belt standing, Trump needs a final piece of the puzzle: a Great Lakes state where either neither candidate has a clear advantage or he has something of an edge. Last week, all three states stood as potential candidates to be this, but as time went on and reliable polling came in, Kamala remained in a stubbornly decent position in all three. In Michigan, two local pollsters that nailed the 2022 gubernatorial election found the Vice President up by three, as did Marist College. In Wisconsin, the state’s gold standard Marquette poll found her up by one, while Marist had her up by two. And then there was the Selzer poll—the two-time canary in the coal mine for Midwestern Trump strength in 2016 and 2020 that now put out a result indicating the exact opposite.
If you want, you can use that datapoint to justify a Kamala landslide of practically any size. Personally, however, my choice is to be a bit cautious and mark it down as yet another indicator that previously predicted overlooked Trump strength and is not showing it now. For the map, it was enough for me to feel confident in keeping Wisconsin as Lean Democratic, as it was in my previous map, while moving Iowa down from Safe Republican to Likely Republican. The idea of a blue wave localized entirely to Iowa as a reaction to the state’s new abortion ban, Governor Kim Reynolds’ unpopularity, and old people being permanently polarized against the GOP since 1983 because of the farm crisis is very compelling to me, and I was quite tempted to put it as Lean Republican just for that reason alone. However, I can’t lie and say that I would be just as shocked by a Kamala win in Arizona, or a Trump win in one of the Great Lakes states, as I would be by a Kamala win in Iowa. It’s hard to think of any presidential result in recent decades that was quite as out of left field as that would be. Perhaps cowardly pollsters and the adoption of methodological changes that may be obscuring shifts in attitudes have created the conditions for such an outcome, but I’m still of the attitude that I’ll believe it when I see it.
This gets us to the final state of the Great Lakes trio—our projected tipping point state that determines whether or not the 270th electoral vote is rated as Lean Democratic or Tilt Democratic. Last week, I thought it very likely that both it and Wisconsin would be rated Tilt one way or the other, and that I would decide which way I would classify them based on the upcoming high quality polls. For Pennsylvania, these ended up leaning Harris (although not by an overwhelming amount), pointing me in the direction of Tilt Democratic. Like in Wisconsin, it would ultimately end up being the Selzer poll, along with some correspondence with local sources, that moved me in the direction of Leans Democratic for the state. While some nonpartisan polls finding slight Trump leads in the state makes this rating far more tenuous than the identical ratings in Wisconsin and Michigan, Selzer being added on top of the trustworthy indicators and recent electoral successes pointing in the direction of Democrats in the state makes it so that I can’t honestly say that a Kamala victory in Pennsylvania would be as unexpected as a Trump one. If he falls short, it will be entirely congruent with pre-election indicators that have been consistently reliable for states like Pennsylvania throughout the Trump era; if she falls short, it won’t be.
Although these signs in the Midwest are what give Kamala an edge on paper, they probably wouldn’t be enough to move this race ever-so-slightly out of tossup status by themselves. As mentioned previously, her inroads in the Sun Belt keep Trump a ways away from 270 electoral votes, and although a 2016-style scenario where he nets them all is possible, it is not a guarantee. Of these four states, Arizona is by far his clearest shot for a flip. Unlike every other swing state in the country, his leads there have been both very consistent and replicated by high quality pollsters. Most importantly, these leads make sense in the context of two very real trends: Latinos moving to the GOP and polarized moving patterns. A recent New York Times study found that new arrivals into Arizona had a partisanship of R+28, something that would do a lot to explain the GOP’s registration gains since 2020 in a state without many ancestral Democrats-in-name-only. Leans Republican makes the most sense to me—I feel fine saying that a Kamala victory there would be roughly as surprising as a Trump win in one of the Blue Wall states. It’s not out of the question by any means, but it would go against enough trends and indicators that it would catch me a little off guard.
Nevada is a state that I could absolutely see this same phenomenon happening; indeed, I had it rated to the right of Arizona in my first race rating all the way back in the spring of 2023. But despite everything—registration losses, an unprecedented GOP early voting advantage, and seemingly horrific demographics in general—Nevada Democrats have just refused to say die. The state has been one of Kamala’s better-polling states since she entered the race despite the pattern of pollsters often undershooting Democratic strength there, and people who know a lot more about the state’s early voting numbers than me feel confident enough to say that the GOP’s edge isn’t enough to put them on track to win. I’ll defer to them and have it at Tilt Democratic for now.
Finally, this gets us to the Southeastern duo: North Carolina and my home state of Georgia. These states are very tough to judge, in no small part due to a bit of a polling drought in both. This is most highly pronounced in Georgia, where the Times’ list of Select Pollsters includes AtlasIntel in three of the five most recent surveys. Excluding that outfit of demonstrably ignorant Brazilians, high quality polling in the Peach State looks quite promising for her. At worst, Trump has been up by one or tied with her; at best, she’s outright led, with one early October poll by the Washington Post finding her up by 4. Things are a bit more polarized in North Carolina, where her best polls have found her up by as much as three points but a spate of high quality pollsters have found a few Trump+2s. In the end, though, Trump’s lead is still less than a percentage point despite AtlasIntel spamming new polls every two days. This slightly worse polling and the lack of clear trends in both states makes it hard to feel as confident in her chances as one might feel in the Midwest, but they make the most sense as close wins for her in a world where pollsters broadly overclocked Trump support and blexit is once again confirmed to be fake. As such, I have both as Tilt Democratic.
With all seven swing states covered, I’ll give a brief word for some possible Kamala reach states (rated as Likely Republican on the map). Of these, Iowa is, as stated previously, by far the most plausible win for her. The idea of a localized blue wave in Iowa that could allow her to win the state without necessarily winning by 17 points nationally is plausible enough, at least as long as Selzer is saying it. Following that, Alaska also stands as a possible Democratic upset in a world of rampant racedep, although polls from Alaska Survey Research showing the state roughly in line with 2020 throws quite a lot of cold water on that possibility. ASR almost perfectly predicted Peltola’s winning margin in 2022; if there was an unseen surge of Democratic strength in the state this year, they’d probably have picked up on it. Following that, Ohio and Texas stand as the likely upper limit for a Kamala win in a world where J. Ann and J. Ann alone is right; I’d put them at Very Likely Republican to distinguish them from Iowa if 270towin allowed for it, but they don’t. As for Florida, don’t even waste your time thinking about it.
For a brief word on Congress: my Senate ratings are largely unchanged from September, including having Brown as Tilt Democratic. The only exceptions are that I see Nebraska as far more of a live wire than I did back then, I think Slotkin is in a very solid position, and have stopped seriously considering Florida in any capacity since the Times’ poll in the state. Gallego and Rosen both look very solid, as per usual; Baldwin and Casey have seen their positions deteriorate slightly, but they’re still clearly in the driver’s seat even if there isn’t a polling error. As for Texas, Cruz’ history makes me believe the polls that say that he could underrun Trump significantly, so I still see his race as a possible upset and the best chance for Democrats to get to 50 seats. Tester has supposedly seen some late momentum, but his race has always been a tall order and remains one still. That you can’t totally rule him out this late is impressive enough, but I would be legitimately shocked to see him win, maybe even moreso than Bliowa.
As for the House, I feel safe saying that it will go mostly as the presidency goes, although it’s a lot easier for me to imagine a Speaker Jeffries and President Trump than a Speaker Johnson and President Harris. The gap between the generic ballot and presidential polling that got to such a high level under Biden—likely as a result of voters thinking he would lose and wanting a check on Trump—has mostly dissipated under Kamala, resulting in a polling world where she actually runs ahead of the generic ballot. Democrats should probably be fine here when it comes down to actually winning the chamber because of the candidate quality gaps they’ve enjoyed in competitive races, but it’s not as much as lock as it would be if House Democrats were running ahead of the top of the ticket by as much as the average Senate Democrat.
That’s where I’ll leave things for now. If you want to catch me on Election Night, I’ll be on Hasan’s stream starting at 6:00 PM EST.
]]>Following up from this article:
I know I said that this article would be titled The Art of Losing: Kamala Harris, but after considering it for a while, I changed my mind. Although she is the candidate on the ballot, it feels wrong to single her out as the principal (potential) loser of the election on the Democratic side. The dynamics of the election that she was forced into were not of her choosing or her making. To the extent she has failed or made mistakes, they can all be traced back to her boss—not her ideology, her perceived ideology or really all that much about her individually.
Of course, I’m aware that this could very well look self-serving if I published it in the aftermath of a loss, which is why I’m publishing it while there’s a very good chance that she could win. Either I’ll have proof that my post-election takes aren’t being put out for convenience’s sake, or I’ll be one of the rare pundits on record critiquing a winning campaign. Hopefully, both will be a contribution to the discourse. So, without further ado, here are the main issues facing Democrats heading into Election Day.
Reason #1: It’s not progressivism, or centrism, or anything ideologically. A despised old man was the presumptive Democratic nominee for more than a year.
As the title of this piece implies, this fact is the alpha and omega of every single issue or potential issue facing the Democratic campaign. It is so dominant, so influential, that it makes it impossible to regard any kind of Democratic loss this year as any kind of ideological verdict from voters. Politically, President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. is in a world of his own and has been for more than three years. He is regarded by voters as uniquely incapable and incompetent in a way that no other member of the party is. Simply having him in the White House has been bad enough for their electoral changes; having him spend more than an entire year at the top of the ticket as the face of the party so, so much worse. He let a yearslong head start go completely to waste in service of a laughably ineffective and vainglorious effort. If reporting is to be believed, his campaign was organized horrendously, with one of his friends working as the entire ad team.
No man could have possibly been worse for the moment. Things were so bad that his performance in the June debate made me feel the most optimistic about the election I had in years. Just the fact that the public’s overwhelming dislike for Trump put his party in a position to win regardless after he left the scene doesn’t change anything. Even though he’s not on the ballot, the main lesson of a Kamala loss will be the simple fact that it’s not helpful to have a visibly decaying elderly man as the leader of your party. Dumb moves by centrists, which I’ll get to in a minute, will be part of the story and will be very important to learn from if Kamala falls short, but they will always be secondary to this fact.
Reason #2: This party replaced said old man with a completely inexperienced politician that he chose…
After the first week of Kamala Harris’ campaign, many commentators, myself included, were asking where this new politician came from and what happened to the old Vice President we had known and loved since her 2020 presidential campaign. Since then, we’ve gotten something of an answer: she didn’t really go anywhere. Her belated media blitz is a case in point—while not outright awful, the high-profile interviews and town halls she gave to get voters to know her were hardly stellar. Unfortunately, it’s about what one would expect from someone who has only faced a Republican in a general election two times in her entire career, both in one of the bluest states in the country, and nearly lost the first time. Of course, the primary blame here goes to Biden for choosing her at his advanced age. That may make this only his fault indirectly, but it still makes it his fault.
Reason #3: …and then his team might have missed what was compelling about said politician when she happened to gain momentum.
Moving on from the indirect consequences of Biden’s actions, we now reach something that’s a direct result of his actions—or, at least, the actions of his team. The people around him were awful, made terrible decisions, were kept on the campaign and only continued to give bad advice afterwards. Case in point: the Democratic pollster who responded to Kamala’s first week of campaigning by advising her to stop calling Republicans “weird” and saying “we’re not going back.” People like him clearly won out on the inside, and the result has been a very bloodless, uncertain campaign that regularly plays into right-wing framing on the issues for the benefit of repeating uninspiring, focus-group tested phrases over and over. Maybe it works out, but it’s hard to have much confidence knowing where, and who, it’s coming from.
Reason #4: Disingenuous, inconsistent “moderation” in line with White House desires.
This one can be summed up in just two words: immigration and Palestine. Under Biden, the party has been completely willing to sell the farm on the former issue in the vain hope that it might help them electorally while refusing to budge on the latter despite far clearer evidence that doing so would benefit them. It’s a textbook case of everything they’ve accused the left of doing: childishly putting ideological preferences over winning. Even if it’s a smaller part of the equation than it probably should be, it’s still unforgivable in every respect.
Reason #5: Racism and sexism.
It’s not fun, but this can’t be ignored. It’s true that we have a lot of evidence that both female candidates and Black candidates can do very well electorally, but none of that evidence includes presidential elections, which are different beasts entirely. At minimum, it’s almost certainly the case that Kamala’s race and gender are why the public sees her as an extremist; at most, it could be pushing her downwards in every respect, especially as it concerns all-important perceptions about leadership. Liberals won’t be right if they attempt to use this as an excuse for the decisions made by the Democratic Party in the event of a loss, but we won’t be right if we declare it to be completely irrelevant, either. The middle ground is the most accurate here.
]]>It will be fun, at least for me. I always find it very amusing to see the lengths many will go to spin whatever they see as proof that they were always right all along, especially when they sung a different tune—or said nothing at all—before things became clear. But it will also present a major complication: how to provide any takes about how things went after the election without looking like a complete hack. This tendency—to come to a conclusion first and work backwards to justify it—is so pervasive in political writing that it’s hard to have much trust in the post-election takes spouted out by, well, anyone at all. No matter how rigorously you justify whatever conclusion you come to, it’s still hard to blame readers if they assume that you’re only saying what you’re saying for the sake of convenience.
To combat this, I have decided to do something different. Rather than wait until after the election to give my impressions on the Trump and Harris campaigns, I have decided to do so before any results have come in. Through this, you can be confident that my analysis of the flaws of one campaign—say, Trump’s—is not just something I’m pulling out purely because he lost, but is something I was willing to say at a time when there was a very real chance that he could win. Additionally, this will also guarantee that I will have been on record critiquing a campaign that ended up winning—something that very few analysts do in the aftermath of an election, but can often prove to be just as valuable as any analysis of the flaws of a campaign that lost. So, without further ado, let’s start with what you all want to hear first: why Donald Trump lost this election.
(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)
Reason #1: He was too fucking online.
I’ll start off by saying that this point used to be a lot more fun to make back when it was more novel. Only a few years ago, it was the Democrats who pundits universally saw as the out-of-touch, internet-addicted party that couldn’t manage to understand that Twitter wasn’t real life. Republicans, by contrast, were assumed to be far more on-the-level. It was a great time looking where few others looked to show how deeply wrong this was: how truly, profoundly influential social media stars had become in determining their messaging, how insular and self-indulgent their priorities were, and how this was alienating people left, right and center. This analysis was quickly vindicated in 2022 with the midterms, made obvious by the fascist DeSantis fancams in 2023, and then rose rapidly in 2024 to become one of the biggest stories of the election. What was once a relatively contrarian take has now become impossible to ignore, courtesy of a Trump campaign that has put lines from impact font memes on the front page of its website and made Elon Musk one of its top surrogates during the final days of the election.
Just because a take has become somewhat basic, however, does not mean that it stops being important. The exact opposite is true. Whether or not Trump wins, this wholesale capture of his campaign by poorly socialized adult Catholic converts will have been the defining story of his campaign, and it is not something that is good for the right whatsoever. I’ll have a lot more on this phenomenon—and the history behind it—soon in the upcoming miniseries I’ve created with Chapo Trap House, coming out early next month.
Reason #2: JD Vance.
This choice—and JD Vance himself, for that matter—is both something of an extension of the latter section, but it’s big enough that it’s worth covering by itself. While he’s not getting the same degree of negative attention that he did during his disastrous rollout, nothing about Ohio’s very junior Senator has changed. By the numbers, he’s still solidly one of the least popular VP picks in history, still right in the middle of Palin and Quayle territory even as polarization has boosted his numbers a tad down the stretch. In context, he’s still easily the most baffling choice in modern history, if not all of American history. Past bad VP picks almost always came as a result of a candidate being backed into some kind of a corner, but Trump in 2024 had practically every member of his party debasing themselves to be his #2. A lot of them had very impressive electoral records and strong enough resumes to not raise any concerns about their qualifications to potentially serve as President. For an election where Trump’s perceived leadership ability has been his biggest strength from the very start, doubling down on it should have been a no-brainer, and anything that could have jeopardized it should have been immediately recognized as a completely unnecessary risk.
Naturally, the Trump camp took that exact risk, giving them weeks of bad headlines at the worst possible time. If Trump ends up losing in a close race, his choice to remind the entire country about everything they hate and fear about him and his movement could have very well been pivotal. Even if he wins, it will still have been a very dumb choice.
Reason #3: America just isn’t that conservative…
For the past year, pundits and reporters alike have been insistent in telling us that one of the defining stories of this race is a rightward shift in public opinion since the Trump era. It’s a story that is absolutely true in some respects—changes in attitudes on immigration and crime are undeniable, even if their causes may be open to debate—but isn’t nearly as sweeping as many have made it out to be.
It is true that, historically speaking, immigration and crime have served as strong heuristics for more conservative attitudes writ large: e.g., opposition to welfare spending, support for traditionalist social policies, and more hawkish attitudes on foreign policy. But this hasn’t been what has occurred over the past few years. Across a multitude of issues, the public has remained just as progressive as it was during the left’s supposed artificial sugar high during the Trump era. Pro-choice policies are the obvious example here—they’ve maintained supermajority support even as Democrats have done everything in their power to associate them with their party—but it’s also true of many economic policies as well. Despite Biden presiding over a generational inflation crisis and being completely distrusted on the economy, the big, boilerplate progressive economic agenda pieces haven’t lost public support. There’s been no major wave of support for repealing the President’s big spending bills like there was for Obamacare; if anything, many swing district Republicans have taken pains to show their support for things like the CHIPS Act.
Altogether, it’s just not the same world as 2016, to say nothing of an environment like 1980. In place of those tailwinds, the GOP this year was in a position where it had to demonstrate some real finesse, which isn’t exactly something they’re all that known for as of late.
Reason #4: …and Trump didn’t properly deal with that.
A potential saving grace, however, was Trump. As I’ve long written about, one of Trump’s biggest political assets throughout his career has been his ability to make voters see him as a moderate. And this wasn’t all just vibes—some of it was actually earned, like when he began his political career with a promise to reject the GOP’s unpopular austerity plans for Social Security and Medicare. Even now, he’s still had moments where he’s served as something of a moderating force in his party. One particularly amusing example of this came in January of this year, when Charlie Kirk of TPUSA began a personal crusade to re-demonize Martin Luther King, Jr., and said that Black people were incapable of flying planes. In response, Trump told an ally “We don’t need this” and “I want it to stop.” It soon did.
These sorts of stories, however, have been exceptions to the overall rule of Trump and his people doing practically nothing to moderate themselves and clamp down on their wing’s excesses. At best, they’ve just been stuck playing catch-up to distance themselves from things like Project 2025, which would have never seen the light of day if his team was actually on the ball. At worst, they’ve just outright followed the lead of the Kirks of the world and dumped considerable resources into questionable-at-best culture war crusades, like their anti-trans ads. With how much room a candidate like Trump gave them to work with, they left a lot on the table.
Reason #5: He’s just always been unpopular.
It’s the oldest of old hats, but it’s the alpha and omega for everything about American politics today. When everything is said and done, voters do not like Trump. They have never liked Trump. He has never had positive personal favorability at any point during his career—not when he was first elected president, not when he oversaw a strong economy, not when COVID began, not when Biden’s approval tanked and not after he was shot. Throughout his entire career, the best predictor of his strength in the polls has not been anything he has ever done, but the quality of his opponent. The right hasn’t fixed this, has never really been all that interested in fixing it, and has eaten shit because of it for nearly a decade on end because of it. After all is said and done, this might just end up being the story again.
Coming next, The Art of Losing: Kamala Harris
]]>For nearly 100 years, the most widely-followed metric for predicting U.S. presidential elections wasn’t a poll, a forecast, or a race rating. It was a state—specifically, the state of Maine. Because of the cold autumns in northern New England, the Pine Tree State once held its statewide and Congressional elections in September, two months earlier than the rest of the country. It didn’t take long before political observers in the 19th century realized that these early races could provide a valuable window into the state of the nation’s very polarized political environment. Taking Maine’s Republican lean into account, the general rule was that a strong GOP win would mean a GOP victory in November. On the other hand, a close GOP win would mean a close race, and an outright Democratic win in the state would mean that Democrats were on track to do very well nationally. Thus, the saying went, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”
This trend continued unabated as late as 1932, when Maine’s election of a Democratic governor and two Democratic House members presaged Franklin D. Roosevelt’s landslide win two months later. Four years after that, the state once again seemed to provide a sign that major political changes were afoot. In September of 1936, Maine elected a Republican governor, state legislature, and Congressional delegation—a sign that, if history was any indication, the GOP was about to make a major comeback and oust President Roosevelt out of office in November. But once the results that year actually came in, it was immediately obvious that this Republican strength in Maine had only meant one thing: that Republicans were doing relatively well in states like, well, Maine. Alf Landon, the Republican nominee, would carry the state, but it would wind up being one of the two states in the entire country he ended up winning. The state’s longstanding status as a bellwether was completely busted; James Farley, FDR’s campaign manager, would quip that “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”
This misfire wouldn’t be a one-off. As the nature of the office of the presidency changed under Roosevelt and local partisan newspapers gave way to new mass media outlets, U.S. elections became something more than the feats of raw partisan strength that they were during the Gilded Age. Voters began to evaluate different candidates for different offices very differently from one another. It was a depolarized era, defined by the new maxim that “All politics is local.” Commentators would shift their attention from off-year elections and towards the new industry of scientific polling, which could more directly evaluate how voters felt about America’s individually unique races. True to form, Maine’s early elections would fail to predict almost any of the presidential elections over the five cycles after 1936; by the time the state moved its elections to November in 1959, it went with little notice. The political world had long since moved on to the polls as the only meaningful pre-election indicators one could get.
This New Deal-era attitude of prioritizing polling above all else still prevails to this day even though the political environment of that era is long gone. In the decades since public polling became king, American politics have steadily become more and more polarized. Ticket-splitting, once so prevalent that it was practically impossible to extrapolate trends in one race onto another, has become near-nonexistent. Instead of evaluating candidates among a countless array of factors, voters often now only evaluate them according to one: partisanship. Altogether, it’s a political world that’s a lot more like the one of the late-19th century than the one of the mid-20th century—one that may be worth looking at in a new light. Although we no longer have early results from Maine to pour over, we still have a myriad of pre-November data points from voters each year, from party primaries or special elections, that we can look at. Although often ignored, these races have repeatedly proven predictive of major trends in U.S. elections, from Republican resilience in 2020 to Democratic strength in 2022. But, despite all of this, hardly any commentators have chosen to incorporate these indicators when creating projections of the national environment.
That is, until now. After correctly using pre-November electoral indicators to predict that 2022 would not be a red wave two years ago, my friend Josh Taft of Dark Horse Politics has worked on creating a model that combines polling, primaries, and special election data to try to present the most accurate possible projection of the national environment. The result is an eerily accurate formula that, when applied to past presidential elections, has almost always been more accurate than the polling averages. Here’s how it works, its historical track record, and what it says about 2024—and why it gives Democrats reason to be optimistic heading into the final week of the election.
To begin, I’ll tell you what Taft’s model says right now. Although not finalized, it presents a D+2.9 environment, better than what both generic ballot and presidential polling has for the Democratic Party right now. Now, here’s why it may end up being right.
In its inner workings, the Taft model uses just three things to project the state of the national environment. The first, and most important, is, in fact, polling data—specifically, generic ballot polling data. Right off the bat, this already makes Taft’s model substantially different from every other polling average, model, and forecast of the presidential election out there. Those all use, well, presidential polling, which directly pits the candidates themselves against each other. Generic ballot polling, on the other hand, asks respondents if they would support a generic Democrat or a generic Republican in a race for the U.S. House. It’s a choice that few others make, but also one that Taft says has made his model more accurate compared to using presidential polls to represent polling during presidential cycles.
To augment this polling data, Taft includes two additional factors derived from pre-November electoral indicators. The first of these is the partisan environment represented by voting in party primaries. Taft employs his own in-house formula to create this variable, in which he gives 50% weight to the results from the historically predictive Washington primary and 50% weight to the turnout composition of party primaries in other states across the country. This is the most important variable representing pre-November electoral indicators in his model; as it's currently constructed, only the generic ballot holds more weight. The third and final factor he includes is the national environment as represented by special elections—specifically, special elections for the U.S. Congress held the same year of the presidential election. This factor holds the least weight in his model by far, but it is still included as it helps provide a final nudge that makes the forecast just that more accurate.
Before I show you what his model looks like retroactively, I want to give a glance of how the national pollsters themselves have performed in every election since 2010, which is as far as the model currently goes back to.
In 2010, the generic ballot presented a R+10.2 environment. In November, the election was R+5.2. Generic ballot polling underestimated Democrats by 5.0 points.
In 2012, the generic ballot presented a R+0.2 environment, while presidential polling presented a D+0.7 environment. In November, Barack Obama won by 4.0 points, being underestimated by the generic ballot polls by 4.2 points and underestimated by presidential polling by 3.3 points.
In 2014, the generic ballot presented a R+2.7 environment. In November, the election was R+5.04. Generic ballot polling overestimated Democrats by 2.34 points.
In 2016, the generic ballot presented a D+0.7 environment, while presidential polling presented a D+3.2 environment. In November, Hillary Clinton won by 2.2 points, being underestimated by the generic ballot by 1.5 points and overestimated by presidential polling by 1.0 points.
In 2018, the generic ballot presented a D+9.2 environment. In November, the election was D+7.4. Generic ballot polling overestimated Democrats by 1.8 points.
In 2020, the generic ballot presented a D+7.9 environment, while presidential polling presented a D+8.4 environment. In November, Joe Biden won by 4.6 points, being overestimated by the generic ballot by 3.3 points and overestimated by presidential polling by 3.8 points.
In 2022, the generic ballot presented a R+1.3 environment. In November, the election was R+1.6. Generic ballot polling overestimated Democrats by 0.3 points.
Across the board, it’s a pretty rough record. In comparison, Taft’s model, using retroactive data, does as such:
In 2010, the model would have projected a margin of R+9.5, underestimating Obama by 4.3 points.
In 2012, the model would have projected a margin of D+3.9, underestimating Obama’s margin by 0.1 points.
In 2014, the model would have projected a margin of R+5.2, underestimating Democrats by 0.1 points.
In 2016, the model would have projected a margin of D+2.7, overestimating Clinton by 0.4 points.
In 2018, the model would have projected a margin of D+10.2, overestimating Democrats by 2.9 points
In 2020, the model would have projected a margin of D+3.5, underestimating Biden by 1.1 points.
In 2022, the model would have projected a margin of R+0.8, overestimating Democrats by 0.9 points.
For a graphical representation of this data:
Altogether, it’s a record of remarkable retrospective accuracy. In four out of these seven elections, the model got within a percentage point of the final result; in another, it only missed by 1.1 points. The polls by themselves, for reference, only managed such a feat only once between 2010 and 2022. The model only missed the final result by more than around one point twice, both during midterm elections and both in the same direction that polling erred. Quite notably, the model has not done this while consistently being more Republican or Democratic than the polling averages each year. From 2012 to 2020, the model would have first been more Democratic than the polls (in 2012), then more Republican (2014 and 2016), then more Democratic (in 2018) and then more Republican once again (in 2020). That’s real variation, a stark contrast to the consistent biases of the Trafalgars of the world. If there is any trend at all, it has been towards accuracy.
Speaking of accuracy, the Taft model has only been less accurate than polling two times, both during midterm elections (2018 and 2022), and the second time only marginally. During presidential elections, it has beaten the polls every single time, most dramatically so when the polls were at their most erroneous. Of particular note, and particularly impressive to me, is that the model not only accurately predicted that 2020 would be a closer election than the polls showed, but that it did so while underestimating Biden’s margin of victory. It’s hard to think of any indicators, either retroactive or from 2020 itself, that would have shown such a result, absent right wing pollsters who clearly just got lucky. It’s even harder to think of any that would have shown such a result while also correctly forecasting that Obama was on track to beat his polls in 2012. Taft’s model may legitimately be alone here, a strong point for the power of pre-November electoral indicators.
As an aside for those curious as to what Taft’s model would look like now if he switched from using generic ballot polling to presidential polling, it would have shifted his last update from D+2.9 to D+3.4—a small but meaningful shift in Kamala’s favor. Had he used this metric in past presidential elections (I asked him if he could plug those into the model for me for this), it would have shifted his 2012 projection from D+3.9 to D+4.1 (essentially just as accurate), his 2016 projection from D+2.7 to D+3.6 (less accurate by about a point), and his 2020 projection from D+3.5 to D+3.8 (more accurate by 0.3 points). On average, this results in a less accurate forecast, although you could make a case that this is primarily a result of changes in how Trump supporters and opponents have responded to polls. The argument here is this: while generic ballot polling would have been a more reliable tracker for Trump’s support in 2016 by managing to avoid the impact of embarrassed Trump supporters refusing to state their choice in presidential polls, it wouldn’t have had this strength in 2020, when Republicans writ large were much more comfortable with him. In that context, going with the generic ballot then would have only had the effect of missing the real anti-Trump Republican vote, slightly dragging down Democrats in the process. And since the circumstances of this election are far more like 2020 than 2016, it would now be best to use presidential polling data for the current model. It’s an interesting theory that we may end up looking back on if the generic ballot version of his model ends up being a tad too bearish for Democrats, but for now, it’s probably best to just stick with the one with the smallest historical error.
Now, the million-dollar question is this: what does this mean for 2024? First and foremost, I would say that it is a strong sign that the polls are not, in fact, overestimating Democrats like they did in 2020. Taft’s model was able to catch that four years ago, and it’s not seeing it now; in fact, it’s actually showing a bluer environment than what both generic ballot and presidential polling currently indicates. This one-and-a-half point gap may not seem like a huge difference, but it could mean the world when it comes to the Electoral College, possibly transforming the race from one where Trump is a meaningful favorite to one where Kamala is the one with the edge, if not a meaningful favorite herself. According to Nate Silver’s model, a world where Kamala only wins the popular vote by a margin between one and two points—i.e., what current polling is suggesting—is one where she only has a 26.7% chance of winning. But if she wins by a margin between two and three points—as Taft’s model currently projects—her odds go up to 51.7%. And if she does slightly better than his model projects and wins with a margin between three and four points, her odds skyrocket to a 75.6% chance to win.
Of course, none of this is a guarantee. While Taft’s model is remarkably accurate at forecasting elections relative to polling, it’s not infallible, and past performance does not guarantee future results. With that said, it’s also the case that one of the main arguments against using pre-November electoral indicators—that voters in special elections are too Democratic-leaning to properly represent the electorate—does not apply here, as special elections play an exceedingly small role in the output of the model. Primaries and the generic ballot polling, on the other hand, make up the vast majority of the inputs for the model, and they provide us with no clear reason to suspect that they may be overestimating Democrats. We’ll see who wins out between Taft’s model and the polls this year in a week, but if history is any indication, it’s that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of applying pre-November electoral indicators.
Hey! Josh Taft here. First, I want to thank Ettingermentum for giving my model a big shout-out as the election comes up, and for an outside perspective on my work. It was his idea that I should do a substack in the first place, and I couldn’t have gotten as far as I have without his help (Thanks!).
Secondly, feel free to head over to my substack, Dark Horse Politics, if you’d like to enjoy my takes and analysis of politics (both US and global). For more information on my model, feel free to reach out to me personally on Twitter (@tafjos20), or become a paid substack subscriber for full access to my model (there’s a lite model for those who don’t–so do not worry–and I plan on releasing some new additions to the model before election day for everyone to see).
]]>It was just two weeks before the election, and the Republican Party was surging.
For anyone who followed politics, it was impossible to escape the news. If you checked Politico, you’d be presented with articles telling you how to “[Make] sense of the GOP’s October surge.” Go over to the New Yorker and you’d see an extensive feature explaining “Why Republican Insiders Think the G.O.P. is Poised for a Blowout.” For the other side of the aisle, the New York Times would tell you that the Democrats were “Fearing a New Shellacking.” Scroll down a bit further to the Times opinion section, and you’d see an article purporting to explain “Why Republicans Are Surging.” Switch over to leading probabilistic forecasts, and you'd see exactly this happening: a once-solid Democratic position eroding rapidly, with Republicans clearly holding the momentum and on track to be favorites on Election Day.
In case you can’t tell what I’m getting at here, it’s this: every single one of these articles were released in advance of the 2022 midterms. In fact, almost all of them were released within the same few days in late October. This is the forgotten part of that race—the big part about it that was buried under all of the media’s self-congratulatory postmortems. Right at the closing stages of the election, after months of correctly covering the race as a more-or-less neutral year, nearly every single elite political commentator in the country flinched. On the forecasts and aggregates, they opened the floodgates to every poll that showed Republicans ahead. When polls found Democrats ahead, the pollsters who conducted them would use their platforms to talk their own data down. Opinion writers like David Brooks, linked above, pre-wrote entire narratives about how Democrats lost by being out-of-touch elites who went too far to the left. Even the most prestigious analysts in the country would change entire state ratings with the sole purpose of finding some way to show the GOP ahead.
In short, they used everything in their power to make Republicans appear in as strong a position as possible. They ended up being completely wrong, and they also ended up facing no consequences for it. Now, with the lights as bright they can be, they may be doing the exact same thing again to an even more extreme extent. Here’s how the stars might be aligning for a polling error that favors Trump in 2024, or: how pundits and pollsters might be courting complete disaster so they can cover their own asses.
What 2022 Doesn’t Tell us About 2024…
To begin, I want to establish something important. Unlike what many said at the time and are still saying now, something big did happen in polling and punditry in 2022. It was real, and it caused people to significantly, and, in my mind, unreasonably underestimate Democrats by Election Day that year. But while this story does provide many valuable lessons for 2024, it doesn’t prove something that many Democratic partisans would like to believe: that all polling now is essentially fake, and that any bad numbers Democrats see are a result of partisan Republican pollsters flooding the zone.
You can call that the Simon Rosenberg theory of politics, and it’s an example of something with a grain of truth to it getting pushed way, way too far. The core idea behind it is very true and very important: that, in 2022, a huge number of unreliable, Republican-leaning polling firms were added, and that they skewed some averages significantly to the right at the closing stages of the race. I will be the first one to tell you that this absolutely happened, that it still stands to be a potential problem going forward, and that it is something that aggregators and modelers should take far more seriously than they do. It’s something I’ve written about extensively. What I object to, however, is those who attempt to use the fact that this happened once as a get-out-of-jail-free card for any and all negative signs that Democrats ever see.
This is why I mention Rosenberg here, as he has made a very lucrative career of doing exactly this. A literal Democratic hack who spent decades in D.C. fighting on behalf of Clintonism against “labor unions and old-line liberals,” Rosenberg received a lot of attention for declaring that the 2022 elections wouldn’t be a red wave very early on. Since then, he has spent the past two years making it very clear that he does not, in fact, have any special insights, but instead just says that Democrats are always going to win no matter what. In this effort, he has blamed supposed “zone flooding” by right-wing pollsters for any and all problems Democrats have faced. This has included:
The poor approval numbers Biden saw at the beginning of 2023, when he launched his campaign. Rosenberg’s only reference to the poor nonpartisan polls that Biden saw at the time was when he brought up a poll from The Washington Post that he said shouldn’t have been published on account of being too bad for Biden.
The polling deficits Biden saw at the end of 2023 following the October 7th attacks. Again, Rosenberg also said that his readers should ignore a bad nonpartisan poll for Biden that came out around that time, this time from CNN, on account of it being too bad for Biden.
Recent shifts towards Trump in the polls this month, which he has once again said is due to what he calls “red wave pollsters” flooding the averages.
For reference, Rosenberg currently defines “red wave pollsters” as such:
American Greatness, Daily Mail, co/efficent, Cygnal, Echelon, Emerson, Fabrizio, Fox News, Insider Advantage, McLaughlin, Mitchell Communications, Napolitan Institute, Noble Predictive, On Message, Orbital Digital, Public Opinion Strategies, Quantus, Rasmussen, Redfield & Wilton, Remington, RMG, SoCal Data, The Telegraph (sic), Trafalgar, TIPP, Victory Insights, Wall Street Journal (sic).
There are some obvious problems with this list, like the fact that many of the pollsters he has included on it—namely Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Emerson—are actually non-partisan pollsters, entirely different from the likes of Trafalgar or Rasmussen. He also missed Patriot Polling, which is inexcusable for anyone trying to explain the world of right-wing polling slop. But the most concerning thing for him is this: that this purported gap between these “bad” pollsters and the “good” pollsters doesn’t really exist.
Back in 2022, there was a clear gap between the national environments presented by different types of pollsters. Partisan polls from both Republican and Democratic firms showed a clear national Republican advantage, while nonpartisan polls showed what was essentially a tied race. Things were even more extreme in statewide polls—in Washington, for instance, GOP-aligned polls erred by as much as 13 points compared to the final result. Notably, this gap showed up as a result of just splitting pollsters according just based on one very relevant aspect of their background: their partisan affiliation (or lack thereof). There was no cherry-picking involved, unlike with Rosenberg’s specially-selected burn book.
Things are different now. As shown by Eli McKown-Dawson in the Silver Bulletin, even removing Rosenberg’s hand-selected list of “bad” polls from the national averages only makes a marginal difference for Kamala. After testing his recommendations and cutting out every pollster from his personal burn book, McKown-Dawson found that his site’s national average only shifted to the left by a mere 0.4 points. When he took a different route and just cut out low-quality pollsters, Trump’s odds in their forecast actually improved. Although this article doesn’t close the book entirely—McKown-Dawson notably didn’t test Rosenberg’s claims by adjusting state polling averages, where Rosenberg has said that the alleged zone-flooding is at its most prevalent—it is a significant point against claims from the likes of Rosenberg that what we’re seeing now is an exact replay of what happened two years ago. The gap between partisan and nonpartisan firms from 2022, so extreme and influential back then even in the most high-volume averages, just isn’t on display now.
As for why this is the case, there are a few reasons that stand out. Part of it is that even the most notorious bad actors from two years ago are simply putting out less extreme results compared to what they put out in 2022. Trafalgar, for instance, repeatedly put out polls that year that showed Republicans either leading or in striking distance in solid Biden states, from New Hampshire to Washington to Colorado to even fucking Vermont. This year, they’ve limited themselves to core swing states, and although they have “found” Trump leads in almost every single survey they’ve conducted, it’s always only been by a few points. It’s enough for them to push their preferred narratives and get appearances on Fox, but also not extreme enough to make them stick out by as much as they did in 2022 if Democrats win. But while these changes are a big deal, they’re only half of the story, because partisan pollsters were far from the only problem we had in 2022.
…What it Might be Telling us…
To start, there is some grain of truth to the popular conception that non partisan pollsters “won” 2022—I’ve supported that conception before. It is undeniably the case that there were some nonpartisan outlets that were both willing to buck the consensus and saw remarkably accurate results that year. The New York Times and Marist College, for instance, both went against the grain at the end of the cycle and published results that had Senate Democrats ahead by almost the exact margins that they ended up winning by. District-level congressional polling from the Times also proved to be eerily accurate. In my eyes, these two firms gained a ton of credibility here—not just because of how right they were, but because they were demonstrably willing to go against the consensus at risk of being deeply wrong in the same exact way once again. We can, in a sense, trust them to be brave.
However, it’s important to understand that the Times and Marist were both outliers in this regard. For every pollster like them, there were many nonpartisan firms that either didn’t participate in 2022 at all or only published a few surveys. Additionally, there are also quite a lot of nonpartisan pollsters who did participate in 2022, but ended up putting out results that were suspiciously in line with the red wave consensus, even if they weren’t quite as off as the partisan Republican firms. The Washington senate race from that year is a clear example of this. As shown in the linked Times article from 2022, nonpartisan pollsters spent most of the year showing the incumbent Democratic Senator, Patty Murray, up by about as much as she won by. But once Election Day got closer, GOP-aligned firms began polling the race and showing close margins, spurring narratives about the race as a “sleeper flip.” Following this, nonpartisan pollsters who surveyed the race suddenly started to find a far tighter contest. By the end, they, too, would show substantial movement away from the Senator, only finding her up by just over eight points. While it was far more accurate than the nearly-tied race presented by GOP firms, it was still a collective miss of six points. In reality, Murray won by nearly 15.
This phenomenon—wherein nonpartisan pollsters abruptly shifted at the end of the race to match “movement” that only existed in the world of media narratives and GOP-aligned polls —wasn’t just limited to Washington. In New Hampshire, the polls had the incumbent Democratic Senator, Maggie Hassan, up by roughly eight points at the start of October. By Election Day, they only had her up by two; in the end, she won by nine. The story was the same as in Washington: GOP-aligned firms started showing a close race near the end, and nonpartisan firms started playing copycat, presenting a race more Democratic than the results from partisan firms but more Republican than the actual results. It also happened in Michigan, just as it did in Arizona. Even in Pennsylvania, which has since been remembered as 2022’s definitive case of GOP zone flooding, much of Oz’s supposed late surge came as a result of pollsters with no connection to the GOP at all suddenly showing leads for him at the end of the race. Noticeably, this occurred just as political talk became dominated by talk of a Fetterman collapse after his debate against Oz.
The most charitable explanation for non-partisan pollsters here is this: that these final shifts represented real movement, but that these states were just tough places to poll, and that they had just been underestimating Democrats throughout. In Washington, for instance, this says that Murray would have “actually” been up by 20 points when nonpartisan pollsters found her up by 13, and that she fell to the margin she actually won by at the close of the election, when they observed her falling from +13 to +8. Quite convenient, but seemingly possible…until you look at the results for that year's Washington senate primary. In that blanket election, the combined vote of the Democratic Senate candidates beat out the combined vote of the Republican Senate candidates by just under 15 points, a margin practically identical to Murray’s ultimate margin of victory.
This, coupled with the fact that this phenomenon occurred in so many states always right after the beginning of pro-Republican media narratives, should raise some major suspicions at the bare minimum. At the very least, it shows that most nonpartisan pollsters haven’t earned the right to be trusted to be brave like the New York Times and Marists of the world. If they’ve shown us anything, it’s that they’re extremely susceptible to any signs—valid or not—that the GOP could be poised for an upset, and that they see pushing their numbers to the right to be erring on the side of caution. And if they’ve learned anything from 2022, it’s that there are no consequences for doing this. If the GOP ends up outperforming like the partisan polls and the media says they will, they end up being right. But if they don’t, even the biggest Democratic hacks in the world will lay all their blame on partisan “red wave pollsters,” while nonpartisan pollsters writ large will see a reputational boost courtesy of the few firms who were both a) willing to be bold and b) happened to be correct.
This is quite concerning for our specific moment: the end of a presidential election, when the risk of reputational damage is as high as can be and pro-GOP media narratives are in full swing. And it’s extremely concerning when absolutely nothing we’ve seen from the world of pollsters and elite pundits indicates that they’re willing to take any risks whatsoever this year.
…And What we Know is Happening now
For this section, two sources are indispensable: Nate Cohn’s two recent pieces about how pollsters have changed how they operate in 2024. They provide a lot of direct evidence for what was once mostly speculation, and they could very well prove to be a canary in the coal mine if the pollsters end up overestimating Trump this year. But they were not the inspiration for this piece. In fact, what inspired me to publish this article didn’t have anything to do with polls at all. It was when the Cook Political Report changed its rating of Pennsylvania’s Senate race from Leans Democratic to Toss Up, right after they did the same for the Senate race in Wisconsin.
To call these moves cowardly would be a disservice to cowards. They’re also nothing new for the post-2020 punditry world. Of the myriad of examples of their attempts at hedging and ass-covering, the most egregious by far is the one I mentioned at the beginning of this article: when Sabato’s Crystal Ball shifted two entire states towards Republicans so they could project the party as on track to being favored in the Senate while still deferring to Jon Ralston’s projection that Democrats would hold on in Nevada. It was a complete absurdity—a textbook example of coming to a conclusion first and then working backwards to justify it. And ever since the 2020 election, every forecaster and pundit has done essentially this, working overtime to provide ratings that are the best they can give for the GOP at any given moment.
Understanding this mindset is the only way to understand Cook’s latest moves. Rating those two states as tossups at the presidential level is one thing, but to do it at the Senate level is another thing entirely. These aren’t hypercompetitive races. They’re contests where the Democratic incumbents have held continuous leads ever since they’ve been polled. In Wisconsin, every single poll besides two conducted by GOP-leaning firms has shown a lead for Tammy Baldwin. Things are almost the exact same in Pennsylvania, where only two nonpartisan polls in the entire history of the race have shown anything other than a lead for Bob Casey. Averages currently show Casey up 4.5 points in his race and Baldwin up 3.7 points in hers, both practically identical to the leads currently held by Republican Senators Rick Scott in Florida and Ted Cruz in Texas, respectively.
This might lead one to believe that Cook also has the Texas and Florida races rated as tossups, but they don’t. Cruz’s race is currently ranked as Leans Republican on Cook, while Scott’s is ranked as Likely Republican. It’s a flagrant example of hedging. Unless Cook is willing to be consistent here, in which case their commentary would be so vague as to be useless, there is simply no empirical justification for these ratings other than a belief that the polls are very likely to be very wrong in a way that benefits Republicans. And in this case, you would need to put Trump down as a meaningful favorite to win Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which Cook doesn’t do. They just want to have their cake and eat it, too, by rating Democrats as low as possible while still providing enough wriggle room to say that they technically never forecasted a Trump win if he loses.
Cook may just be one publication, but their moves provide clear evidence that the elite political class is still well and truly obsessed with one thing: avoiding any overestimation of Democrats at all costs. Here, we don’t even need to speculate that this mindset may be impacting the polls, because we know with pretty strong certainty that it is. Case in point: the two aforementioned recent articles by Nate Cohn for the Times. His first piece, “Two Theories for Why the Polls Failed in 2020, and What It Means for 2024,” goes over the state of discourse among the polling world right now, showing how the industry is still utterly transfixed by its errors four years ago and and is desperate to avoid them once again. At the center of their fear is the supposed problem of nonresponse bias, wherein Trump’s support could be underestimated due to anti-Trump voters of all stripes being more likely to respond to polls than Trump voters. This was something that very much did happen in 2020, and it had a very big impact. But why it happened, and whether it will happen again now, is still far from clear.
Right now, there are two theories purporting to explain what happened four years ago. The first, and the most popular, is that this is simply a problem that’s endemic to polling now, at least whenever Trump is on the ballot. As this story goes, Trump’s unique strength among low-propensity, low-trust voters who pollsters find it very difficult to reach means that they will never be able to properly measure his support. The second and, in my opinion, most plausible explanation is that the fact that this happened in 2020 was mainly because of one big thing specific to 2020: the pandemic. It’s a known fact that lockdowns caused a substantial boost in response rates to pollsters once they began, which would have very obviously resulted in liberals being overrepresented in polling once COVID safety became yet another front on the culture war. This would logically stop being much of an issue once COVID ended, allowing the problem to essentially solve itself.
But even though this debate is hardly settled, it’s clear that pollsters have broadly chosen to err on the side of “caution” by assuming the first theory is true. In response, they have made major changes to the ways they conduct their surveys. According to Cohn in his follow-up article, many pollsters have dramatically changed their process for data collection with an eye on getting the highest possible response rates. Some have attempted to get these high response rates themselves by contacting voters by mail, sometimes providing monetary incentives for respondents. Others have outsourced their weighting to high-profile, high-response “benchmark surveys,” like the Pew National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS). Pew’s most recent survey found a R+2 advantage in public identification, and it has been this number that Cohn says many leading nonpartisan pollsters have used to determine the makeup of their surveys.
It’s an interesting experiment, but one that might have two major problems. The first is that the NPORS was released in July, meaning that it was conducted entirely while Biden was in the race. Knowing how much Biden was individually hurting Democratic chances, it’s entirely plausible that this benchmark number reflects a different political reality than what exists now and is artificially hurting Democratic numbers in the polls. Still, it’s possible that using this data might still be worth the risk if we had clear evidence showing that there’s a substantial risk that traditional data collection methods still have a nonresponse bias benefitting Democrats. This, however, gets us to our second problem: some recent data indicates that the opposite may be true. A recent report by the Polarization Research Lab using data from YouGov showed that the proportion of Republicans responding to their survey has gone up as the 2024 election has progressed. YouGov has rightfully responded to this by decreasing their weighting of Republicans in their survey while increasing their weighting of Democrats, which could fix this problem (as an aside, it’s worth noting that YouGov has been one of Kamala’s best pollsters the entire cycle). But if this is something happening industrywide, we have no idea if other pollsters are making the necessary efforts to adjust for it—and the rest of Cohn’s article gives us little reason to believe they might be taking the effort to do so.
Beyond the changes pollsters have made to their data collection processes, Cohn details that pollsters have also made a number of general changes that have the effect of moving numbers in Trump’s direction. The most impactful of these is the decision by many pollsters—two thirds of them, in Cohn’s estimate—to begin weighting polls by “recalled vote.” This is a tough decision to defend on the merits. Its main effect is to just flatly move the numbers in Trump’s direction, a result of the long-observed phenomenon of voters often misremembering who they voted for in the past and just saying that they backed the winner. It’s extremely possible that a sample that self-reports as having voted for Biden by, say, six points could be perfectly representative of the electorate, and that downweighing the sample to match the “real” margin of D+4.5 could just have the effect of giving Trump extra support unnecessarily. It’s not a practice with any track record of success—Cohn noted in an article earlier this month that “weighting on recalled vote would have made the polls less accurate in every election since 2004”—but this may be irrelevant to many nonpartisan pollsters.
Why so? The section at the end of Cohn’s article may give the game away. According to him, one of the major things that pollsters see hope in is the fact that Republican-aligned pollsters make up a higher proportion of polling averages this year than they did in 2020. This alarmed me more than anything else in the article, as there is not a single politically literate person on Earth who looks to Republican-aligned pollsters as a source of accuracy. Those pollsters are complete trash: often headed by election deniers, run as propaganda outlets, and regularly wrong by ridiculous margins. Such firms having a higher presence in the averages isn’t going to do a single thing to make polling more rigorous. All it will do is just move things towards Trump, and this looks to be exactly what many pollsters want.
Self-hating, scared of their own shadows, and liable to see a pro-Trump polling error of practically any size hiding in the bushes, they have made a close election a self-fulfilling prophecy. And even the tools we know they’re employing to shift things rightward might only scratch the surface of what they may be doing. As demonstrated by yet another Nate Cohn study from 2016, the different ways in which pollsters tinker with their results can result in the same exact raw data producing wildly different ultimate outcomes. We can only guess the extent to which they may be using these tools to move things further towards the risk-free, narrative-friendly results that so many of them loved producing in 2022.
What to Make of This
Of course, maybe this all just works out. Maybe what we’re seeing about Republican response rates increasing is just a fluke specific to YouGov’s surveys, that Pew’s survey from before Kamala’s entry still accurately reflects partisan leanings, and that all of this is helping us stop nonresponse bias. Maybe there are also further, as-of-now-unidentified causes of pro-Democratic survey error lurking out there, and that the extra tools that pollsters are now employing are also helping them stop that from ruining the averages. But we shouldn’t take this for granted, because there’s a real history of pollsters becoming too obsessed with their industry’s past blindspots, overcorrecting, and missing badly in the opposite direction. As noted by Nate Silver in a recent article, this happened quite noticeably in the 2017 U.K. election, when a country with a political culture long dominated by the idea of a “shy Tory vote” was just reeling from a 2015 election that saw the Conservatives underestimated in the polls. According to Silver, many pollsters in 2017 put their fingers on the scales to benefit the Tories, often using ad hoc methods to do so. It didn’t end up working out and only caused them to miss very real Labour strength. As a result, all major forecasters but one (the sole exception being YouGov, funnily enough) incorrectly projected a Conservative majority. Pollsters in the U.S. now are facing similar circumstances, harbor very similar self doubts, and are employing equally dubious methods to move their polls in the same direction. They could end up doing something quite similar in the end.
This leads me to my final question: what kind of raw data would pollsters need to start seeing in order to produce polls with a meaningful Kamala lead? They’re obviously very comfortable with producing polls that show her up narrowly with Trump within the margin of error, but what kind of responses would they need to show her up by more than that? It’s hard to think of what it might take as long as they’re capable of imagining a supposedly endemic nonresponse bias that could inaccurately boost her by any amount imaginable. Because of this, it’s entirely possible that they could be converting any dataset they’re presented with to a result within the “safe” band between R+3 and D+3. If Kamala ends up outperforming her polls in the end, we may very well look back on her lack of a surge after events that have historically corresponded with gains, like the DNC and her successful debate, to have been a sign that pollsters were erring on the side of cowardice. This election’s lack of practically any polling variance—something that stands in stark contrast to Trump’s prior elections, including his re-election campaign when Americans had supposedly made up their minds about him—will also stick out like a sore thumb, especially given that one of the major party candidates entered the race at a historically late date while lacking much of a profile to voters. One would think that this would result in a race with a lot of movement, but we’ve hardly seen any since August, around when Kamala started putting together leads close to what pollsters might consider to be safe no matter the result.
In this context, and in light of how many nonpartisan pollsters played me-too with GOP narratives at the close of the 2022 elections, who can we trust to be brave? There are the New York Times and Marist, but they are hardly infallible. While the Times’ eerily accurate closing Senate and House polls massively boosted their reputation in the aftermath of the 2022 election, it’s often forgotten that their final generic ballot poll overestimated Republicans by a few points, or that they editorialized against their own polls that went the furthest against the grain. Sticking by such results when they concern congressional district elections in Kansas is one thing, but it’s another thing entirely when it comes to things like the final poll of a presidential election with Trump on the ballot. Similarly, Marist was hardly free from error in 2022—they underestimated Colorado Senator Michael Bennet’s winning margin by eight points, for instance. They certainly have a degree of credibility that the Emersons of the world don’t have, but they’re not Gods. Even if they were, it’s just never going to be possible to model an entire election off of two pollsters, both of whom are subject to the same incentive structures that all the others are. Pay more attention to them if you please, but don’t expect them to give you a window into the “real” world that other nonpartisan pollsters aren’t showing you.
In any case, we’re well past the point where these decisions won’t have any impact. If they do end up working out and polling happens to be right, the industry will be changed forever, for better or for worse. But if they don’t end up working out, don’t expect it to come without any real-world consequences. We know with certainty now that Trump will declare himself the winner of the election no matter how the results go, and that he and his followers will seize on any bit of proof to claim that it was stolen. In 2020, they were fully willing to use trivia about bellwether counties and the predictive power of Ohio to back up their claim that Trump won. This time, they will be guaranteed to have an extensive list of pollsters showing Trump winning, very possibly for unjustifiably cowardly reasons. In their attempt to cover their own asses, these pollsters may end up giving ammunition to an even more dangerous and well-prepared election denial movement.
We don’t know what the consequences of this may be, but we do know one thing: that, if Kamala wins, Democrats will be too relieved to make fun of the pollsters who messed up. For some surveyors out there, that seems to be all that matters.
]]>On the night of October 1st, 2024, the establishment far right dared to dream once again.
It was hard to blame them for wanting some hope. Senator JD Vance was on TV that night, and they really, really wanted him to do well. He was what they had spent years upon years dreaming of: a young Midwesterner with a compelling background, none of Trump’s personal toxicity, and a stronger commitment to Trumpist ideology than the man himself. In Vance, those tens of millions of Americans supposedly crying out for Trumpism-without-Trump—the former president’s policies supported by someone other than the former president—seemed to have their man. But from the moment he began his political career, Vance had failed to live up to expectations at every single turn. From his disastrous inaugural electoral performance as the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio to his atrocious rollout as VP, Vance didn’t just fail to win over voters alienated by Trump. He failed to win over much of Trump’s existing base. Instead of inaugurating an entirely new era of politics, he floundered to such an extreme degree that the big man himself was forced to say that VPs don’t really matter only two weeks after his selection.
All of this makes it somewhat understandable that conservative commentators were so excited when he put together a serviceable performance during his debate against Tim Walz. It doesn’t explain them thirsting over him—nothing could ever do that—but it does help contextualize why they declared his showing to be “the best political debate performance we’ve ever seen.” They are incredibly, unbelievably desperate, and they are right to feel that way. For as bad as they are, Vance’s flops over the past few months are only the tip of the iceberg. From the primary race to Senate campaigns to the Vice Presidential nomination, Trump’s imitators have failed at practically every chance they’ve been given. At the same time, Donald Trump himself, the very man who they held personally responsible for all of their past electoral failures, has begun to look like something many never thought he would be: indispensable for the right.
It’s here, before any votes have been officially counted, where I am ready to make a bold declaration. For as much uncertainty as there is about the eventual result of this year’s election, we can already declare its biggest loser: those on the right who have hoped to have their cake and eat it, too, regarding Trumpism. Here’s how the right’s self-styled intellectual class misunderstood their own victories, sabotaged their own appeal, and left their party with a very bleak future regardless of who wins this year.
At its core, everything about the Trumpism-without-Trump ideology—from its genesis to its most basic tenets to its eventual struggles—comes from a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding is very dramatic, very long-running, and could have been completely avoided had those committed to the ideology been more consistent. This misunderstanding comes in two parts: the idea that every success Trump has had is a vindication of far-right politics, and the idea that every failure he has had is a result of his unique personal failings. Both of these ideas contain some truth to them, and neither are all that objectionable by themselves. But when put together in just the right way, they have proven capable of leading people very, very astray.
Let’s begin with the first idea: that Trump’s successes, however limited or extensive, represent popular approval for specific policies that he clearly represents. All else equal, there are some notable areas where this is, in fact, the case. Prior to Trump, it was taken for granted that the only way for a major American political party to survive was to show an openness to an immigration reform package that included at least some nods to undocumented migrants. Over the past decade, Trump has shown pretty clearly—although not without assistance from an inept opposition—that this is not the case, including among Latino voters. Trade, once practically a non-issue, has become a defining cause of both parties, which have both moved towards his protectionist vision. Even the general tone of political discourse has moved in his direction; since 2016, politicians on both sides of the aisle have adopted some aspects of his speaking style to look more “authentic” to voters.
These changes aren’t nothing, but they’re also a far cry from what the Trumpism-without-Trump–ers want them to be. You see, their vision has never been that someone with Trump’s exact approach, but without his unique problems, could dominate American politics. It is the idea that someone following their personal brand of socially conservative “populism,” which they have spent years convincing themselves and everyone around them is what Trump actually represents, would be set to dominate as long as they lacked the big man’s scandals and personal abrasiveness. It was here where those pushing this idea made their first big mistake. You see, for as much as the right did to convince themselves that voters in 2016 chose Trump with the hope that he would be an American Franco, there was never any proof that his success represented an appetite for far right social conservatism.
Among those who fully understood this at the time were many future Trumpism-without-Trumpites themselves. Back in 2015 and 2016, before Trump became the right’s God-King, many of the same exact people who would eventually be most excited about a socially conservative Trumpism-without-Trump–ist future were clocking Trump as everything but a committed right winger. These were the Ben Shapiros and JD Vances of the world, and they spent an entire year screaming at the top of their lungs that Trump was a closet liberal. As a young man by the name of Matt Walsh, then a writer at The Blaze, put it in his now-deleted article “Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear: I Will Never Vote For Donald Trump”:
Many people have asked me what I’ll do if — as is incredibly likely at this point — Trump tragically wins the nomination. Will I coalesce around the nominee and support “my” party, they wonder?
The answer is no. Also hell no. Also how dare you even ask me that?
I have spent months calling Trump what he is: a conman, a tyrant, a pathological liar, a flamboyant despot, a fraudster, a big government liberal, progressive in a very poorly fitting and unconvincing conservative costume, a Planned Parenthood apologist, an unrepentant philanderer, a crook, a creep, a fascist with a spray tan, a reality TV Mussolini, a Caligula with bad hair, etc.
How could I possibly vote for a guy who I’ve just described this way? How could I possibly unite around this man when I’ve spent months correctly observing the fact that he’s a scam artist who lies about everything, including his opposition to illegal immigration?
There are quite a lot of descriptions in that second paragraph, many of them belaying a strong disdain for Donald Trump personally. This recognition of how bad of a person Trump is is a very important part of this story and something we’ll get to later. But for now, I want to focus on a few of those descriptions in the middle: “big government liberal,” “progressive in a very poorly fitting and unconvincing conservative costume,” and “Planned Parenthood apologist.” Those were ideological attacks, not personal ones, and they showed a recognition of something very important: that Trump wasn’t all that easy to code ideologically in 2016. He was truly idiosyncratic in both his history and his positions, to such an extent that it easily explains Walsh's true main fear in the article: not that Trump would be a fascist despot, but that he might not appoint “Antonin Scalia 2.0” to the then-open seat on the Supreme Court.
But while such a possibility struck utter fear into the hearts of far-right commentators like Walsh, it piqued the interest of a lot of voters who hadn’t been interested in the GOP before. Buoyed by a Clinton campaign that chose to emphasize Trump not being a “traditional Republican,” he ended the election regarded as the least conservative Republican nominee in decades. All in all, it was an incredibly impressive form of ideological laundering, wherein voters were convinced to elect someone who actually had extensive connections to unpopular religious right organizations in the hope that he would represent a break from those exact groups. There was some real promise here, and embracing it never required people like Matt Walsh to reconsider and/or renounce their worldviews. All they had to do was just admit that Republican candidates who are seen as so idiosyncratic that it was not even clear what kind of judges they would nominate for the Supreme Court might be more effective than they believed, and that keeping up such appearances was a more than acceptable tradeoff for real, material conservative policy gains.
They refused to make even this basic compromise. When Trump won, the establishment far right would not recognize his victory in the terms they might have described it back in the primary: as a victory for moderate aesthetics and Trump’s own force of personality. Instead, they retconned it as a victory of their own exact strand of politics. Boosted by panic from liberals now convinced that they had permanently lost the culture war, they would make quick work in establishing this new narrative. The bones Trump threw to social conservatives, mocked by writers like Walsh as laughably untrustworthy attempts at pandering at the time, were recast as the principal reasons why voters fell behind him. His generally anti-PC attitude, which they once described as disgusting and rude, was now lauded as a new form of traditionalist signaling that won over what would eventually be described as “Barstool Conservatives.” In record time, the millions of voters who voted for the incoming President under the impression that he was a moderate were cast as foot soldiers on the side of traditionalism in a war against progressivism.
By the time Trump was inaugurated, the right’s understanding of politics was completely dominated by this class of figures who cared far more about making themselves feel comfortable and powerful than they did about actually understanding why Trump won. They ran his new administration in line with this misunderstanding of his appeal, and it sent the Trump train crashing into a brick wall.
To be certain, the original, 2016 version of Trump was hardly popular itself. He would have almost certainly lost in a landslide, perceived moderacy or no, had he not run against the one national Democrat in the country who was just as hated as him. But, with that said, his idiosyncrasies provided him with at least something of a salient appeal. Conversely, not only did the new, online, socially conservative version of him pushed forward by right-wing ideological warriors lack such an appeal, but the barely-concealed disdain that these former haters held for him would keep his administration from ever adjusting in response to anything. If their administration ever saw any successes, it was cast as proof of the strength of their own ideology. And if it ever saw any failures—and it saw plenty—they would just be implicitly blamed on Trump’s obvious ineptitude and stupidity, euphemistically referred to as his “polarizing nature.” To the extent they were willing to concede on anything relative to their old Reaganite beliefs, it was that committing to some form of “populism” was unavoidable, but they would still be quick to clarify that that never meant that they needed to give up on any of the socially conservative causes they really cared about. As Utah Senator Mike Lee put it in a 2019 National Review article, the way forward was “More Populist, More Conservative.”
Eventually, this endless feedback cycle of self-soothing was only ever going to lead them to one conclusion: to max out on ideological extremism while trying to find some way to dethrone Trump. Looking back at 2020, when Trump looked set to lose in a blowout, one can see some subtle signs that the conservative intellectual class was already working on constructing a narrative that would fully explain a decisive Trump defeat, cast him out into the political wilderness, and recommit the party to their new ideology in one fell swoop. In February of that year, no less than JD Vance himself, who had by now cast aside his past country club conservatism in favor of a new “right-wing populist” outlook, would tell a friend on Twitter that “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).” That June, he would send a message saying that he thought that “Trump will probably lose,” a loss he was no doubt planning to blame on Trump's lack of commitment to the ideology he and his fellow intellectuals had proclaimed the President a representative of.
Once the results came in, however, any such attempts at doing so would be rendered dead on arrival. Not only did Trump nearly win, but he would refuse to even admit that he even lost, freezing out any potential right-wing reckoning with his tenure before it even began. But after being caught off guard, right-wing intellectuals would evaluate the results in the only way they knew how: declaring them to be a resounding vindication of hard-right politics only sullied by Trump’s unique ineptitude. Their new hero would be Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a fellow former Reaganite-turned-Trumper who was putting together one of the few legitimately impressive electoral records of the Trump-era GOP. With him as their model, they would indulge themselves in the most extreme aspects of their ideology, from simple aesthetics to hard policy.
They only became more confident after Joe Biden’s popularity tanked in 2021. They became so confident, in fact, that they decided that they didn’t need to care all that much about the normal rules of politics at all. Unwilling to compromise by backing politicians with actual experience, they would run many of their own people as outright candidates in major 2022 elections. From Blake Masters, Peter Thiel’s right hand man, to Kari Lake, a former TV host made famous for her provocative social media posts, to, yes, JD Vance, they pulled the mask fully off. There was no subtext anymore—no attempt to launder their beliefs through appeals to experience or the strength of a larger-than-life personality. There was just the ideology—ideology presented in its purest, most unaltered form, red-faced rants about “childless cat ladies” and all. And now, with Trump out of office and a hated Democrat in the White House, there was nothing stopping the American people from rendering their full verdict on just what they thought about the GOP’s “more populist, more conservative” agenda.
Their verdict was that they fucking hated it.
You all know the story here. The unprecedented choke. The first opposition party to lose both Senate seats and governorships in a midterm since 1934. The pathetic single-digit flips in the House less than a year after party leaders were openly fantasizing about 60-seat gains. The only thing that kept it from being a true full-spectrum disaster was Ron DeSantis performing at about the same level as other popular incumbents, which they naturally decided made him—and, by extension, them—“DeFuture” of the entire Republican Party. Right after the results came in, the governor would be immediately lionized as the right’s chosen one, capable of finishing the job and relieving them of that meddlesome former President. Under him, Trumpism would finally be allowed to flourish without the cumbersome influence of Donald Trump.
Forming the core of early support for DeSantis in the media would be many of the same figures who had rejected Trump for being insufficiently conservative all those years ago, like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro. Coming along for the ride, and preventing the Florida governor’s campaign from just being a reunion tour for every conservative commentator with a past feud with Milo Yiannopoulos, would be many of the right’s newest stars and most recent converts. Elon Musk would get so close with DeSantis that the Florida Governor would choose to launch his campaign on Twitter itself. Chris Rufo, of “Critical Race Theory” fame, would become such a close ally that it would net him an appointment to the board of trustees of the New College of Florida. Even a few ride-or-die Trumpers from 2016 like Bill Mitchell would join the party. Different figures from different backgrounds all led by the same ideology to the same conclusion: that their brand of conservatism could not fail, but only be failed, and Trump had profoundly failed it.
At the time, it was very easy to see their logic, especially in light of DeSantis’ resounding re-election victory. Trump’s personal flaws were and are so overwhelmingly obvious that it was very easy to conclude that the particulars of his personality made him a uniquely weak candidate relative to more “normal” Republicans like DeSantis. But when looking at this analysis knowing what we know now, it starts to appear a little outdated. While Trump’s “Trumpiness”—the vulgarity, idiocy, corruption, and scandals unique to him personally—might have been an issue localized to him in 2016, quite a lot of time had passed since then. By establishing an iron grip over his party, he made it so that his personal problems now became problems for the party as a whole. Someone like Walsh or DeSantis may have been able to brush over something like the Access Hollywood tape or J6 as irrelevant, but to the voters who disliked Trump, they were gravely serious. And when they decided how to vote, they saw little distinction between a serial sexual abuser and election denier and the politicians around him also denying elections and enabling him at every turn.
In addition to this, it was also hardly clear that these scandals were even the biggest problem facing Trump and the GOP. While the transformation of the Republican Party into a cult of personality around Trump can make it difficult to tell when voters are reacting to their initiatives and when they are reacting to Trump personally, there were a number of polling trends during his presidency that stood out. Trump, by his own admission, had changed nothing about his personal behavior after his election as president. He stayed true to himself from Inauguration Day to J6, whether that entailed rants about “washed up psycho Bette Midler” or boasts about the size of his “nuclear button.” These constant controversies may have kept him consistently unpopular, but they were rarely ever the reasons why his numbers truly spiraled downwards when they did. Those moments came when Trump threw his biggest bones to social conservatives on the right. From the Muslim ban to the trans military ban to the government shutdown over the wall, Trump’s biggest losses, and lowest moments, came when he was most like Matt Walsh. Relative to that, practically any other course of action—up to and including him just acting like himself—proved to be more popular. Even if one couldn’t say that the ideology was a bigger problem than the man, it still seemed to be a pretty big problem—and one that the right-wing intelligentsia was totally unwilling to recognize as such.
In this light, the story of the DeSantis 2024 campaign turns from a near-inexplicable personal failure on the part of Ron Dion himself into something a lot more predictable. Convinced that just not being Trump would be enough for a significant proportion of Trump-skeptical voters to like him, he pushed forward with an uncompromising hard-right campaign and crashed straight into the electoral rocks. In this, I’m not just referring to his collapse in the Republican primary itself, even though it served as a very helpful illustration of how few voters were actually crying out for a more doctrinally pure form of Trumpism. I’m referring to how he came to be perceived at the national level. While his strong performance in Florida may have implied some kind of talent on his part at winning over Biden voters, this was nowhere in sight once he was exposed to the public at large. While he began his shadow campaign with net positive favorability as Americans saw him as a broadly more mainstream Republican alternative to Trump, he sank like a stone as soon as he began establishing himself as someone to Trump’s right.
By the time DeSantis launched his campaign, his approval rating was already in the net negatives. Less than a month later, his net negative favorability would climb into the double digits. By the time the Iowa caucuses finally arrived in January, his net favorability stood at -17—worse than both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Speaking of Biden, DeSantis regularly fared worse against him than Trump did by the end of the campaign in head-to-head matchups. And lest one think that this was just simply a consequence of DeSantis being indirectly tainted by Trump by virtue of him being a Republican, Nikki Haley provided clear proof otherwise. Despite being a former leading member of the Trump administration—notably unlike DeSantis—she still managed to demonstrate the crossover support that he never managed in poll after poll. You don’t need a PhD in political science to tell that this was clearly because she, as someone who at least attempted to present a moderate image, managed to represent at least something of a break from the status quo, which DeSantis and his threats to “slit throats” if elected utterly failed to.
DeSantis would officially end his campaign on January 21st, 2024, six days after his blowout loss in the Iowa caucus, but his failures would only represent the beginning of the struggles faced by Republicans named something other than “Donald Trump” in the 2024 election. Around this stage of the race, a curious trend would start occurring in statewide polling. At the same time that Trump was managing the first-ever consistent national and swing state leads of his career, down ballot Republicans were trailing him by substantial margins.
It was, and is, a major break from history. During Trump’s first two elections, he underran the national performances of House Republicans both times and rarely ever outperformed any of his party’s Senate candidates. This year has seen a complete inversion of that. Whether they be products of the McConnell machine like Sam Brown and David McCormick or dyed-in-the-wool MAGA fanatics like Kari Lake and Bernie Moreno, right-wing Republican Senate candidates have badly trailed the top of the ticket for the entirety of this election cycle. Across the entire country, the only Republican Senate candidate to consistently and meaningfully outrun the top of the ticket has been Larry Hogan in Maryland, who has not coincidentally taken great pains to present himself as a moderate. Not only is it now hard to find proof for the idea that Trump is weaker in comparison to other Republicans with his same beliefs, but there’s a mountain of examples implying that the exact opposite is true.
There is, of course, one substantial difference in the circumstances facing Trump and those facing his ideological imitators running for Senate. While his down ballot copartisans have been forced to face off top Democratic recruits and entrenched, well-liked incumbents, Trump has had the substantial fortune of being able to run directly against the deeply unpopular Biden administration. As such, the million dollar question of this election is this: how much is this overperformance due to him simply facing weaker competition, and how much of it is due to Trump’s own, possibly underappreciated strengths?
Back when Biden was in the race, my impression was that this was almost, if not entirely, because of problems in candidate quality on the Democratic side. Biden’s flaws were just so obvious, and Trump’s past history was so weak, that the idea that the President’s poor numbers were a result of anything other than his own unique issues seemed laughable. For more than a year, I was firm in my belief that Trump was not a candidate to be feared, and that Democrats could replicate the success they were consistently seeing against his acolytes just by running someone who wasn’t older than time and representing an administration regarded by the public to be a failure. Polling consistently backed me up. In some of the same exact surveys that showed Trump leading Biden nationally and in key swing states, the same exact respondents repeatedly chose non-Biden Democratic alternatives over Trump, whether they be popular local governors like Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro or just the idea of a “generic Democrat.”
This belief was vindicated, at least in part, when Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee after Biden’s polling became unsustainable. Despite entering the race on the heels of what was arguably the best news cycle of Trump’s entire career, she managed to vault back into contention within a matter of days, clearly just by virtue of not being Joe Biden. But while it may have appeared at some points that she was on track to a substantial lead, her numbers have largely stalled since her first burst of support in August, leaving her still well behind many other Democrats running for statewide office this year. Some or maybe even most of this may be because of candidate quality issues on her end. She is in the Biden administration, after all, and I had raised concerns about her lack of electoral experience well before her candidacy began. But at this point, just this one factor can’t be the entire story, especially when hypothetical matchups between Kamala and Vance have shown the Vice President running ahead by comical margins.
(For reference: In their most recent survey this September, the progressive firm Clarity Campaign Labs found Kamala Harris leading Trump by seven points. At the same time, they also found Vance losing to her by 21 points among the same exact respondents. Here’s roughly what the national map would look like if this result came to pass:)
Given that the Democratic candidate in both of these matchups was the same, this sort of result makes it clear that there’s something about Trump that makes him more appealing—perhaps even substantially more appealing—than the likes of JD Vance, who, again, were thought to be set to do far better than Trump by virtue of not being him. There are a lot of possible reasons for this, but the most important one is probably the simplest one: experience. A huge thing that makes Trump’s run this year very different from his run in 2016 is that he actually has a track record in elected office now. It’s not the most popular track record—if it was, he wouldn’t be a one-termer—but it’s still a track record nonetheless. It provides him with an air of legitimacy that was simply missing in 2016 and, crucially, removes the fear of the unknown that played a huge role in how voters evaluated him back then. Below, a series of character attribute polling by Gallup shows how things have changed.
Across all three of Trump’s elections, hardly anybody has changed their minds about him personally. The number of people who regard him as trustworthy is identical to what it was in 2020 and practically identical to what it was in 2016. His personal likability remains just as low as it was in 2020, which means it’s still his lowest attribute. Although it wasn’t surveyed in 2016, it’s not hard to imagine that it was quite low then, too. But what has changed since then—and what might make him less of the complete political albatross he’s longed been assumed to be—are perceptions about his competency. Most notably, his rating on managing the government effectively was very low back in 2016, hardly any better than ratings of his personality. Now, it’s outright majority positive. People are even more likely to believe that he would display good judgment in a crisis compared to 2020.
As shown above, these advantages are especially potent in comparison to his Biden administration opposition. While she wins on personality, Kamala holds no advantage relative to Trump on the question of managing the government—a stark contrast to both the Biden and Clinton campaigns, which put their supposed experience and steadiness at the center of their appeals. She loses slightly when it comes to displaying good judgment in a crisis and having a vision for the future, even if majorities rate her positively on both questions individually, and loses decisively when it comes to being a strong leader and getting things done. While the overall picture this paints of Trump is still one of a weak politician—losing as badly on personality as he does is no small thing—it’s also not a portrait of a politician who is so thoroughly bad that literally any alternative will be better.
(As an aside, the establishment far right can take credit for one thing: granting Trump his sole deterioration relative to his past runs in Gallup’s entire survey. While an unearned reputation as a moderate was arguably Trump’s biggest asset in 2016, the Trump of 2024 was more likely to be rated as “too conservative” than any other Republican nominee this century.)
So, what does the future look like for those planning for a far-right Republican Party after Trump? As much as I would like to say that they’re screwed no matter what, there are a number of paths forward for them that would bring an immediate improvement compared to the status quo. The most obvious and potentially foolproof route here is to just make practically any effort whatsoever to come across as moderate instead of constantly indulging their ideological impulses. Although they may refuse to hear it, Nikki Haley actually provides a great model for this. Every single aspect of her supposed moderation during her run in 2024 was completely superficial. In some cases, her policies and rhetoric were even more deranged than the things that came from the Trump and DeSantis camps, like when she said that rising rates of suicidal ideation among teen girls was because they had to interact with trans children. But none of that ever stopped voters from seeing her as moderate because she was successful at coating beliefs like those with an appealing sheen—a basic political art that the far right seems to believe that it is above engaging in.
If this basic compromise is unacceptable to them, then the next obvious step forward is to stop running used car salesmen and millennial Peter Thiel associates and start backing candidates with enough experience that their presence on a ballot isn’t immediately alarming to people. This shouldn’t be too hard to do in theory, especially for a movement that just controlled the White House, but stands to be a bit tricky for them now with how enamored the base itself is with “outsider” candidates like Dr. Oz and Bernie Moreno. Compounding this is the fact that the hard right hardly has a bench of credible politicians to pivot to even if it wanted to. The near-unprecedented rates of turnover in the Trump administration made it so that it completely failed to serve as an incubator for political talent in the way that past administrations have. There’s not even the bare minimum of a Vice President to rally around after they tried to kill their last one. Some popular, experienced options like Brian Kemp and Glenn Youngkin exist at the statewide level, but it’s always worth remembering that DeSantis was once that too, and that none of his supposed appeal survived contact with the public once he made his belief system clear. It’s possible that things could go differently in the future if they make any effort at hiding that said belief system, but that gets you back to the question of superficial moderation, which puts you back to square one.
In the end, the ultimate irony of this saga is that it’s a result of perhaps the most human and understandable characteristic of much of the far right media and political world: their latent hatred towards Trump. Everything that Matt Walsh said about his character eight years ago was correct, and they were largely right in understanding him as an electoral liability. But in order to give themselves as much credit as humanly possible for everything he accomplished, they oversimplified his political story to the point of parody, completely misunderstood his appeal, and sent themselves running straight into an electoral woodchipper. And even as reality makes itself clear time and time again, they choose the impossible task of convincing themselves that JD Vance is actually a powerhouse every single day over admitting to it. They are truly and utterly lost at sea, and nobody deserves it more than them.
]]>For around two weeks in August, there was a real sense of possibility about the 2024 election. By that point, Kamala Harris had taken a Democratic presidential effort that was set to lose in a landslide and completely revived it, bringing it not just into contention but to a lead. When choosing her VP, she passed over the safe centrist option to pick Tim Walz, the most progressively-minded choice on her shortlist. Most encouragingly, this was reportedly because his liberal policy accomplishments represented what she aimed to achieve during her presidency, making it seem as if she was set to run the kind of assertive campaign that we never got with Biden and his rants about Finland and AUKUS. And with the DNC and a September debate looming as prime opportunities for her to make further good impressions, the sky seemed to be the limit.
It feels like a lifetime ago. While it wouldn’t be correct to say that things have exactly gone wrong since then, it also wouldn’t be correct to say that things have gone right, either. Despite all of the things that have happened in the race and around the world over the past two months, Kamala hasn’t grown at all compared to where she was in August—something that has suspiciously corresponded with her throwing out her early messaging and switching tracks to run a campaign that could be generously described as a cruel parody of Clintonism. The race is as close as it’s ever been, which is to say that it’s far too close for comfort. All in all, the situation is about the worst it could be without an outright Trump lead: one in which the average daily news cycle consists of Kamala declaring that the Cheney family is “brat”1 followed by the release of a set of polls showing every swing state within the margin of error.
It’s not fun. Even if you try, it’s hard not to feel the same feeling that many others felt in the final stages of the 2016 election. That the people who swear that they know so much better than everyone else don’t know what they’re doing. That there’s something horrible lurking just around the corner. That, despite everything, the horror of a Trump win is simply inevitable. In short, it’s hard not to doom. I understand the impulse, but I’m also here to tell you that there’s no need to resign oneself to despair or panic. Here’s what to keep in mind so you can follow the rest of the 2024 election without going insane.
Some Bad Polls are to be Expected…
To start off, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the inspiration for this article: Quinnipiac University’s survey of the big three Great Lakes swing states from earlier this week. As easy as it might be to just tut-tut people for overreacting to “just one poll,” I wouldn’t be honest if I said I didn’t understand why the surveys received the reaction that they did. For the past number of months, the media adopted a very simple—even over simplistic—view of how the 2024 race stood. Looking at consistent (if not at all safe) Trump leads in the Sun Belt, along with consistent (if, again, not at all safe) Kamala leads in Wisconsin and Michigan, they declared that Pennsylvania would be THE state to decide the 2024 election. A convoy of accredited pollsters descended on the state following the debate around mid-September, and their findings weren’t all that bad. At best, they found the Vice President leading by a meaningful margin; at worst, they just found the race tied.
It was a very solid sign for her, but not quite solid enough to provide a reason to think that her advantage in Pennsylvania or other similar states, like Wisconsin and Michigan, was large enough as to put Trump totally out of contention. Case in point: the Quinnipiac polls. While the result they had in Pennsylvania—D+3—was actually pretty solid for Kamala, their numbers in Wisconsin and Michigan weren’t nearly as sunny. They had Trump ahead in both states by two and three points respectively, appearing to turn the Great Lakes pathway to the White House from a solid shot to a frustrating game of whack-a-mole. Particularly frustrating to many were the results in the Arab-heavy Michigan, where it seemed that Kamala’s baffling insistence on sticking with Netanyahu’s fascist government, already so frustrating by itself, might be costing her the election outright.
So, what do these polls mean? Do they put a hole in the argument that I made last month and have promoted quite a lot since: that the election is not a tossup, but one where Kamala holds a meaningful advantage? Well, they certainly don’t help it, but they aren’t entirely incongruent with it, either. The core argument to trust Democratic strength in the Great Lakes swing states wasn’t that Kamala, or even Democrats at large, held truly overwhelming advantages in them. It was that essentially all of the predictive indicators we have have pointed to them being ahead in such states, even if only by a few points. That consistency means that you should be reasonably confident in Democratic strength in such areas, while that narrowness means that you should entirely expect at least some polls showing Trump ahead in these states, especially if pollsters are being honest.
That’s just the nature of probability distribution. If Kamala is up by, say, two points in a state like Michigan in reality, as predictive indicators imply, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility for a poll out there to find her trailing by two, just as it’s also likely that they’ll find her up by six (interestingly enough, Quinnipiac’s poll of the Badger State found her up by almost that exact amount back in September). This was something we saw repeatedly back in the 2022 midterms among nonpartisan pollsters. For a few examples of this:
Just prior to the Pennsylvania Senate race, which Democrats won by five, both Susquehanna and Emerson found Dr. Oz leading by one.
In Nevada’s Senate race, which Democrats won by just under a point, Emerson found the Republican leading by five, while Susquehanna found him leading by six.
In Wisconsin’s gubernatorial election, which Democrats won by just over three points, Marquette and Fox News found the Republican leading by one point, while Emerson found him leading by two.
In Arizona’s Senate race, which Democrats won by five, Emerson found the race tied, while Fox News found Democrats leading by only two. DataForProgress, a Democratic-aligned firm, found Blake Masters outright leading in their final poll.
Recent highly rated national polls have also shown similar variation. This Sunday, ABC and NBC released national polls showing Kamala up by two points and tied, respectively. Both represented a shift to Trump compared to the immediate post-debate polls by both networks, which found the Vice President leading by six and five points, also respectively. You could see this as a cause for panic if you want, or you could also just see it as the kind of random variation you’d expect for a race where Kamala is up by ~3 points and pollsters are being honest about their results. I personally find the latter explanation to be far more convincing than the idea that the race is suddenly spiraling out of control. Part of this is just a subjective judgment—I personally find it hard to tell what might have happened over the past month to cause such a dramatic shift—but it’s also because the idea that these shifts are just noise is congruent with a lot of the other polls that we have seen.
Take, for instance, the New York Times/Siena survey, which most recently found a Kamala+4 result. Their poll immediately after the debate, conducted at the same time that ABC and NBC found solid Democratic leads, had the race tied. Or the poll by CBS, which found a Kamala+4 race in September and a Kamala+3 race in October. Or even the poll by Scott Rasmussen’s RMG Research, which had a Kamala+2 result after the debate and a Kamala+3 result earlier this week. Altogether, this shows:
One poll with movement towards Kamala (NYT)
Two polls with practically no movement (CBS and RMG Research)
Two polls with movement towards Trump (NBC and ABC)
As individual data points, all of these surveys tell vastly different stories, from a Kamala surge to a Kamala collapse to a race that has held completely steady. But when they’re put together, they show us a race that’s essentially identical to the one we’ve seen since August and has been foreshadowed by predictive indicators for months: a narrow and consistent, if not overwhelming, Democratic advantage. To the extent you can draw a pessimistic conclusion from this, it’s that nothing really seems to be indicating a Kamala landslide right now, although that has been reasonably clear ever since the DNC and the debates failed to result in a boost for her.
…Especially with the Current Incentive Structure
Some readers looking at my overview of the distribution of polls during the 2022 midterms might have noticed something curious: while I provided a lot of examples of variation that swung in the Republican direction, I didn’t provide any examples of variation that swung in the Democratic direction—i.e., a poll of the PA or AZ Senate races showing the party up by eight or nine. Statistically speaking, you would expect these sorts of surveys to occur exactly as often as the surveys that showed those races tied. But I didn’t include surveys like those because I just forgot about them—I didn’t include them because they practically don’t exist.
Across the board, the best nonpartisan polls for Democrats in any given race showed them leading by roughly what they actually ended up winning by, while the worst showed them doing somewhere between one and five or so points worse than they actually did. The polls you would expect to see on the other side of that spectrum, showing them doing somewhere between one and five points or so better than they actually did, just weren’t there. This wouldn’t be noteworthy if it was just one race in just one year, but it was in practically every race in 2022. A knife that is supposed to cut both ways was only cutting one way, and it had the effect of skewing even nonpartisan averages that totally ignored right-wing pollsters to the right.
The reason for this is likely a very simple one: reputational incentives. The back-to-back overestimations of Democrats in 2016 and 2020 didn’t just embarrass pollsters and forecasters. It led to what was widely described as an existential crisis for the entire industry, with many wondering if it was capable of surviving in the long term. This created a very clear incentive for them to avoid overestimating Democrats in 2022, which it appears that they acted upon. This reputational management is not at all unheard of from pollsters, who are well known to prefer to err on the side of caution through practices like herding. And when you start to consider that “erring on the side of caution” might mean “getting more Republican-leaning results” in a post-2022 world, a lot of the mysteries in polling that year suddenly make a lot of sense.
(Also worth noting is that this effect was mysteriously absent following the midterms, when pundits were no longer pushing the idea of an imminent red wave. While few nonpartisan polls in the general election for Georgia’s Senate race showed pro-Warnock outliers—only SurveyUSA was brave enough to publish a result showing him up by six on November 2nd—things immediately changed once the race went to a runoff that Warnock was seen as a strong favorite to win. Despite the attitudes of the electorate being practically unchanged relative to November, every pollster surveying the race found the Senator to be in the lead, often by a larger margin than what he actually won by—a stark contrast to the polls of the race conducted just a month prior. Even the high schoolers at Patriot Patriot Polling found him up by two.)
What’s most glaring about this for the 2024 race is the fact that this gambit worked. Absent a few articles in the New York Times, there were practically no consequences for even the most flagrantly biased partisan Republican firms overestimating their party that year, to say nothing of nonpartisan pollsters who might have chosen to herd their results to be a bit more cautious. It’s easy to imagine that this could have served as something of an all-clear sign for pollsters of all kinds that they were and are better off prioritizing more Republican-leaning results at the expense of all else—even getting the most accurate results possible.
Now, with Trump on the ballot and the election looming closer and closer, no firms have any incentive to be the one to put out that outlier showing the big Kamala lead. Conversely, there’s every incentive in the world to put out that outlier showing a big Trump lead or a big shift in his favor. If it’s right, you look amazing. If it’s wrong, both liberals and conservatives will be too busy fainting from relief and rioting, respectively, to care. In light of this, it’s very easy to imagine the next few weeks being something of a perfect storm—one in which nonpartisan firms herd their strong polls for Kamala at the same time that right-wing GQP firms go full throttle in flooding the zone like they did at the end of 2022.
Perhaps this could represent the long-feared last-minute Trump surge that puts him back in the White House. Or it could represent something a lot simpler: polling firms responding to a moronic media environment in a way that benefits them the most while throwing their integrity by the wayside. It might be a mystery, but it also might not. We have, after all, seen this exact movie before.
I wrote this initially as an absurd hypothetical before Senator Amy Klobuchar said it nearly verbatim this morning.
Just a few short years ago, right-wing “election analysts” could be somewhat hard to find. Those who weren’t outright banned from mainstream social networks (on account of their racism and extremism) were rarely ever promoted by mainstream analysts (on account of their ineptitude). To read what they were saying, you had to go really far out of your way to find their habitats on gambling websites and the most recent mirrors for r/The_Donald. There, and only there, could you watch RacismElections and YeatGroyper try to argue that Dr. Oz was on track to win and then watch them fall into hilarious despondency when proven wrong once again.
This year, things have changed. Due to the changes made to Twitter since it was purchased by Elon Musk, these electorally illiterate election obsessives aren’t just back on the platform. They’re on the front page. And while one might think these people would be satisfied with the mainstream consensus that the race is a tossup—something that gives Trump far better odds from pundits than he ever saw in 2016 or 2020—they aren’t. Not even close. After Kamala’s entry into the race deprived them of the cakewalk that they were sure was coming after the failed assassination attempt against Trump, they have worked night and day to smugly argue (and convince themselves) that their long-awaited landslide is still coming.
These figures have become more than just simply annoying as of late. Now that they are armed with years of battle-tested cope, endless confidence, and some semi-decent polling data, they can easily come across as convincing at first glance. In the context of a race that is, on paper, the closest in modern history, I can very much imagine liberals and leftists out there losing some sleep over these talking points being plastered all over their feeds all day. I, for one, will not stand for this. In this article, I will take down the worst right-wing pre-election analysis point by point to prove that, despite what they say, this election is still what I said it was last month: a close race, but one that has a meaningful Democratic edge.
Arguments that claim that the polling data we see corresponds with an imminent Trump victory.
After years of simply ignoring polling numbers that said things other than what they wanted to hear, right-wingers entered 2024 in a very new position. Across the board, the same exact firms that they had long denounced as irredeemably biased towards liberals were now putting out numbers showing Trump up, sometimes even solidly. They didn’t need to unskew any polls or make any claims about silent Trump voters to argue that they were actually ahead—it was right there on the tin. Over the course of the year, they came to slowly love this industry that they had once spurned, gleefully talking up the latest New York Times surveys and election models showing their guy ahead. It was like watching a bizarro version of liberals from 2016, if without the built-in neuroticism that every Democratic voter seems to have.
Sadly, this era of right wing Nate Silver fandom would not last. Soon after Biden exited the race, the polls quickly began showing a more competitive contest. While they still had Trump well and truly in the running, they also found him a far cry away from the dominant position he held that summer. In response, most right wingers have taken this as proof that the polls have once again become biased against them. Still, some others—likely addicted to the pollercoaster after months of riding its highs—haven’t been willing to give up surveys to validate their feelings so easily. Since around August, these people have been working tirelessly to square the circle between trusting the data and declaring Kamala Harris doomed.
Let’s tackle their biggest claim. If you ask your average confident semi-data-literate right-winger out there why they feel so good about Trump’s chances, they’re certain to tell you a simple—and seemingly convincing—story. Yes, they will say, the current data has Kamala up over Trump in 270 electoral votes worth of states. But while one might think that this means that the race is a tossup-at-worst for her, it actually means that she is on track for a solid loss. As they put it, narrow leads in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are not nearly enough for Democrats to be on track to win, as they are not large enough to survive the pro-Trump polling error that they say will inevitably come this year.
To their very limited credit, the polling errors they’re talking about did happen in the past, and the numbers aren’t exactly small. In Wisconsin, for instance, Hillary Clinton finished the campaign up in the polls by nearly seven points. Biden, for his part, led by more than eight. But when the results came in, Biden only won the Badger State by less than a point while Hillary lost it outright. Those are back-to-back errors in the high single digits, with the same Republican candidate on the ballot benefitting massively both times. And now, with only weeks before the election, Kamala Harris leads in all three states by around only one point. Those numbers are hardly enough to put her in the lead as it stands, and they aren’t even close to enough to survive a pro-Trump polling error even just a fraction the size of what he benefited from in the past two elections. Does she have any hope at all?
The answer is yes—not because these polling errors didn’t happen in the past, but because the right is wrong about what their cause was. At the core of their argument, the right takes it for granted that the reason that the polls underestimate Trump’s support in both years is because they were measuring, well, Trump’s support. As their mythology puts it, Trump is able to activate a mysterious, forgotten kind of voter that the lamestream media is incapable of recognizing and picking up on. Since he is now on the ballot once again, they say, this factor will happen once again, and he will win easily. But not only is this explanation overly simplistic, it misses the entire story of why the polls were off in 2016 and 2020. In both of those years, the polls mainly erred for specific reasons that don’t apply to 2024.
In 2016, this was because most pollsters didn’t weigh their findings by education, which caused them to badly underestimate the share of voters without a college degree, who backed Trump by large margins. They fixed that immediately afterwards, but then were hit with something entirely new in 2020: a major nonresponse bias that favored Democrats, far beyond anything seen in presidential elections before. Biden voters of all kinds, whether they be Black or white, educated or uneducated, Democrat or Republican, responded to pollsters at far higher rates than their Trump-voting counterparts. This did a great deal to shift the polls to the left, and, most alarmingly at the time, was something that is very hard for pollsters to account for in comparison to simply weighting demographic subgroups properly. Even the pollsters that nailed the number of Republicans in the electorate down perfectly still ended up overestimating Biden because the Republicans willing to pick up their phones and talk to them were more pro-Biden than Republicans in reality.
Since it wasn’t entirely clear why this was the case, the polling industry entered an existential crisis even deeper than what they went through after 2016. The big fear—and the potential mortal threat to the entire industry—was that they had got that year wrong for the reasons Republicans said: they were simply incapable of measuring the strength of his silent majority. Pessimistic theories about how Trump, through his sheer divisiveness, had rendered conservatives so conspiratorial and distrustful of authority that pollsters were simply never going to reach his base, at least not while he was still on the ballot. To this day, more literate right-wingers and pessimistic liberals still cite these ideas to argue that Trump is solidly on track to win.
It’s a compelling idea on paper. It’s also one that, quite ironically, betrays a very coastal, blue state perspective while claiming to truly understand Middle America. At its core, it assumes that Trumpism represents an exceptional break from the conservatism of past decades, which those of us living in traditionally red states know he just is not. Go back as far as Spiro Agnew whining about an “effete corps of impudent snobs,” or as recently as recently as John McCain claiming that ACORN was stealing the election during a debate, and you will see a movement that has far more continuities with Trumpism than anything else. And even if one is too dedicated to the idea of a lost Good GOP to believe this, they also need to contend with the fact that this theory also posits that there was a substantial difference between the Trump of 2020 and the Trump of 2016, when the polls suffered from improper weighting but weren’t hit by a historic nonresponse bias (even though Trump was on the ballot).
If you want, you can contort yourself into knots arguing that Trump’s tenure as president did something to make the Republican base behave fundamentally differently in response to pollsters than they did four years prior, that this effect is intrinsic to him, and that it will ruin polls for as long as he is on the ballot.
Or, on the other hand, you can point to the obvious thing that made 2020 exceptional: the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is the simplest explanation for why the polls in 2020 had such an intense, pro-Democratic nonresponse bias, as well as the biggest reason to believe that the polls were basically fine now. The story here is very simple: in response to COVID, Biden-friendly voters cooped up in their homes, while Trump-friendly voters went out and about with their normal lives. This made Biden-friendly voters very bored, so they became far more likely to pick up the phone and respond to pollsters compared to how they may have been otherwise—something that pollsters themselves noted very early on during the pandemic. This problem was very big and probably impossible for pollsters to have avoided at the time, but it was also, crucially, a time-limited one. The causal factor here wasn’t Trump and whatever he may or not have done to the social fabric. It was a pandemic—one that would eventually go away, and, indeed, has.
With pollsters now weighting by education, unlike 2016, and no longer confronted with a once-in-a-generation health crisis, unlike 2020, there is no reason to think that the polls should be underestimating Trump this year. They won’t be perfect, but they should be basically fine. Polling in 2022, the first cycle after the pandemic, was generally very accurate, and although some analysis took extensive efforts to find a Democratic-leaning nonresponse bias that survived the lockdowns, they weren’t able to find it. Case in point: in 2022, the New York Times conducted an expensive survey in which they conducted two polls: one done normally, and another done through mail, with the mail survey including a $5 bill and a promise of an additional $20 if the recipient gave a response. This promise of money resulted in a response rate of 30%, a gargantuan increase from the usual 1% response rate that polls get when they aren’t bribing voters. But while the promise of money netted a response group marginally more asocial in some areas than those who responded to surveys for free, the two different groups gave almost identical results when asked about statewide races.
While this is just one experiment, it fits within a far larger trend. Across this entire election cycle, none of the usual warning signs that served as indicators that the polls might be off in 2016 and 2020 have shown anything alarming so far. Special election results are largely in line with what we are seeing in the polling, unlike 2020. The Washington primary has come and gone with results that show a national Democratic advantage in line with the polls, again unlike 2020. Polls in states that have seen smaller polling errors in years past, like Georgia, are entirely in line with a close race nationally—again, just like the polls in Midwestern states are saying, which, again, was not the case in 2020. This doesn’t mean that Trump won’t be underestimated this year, but it also doesn’t mean that he’s any more likely to benefit from an error than Kamala Harris. Polling data should be understood accordingly.
Arguments that shifts in party registration favoring Republicans represent an imminent Trump victory. AKA: Scott Presler slop.
My heart!
When Elon Musk took the stage at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania earlier this week, he didn’t come alone as the sole guest. Speaking on that stage before him, and giving the Technoking himself a run for his money when it comes to scamming credulous right-wing internet users for everything they’re worth, was a man by the name of Scott Presler. Scott, for those unfamiliar with him, is one of the few great minds left in the world of right wing politics. This isn’t because he’s particularly good at anything he does, but because of his complete mastery of taking credit for things he has had absolutely nothing to do with. In 2016, he first made his mark by stepping ahead of Fox News and the Benghazi committee and claiming that he, and he alone, was the one to drive Hillary Clinton’s favorables into the ground. In the years since, he attempted time and time again to replicate this coup.
Sometimes, like when he attempted to take credit for what he thought would be a Republican victory in the 2018 midterms (this is where “The Persistence” comes from—it was supposed to defeat The Resistance), this hasn’t gone well. Other times, like when he took credit for Liz Cheney’s defeat in her 2022 primary, it worked out better for him. But of all of his past wins and losses, none have had quite the impact of his biggest grift of all: his ongoing attempts to highlight, and take personal credit for, Republican gains in voter registration, specifically in the state of Pennsylvania. Just a quick look at his feed is enough to make any well-meaning liberals sink into a deep panic. In post after post, he shows Republicans making substantial gains in voter registration all across the Keystone State, whether it in the state as a whole or in specific key counties. But while his persistence in making these posts over and over again has been enough for him to gain a cult following among grassroots Republicans angry at party leadership after countless losses, they don’t exactly mean what he implies.
Certainly, one would rather have their party be the one to have the most registered voters possible, all else equal. But in most instances, the year-by-year shifts in registration are not going to tell you much about how states will shift year-by-year, because there is a very, very big difference between on-paper partisan registration and how people actually vote. As one might expect, people don’t update their voter registration every time they personally shift between parties or views, which means that on-paper registration often mostly serves as a time capsule of how people—and even entire states—thought, and voted, in years past, not now.
For one extreme example of this, look at the state of Louisiana, which currently has plurality Democratic voter registration. This doesn’t reflect the political reality of Louisiana now, but the political reality of the Louisiana of the past, when it still voted for Democrats like Carter and Clinton. Similarly, Republican gains in voter registration in the state don’t reflect trends of the future, but shifts of the past that happened as far back as 2000. Republican gains in Pennsylvania can be understood similarly: it used to be a left-leaning state, currently reflected in the state’s plurality Democratic voter registration, but moved to the right by quite a bit in the 2010s, which is reflected through current Republican gains.
Is this good for Democrats? No. But to the extent that it’s bad news, it’s bad news we’ve already long been aware of. Everything these shifts reflect, from the more specific phenomenon of ancestrally Democratic conservative voters finally fully abandoning the Democrats to broader national trends of decreasing identification with the party, have been known for quite some time. They also haven’t prevented Kamala from managing to contend or Democrats more broadly from excelling. Even the story in fast-growing Sun Belt states, where new registrations represent new arrivals and potentially new trends isn’t entirely clear-cut. While massive Republican registration gains in Florida have corresponded with the state becoming deeply Republican, gains by the party in Arizona and Nevada haven’t corresponded with either state becoming solidly red.
However: even though this is all very give-or-take and doesn’t really mean much, don’t let the right know it. The way things are going, we’re probably two election cycles away from Presler being named RNC Chair, and I really need that for him.
Arguments that early voting numbers seen so far prove that an imminent Trump victory is coming.
This section was a bit more relevant last month, when some idiosyncrasies with early voting in Virginia (i.e. one county only having one early voting location each) made it appear that Democratic turnout in the state was depressed. They’ve been bragging about the data we’ve seen a bit less now since the turnout patterns in Pennsylvania and Michigan haven’t shown any warning signs for Democrats, but, either way, it doesn’t mean much. Due to 2020 being a pandemic year and 2018 and 2022 being midterms, we simply do not know what good or bad early voting numbers look like. It’s possible to get a general sense of whether or not things are broadly good or broadly bad, but any specific analysis requires a clear sense of what early voting v. Election Day turnout patterns are going to be, and we just don’t have that.
This doesn’t mean it’s not possible to do any analysis, but that’s going to be later in October, not now. So, unless they’re coming from someone with strong credibility in the state they’re talking about—@blockedfreq on Twitter has a strong track record in Pennsylvania, for instance—the things people say about the data we have right now isn’t going to be useful.
Arguments that numbers in betting markets prove an imminent Trump victory.
PredictIt had Blake Masters favored on Election Day, 2022.
]]>For the past number of months, I have found it difficult to write about the ongoing calamity in the Middle East. This isn’t because it’s unimportant—in fact, it’s hard to think about much going on in the world right now that matters more. It’s because everything that has transpired over the past year has been so utterly predictable that any further commentary felt redundant. All but the utterly delusional could see what Israel’s course of action would be: an endlessly escalatory and ever-expanding bloodbath aimed at tying up what its leadership imagined to be loose ends. This, in theory, could be mediated by the power of the United States, but Joe Biden’s history also made it clear that he would be utterly subservient to their whims.
Everything that has come from these circumstances has been exactly what one would expect. The mass death and rampant human rights violations have come entirely as expected. The expansion of the conflict, first in Yemen and now in Lebanon, has been entirely as expected. Biden’s efforts at a ceasefire, “tireless” or otherwise, being completely thwarted by his good friend Netanyahu was more than expected. The only real question mark that remained was the possibility of a full-on war between Israel and Iran, which had begun to feel like a matter of “when” more than “if” as the rogue Jewish state became more and more deranged. And as the U.S. election has come closer and closer, the possibility of this capstone failure for Biden has loomed large as the last true domino left to fall before November.
Now, this domino appears as if it may be on its way down. Through its invasion of Lebanon, Israel brought its long-running proxy-driven with Iran to a turning point, forcing the Islamic Republic to respond with a nearly-unprecedented direct attack on the apartheid state. Now that the ball sits in Israel’s court, it can be very easy to imagine that they are in a position to, as Donald Trump has suggested, win the election for the Republicans. Just the suggestion of an attack on Iran’s oil fields has been enough to send oil prices spiking, raising the specter of an eleventh-hour economic crisis. Nuclear facilities and—as is always the case with Israel—civilian centers also appear to be entirely on the table. The worst possible outcome, at the worst possible time, appears to be in the cards.
Democrats want you to believe that they are powerless in the face of this. Not only are they not, but it’s not only the White House that has tremendous agency here. Here’s how Vice President Kamala Harris has come to the brink of a crisis of her own making, how such a crisis may impact things if it comes to pass, and how she may yet find an unexpected savior—that is, if that savior is willing to trust her.
How We Got Here
The most you can say to defend Kamala’s actions over the past few months is that her position is very, very peculiar. While it is not at all uncommon for sitting or former Vice Presidents to run for president—the way the position opens the door for that is practically the only part of the job that appeals to anyone—it is extraordinarily uncommon for a sitting VP to run for president while their boss is still eligible for a second term. The circumstances that allow for this to happen are so specific, so unlikely, that it’s hard to believe that it’s ever happened at all. First, it requires an incumbent President to forgo a re-election bid. This is itself something that practically never happens in the modern era of U.S. politics, as it requires an unusual political environment where a party is somehow strong while its White House is weak. But for the sitting VP to take the nomination, the White House can’t be so weak as to create opportunities for other members of their strong party. It must be strong enough to project enough authority to get the failing president’s #2 over the finish line at the same time that it is weak enough to be coup’d.
The result of this is that the usual tightrope walk that every VP needs to take, already difficult enough by itself, becomes even more maddeningly complex. The task of projecting authority and appearing independent without looking untrustworthy or unprincipled is far from a simple one, especially in a complex election. It’s for this reason that I have a degree of sympathy for Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 presidential campaign. 1968 was the first and, until this year, only presidential election of the modern era where a sitting VP ran while serving under a president eligible for another term. Humphrey sucked in a lot of ways, but he was also running in arguably the most complex election in U.S. history, with multiple generation-defining issues pulling the country several different ways. The administration he represented had some initiatives that truly were popular and others that were complete albatrosses, forcing him to thread a tight needle. To me, he deserves a lot of credit for finding a way to make the result so close, even if not all of his decisions were perfect.
Conversely, I do not have much sympathy for Kamala Harris’ campaign this year. While the tasks facing Humphrey in 1968 were generationally complex, the task (singular, not plural) facing the Vice President this year is mind-numbingly simple. Joe Biden is unpopular on practically every issue, across the board. On the other hand, Democrats, and liberalism more broadly, are not. Ergo, things that separate her from the President are good, while things that tie her to him are bad. This isn’t just conjecture on my part. Back in September, Blueprint, a Democratic research and polling initiative, found as such:
[Messaging] that performed best, the polling found, “were those that displayed a clear break between her and Biden,” while those that performed worst were “those that portrayed a future Harris administration as building on the accomplishments of the Biden era.”
Any mention of Biden, the polling found, led to less support even if the position it had Harris taking was the same.
Of course, these are all things I’ve gone over before. Since the DNC, I’ve been very put off by how low-energy, nonconfrontational and establishment-minded the Harris campaign has been. They have pointed to the idea of an infinitely complex campaign—an idea that is not supported by reality—as an excuse to play it safe. This would be objectionable enough by itself, but what has made it arguably a disaster in the making is the fact that their conception of “safety” is really anything but. A truly rise-averse Kamala campaign would seek to break from her unpopular boss at all costs, even in the rare areas where it might be advisable to stick with him. It wouldn’t involve sticking with Biden at almost every turn, and it especially would not involve sticking with him on Middle East policy. Not only has this shackled Kamala to a deeply unpopular position, but it may be putting Israel in a position to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.
To understand why this is the case, you need to look seriously at a group of people that the mainstream media never covers as rational actors: the Iranian government.
The Power of a Candidate
The story of how we got here, where a client state is leading a superpower into a war of its own choosing, is a long one, but it has fundamentally revolved around one thing: framing. For decades, the hawks and the (relative) doves in D.C. have battled over how America’s adversaries should be understood. One side, the doves, treats them as rational actors with discrete political interests who can be dealt with diplomatically. The other side, the hawks, regards them as ontologically evil psychopaths who can never be bargained with. And while both of these perspectives have seen their influence wax and wane over the years, none has ever so thoroughly dominated the other as much as the hawkish standpoint has dominated D.C. during the Biden administration.
Since taking office, our old Cold Warrior president has adopted a moralistic, almost neoconservative view of the world that stands in stark contrast to that of his Democratic predecessor and former boss. To Joe Biden, every conflict, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to economic competition with China to the War in Gaza, is a Manichean struggle between dark and light. And by blending this worldview with liberal concerns—chiefly by casting his fight against Trump as one in the same as his fight against Putin, Xi, and the Ayatollahs—he has managed to make this perspective completely hegemonic. Once-mainstream liberal foreign policy talking points have been shunted out of the discourse. Now, everyone from Nikki Haley to Tim Walz speaks as if every adversary America has is impossible to reason with.
Here, whether Biden or anyone else actually desires a war is irrelevant. At the end of the day, their perspective has put them in a position where the only logical solution to any dispute—especially disputes as large as those that we (or, more accurately, Israel) have with Iran—is a military one. If the people in charge of these powers are truly ideological fanatics who cannot be reasoned with, anything other than regime change is a waste of time, if not outright suicidal. As President Obama put it when arguing in favor of his Iran deal in 2015:
“There really are only two alternatives here: either Iran getting a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through negotiation, or it is resolved through force, through war. Those are the options.”
The logic Obama was arguing against then—which, it’s worth noting, is extremely racist—is one that practically everyone in Washington holds now. This very much includes the Kamala campaign, and it is likely what is driving them to stick so closely to Biden’s position on Israel. Cognitively incapable of seeing Israel as anything but good and Iran as anything but the definition of evil, they simply do not have the political imagination to imagine charting another course other than war. Like Joe Manchin and the deficit in 2021, they may even see their stance as a moral imperative, not something that should be sacrificed for the sake of petty politics. Who would they be, they may be asking, if they played games with something as serious as national security for political gain?
The answer to this is that they’d be a lot like Israel, which is so blatantly working to get Trump elected that even someone as slow as Biden has been able to acknowledge it. The fact that things have escalated so far with Iran likely only reflects the fact that the things Israel has done so far, from tanking the hostage deal to invading Lebanon, have failed to move the needle in Trump’s favor. Their hope is that an all-out war will be enough for that, and—all else equal—they probably aren’t wrong. Even if Americans always care far less about overseas conflicts when they don’t involve U.S. troops, something as big as an all-out war would be too big enough to ignore. Even setting aside the impact that an oil price shock could have, such a massive, unprecedented conflict will undoubtedly draw attention from even the most ignorant and incurious voters, raising the salience of one of the administrations single-worst issues at the worst possible time. Even if the administration will be insulated by the media covering Israel’s actions as entirely necessary and not, in fact, representative of generational failure on Biden’s part, such an October Surprise will certainly not be helpful for Democrats. In a close race, it could very well tip the election away from them.
However: all of this rests on a very, very, very big assumption: that Iran will respond to whatever attack Israel inflicts on them in the coming days with outright war. This may be something that Netanyahu and the other racists in the Israeli cabinet are taking for granted, but it is not a guarantee. Contrary to how American media covers them, Iran is not a monolith, and it is not stupid. They know what Netanyahu is doing and why he is doing it when he is. They also have veto power over his ultimate ambitions. No matter how vicious the Israeli attack is, it is Tehran, and Tehran alone, that will decide whether or not the war reaches a stage that will get attention from the average American and potentially drive them towards Trump. They could respond as Israel hopes them to, or they could sit back, bide their time, and avoid playing into Netanyahu’s games.
This is the main reason not to be resigned to the possibility that Israel has the power to determine the result of the election. It is not in faith that Netanyahu is a good guy, as Biden believes. It is also not in faith that Biden will suddenly wake up, stop being an inept failure, and prioritize his country’s interests above Israel’s for the first time in his entire life. It is in the belief that Iran, as a rational actor, will refuse to play into Netanyahu’s desires and refrain from escalating the conflict prior to our election in November.
It is here where Kamala Harris, the candidate, comes into play. Right now, we know for certain now that Tehran does not like Trump. Although right-wing claims that they were involved in his assassination attempt are complete bullshit, the idea that they were involved in the email hack of his campaign is plausible enough. We also know that they have been willing to avoid responding to Israel’s provocations in the past to avoid a worse relationship with the West—their refusal to respond to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh on their soil, for instance, came out of a desire not to disrupt the still-ongoing ceasefire talks. But it’s also true that this past reluctance may have cost more moderate forces like Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian, the new reformist President, valuable political capital against their hardliner counterparts. In order to convince the rest of the government not to respond to a new Israeli attack, one that could very well target their most valuable infrastructure, it will need to be very clear to figures like Dr. Pezeshkian that Kamala Harris is someone worth doing a big favor for.
For past Democrats, such a conclusion may have been an easy one to make. But with the Vice President tying herself to Biden at the hip, promising to keep the nuclear deal dead, and refusing to stand up to Israel even as it tries to end her political career, things might get a little trickier for those in Tehran opposing immediate retaliation. It may be very hard even for those sympathetic to negotiations to argue that Kamala will be any less hawkish than her alternatives, and that an election is something worth waiting for. This is how Israel could end up giving Trump the October Surprise he’s been begging for—not through their own cunning, but through Kamala completely refusing to give Iran any kind of bone.
It goes without saying that Tehran coming to such a conclusion would be highly unfortunate for those of us at risk of being governed by Trump.
But, truthfully, could you really blame them?
]]>U.S. elections have long had a knack for having their most impactful news cycles at their very end. Starting in 2020 and going backwards, you’d have to go several decades before finding a race that didn’t include an October Surprise: i.e., a big, unexpected, late-breaking major news story right before an election. Recent events in Lebanon strongly indicate that 2024 will be no exception, and even that new war likely won’t be the only last-minute trick the far right will attempt before Election Day.
So, in order to get a sense of how Netanyahu’s latest act of aggression may impact things, this article will rank all of the October Surprises in recent history, from the embarrassing flops to the world-changing pivot points.
Across the past number of decades, October Surprises have taken many forms. They have included hacked emails and stolen laptops, natural disasters and sex scandals, sabotaged peace conferences and economic implosions. But at their core, they have always held their power in one major thing: their ability to confirm or rebut long-running narratives. With the right story and the right timing, they can single-handedly settle election-defining arguments right before voters go to the polls. In this, they provide hope for even the biggest underdogs at even the latest stages of a campaign.
It is for this same reason that a true October Surprise cannot be forced. Not only do they need to directly address what voters actually care about, but they need to be truly big and truly credible—not just something one side of the aisle is clearly pulling out of its ass as a desperation play. Essentially, it cannot be like the right’s eleventh-hour attempt at ginning up terror over the so-called “migrant caravans” right before the 2018 midterms, which backfired so drastically that it probably outright hurt them.
The sheer cynicism on display with this attempt was shocking enough. But what may even be more notable about it—and what didn’t receive nearly as much coverage at the time—was how remarkably out of touch it was. By 2018, pro-immigrant views had been reaching record highs. Even if Trump and FOX had managed to avoid being laughed off as pathetically desperate fearmongers and successfully increased the salience of immigration as an issue through this ploy, there’s no guarantee that it would have helped them. This failed attempt at a last-minute game-changer only succeeded in making it all the more difficult for the right to get people outside of their base to believe them on anything, ever.
2024 Equivalent: Trump making the pet-eating scandal his entire closing message.
Wait.
Standing as the most singularly bizarre scandal on this entire list, the passage of years has not made this story any easier to make sense of. Three weeks before a presidential election, the legally blind owner of a Delaware laptop repair shop claimed that he had a laptop that had been left behind in his store by Hunter Biden several years prior—and he wasn’t lying. On paper, this had all the makings of a major bombshell. Allegations of corrupt activities had been looming over Biden’s campaign for years, leading conservatives to dream that they could use such accusations to destroy Biden’s image the same way they had destroyed Hillary’s. But, despite all their effort up to mid-October, it just wasn’t sticking. As the race came to a close, Biden was regarded as significantly more trustworthy, and more well-liked in general, than Hillary ever had been during the 2016 campaign. It was arguably the biggest reason why he was succeeding where she failed. And then, lo and behold, a primary source supposedly confirming everything they had said and proving that Biden had lied fell from the heavens! It was Wikileaks all over again! The meme lords of 2016 would ride once more!
But despite their best efforts—and they truly made some very big efforts to get this story out there—things just weren’t the same as they were four years prior. The laptop’s completely unclear chain of custody made it impossible to tell which documents were real and which might have been faked, causing mainstream outlets to avoid the story in a way they didn’t for Clinton’s scandals. But this by itself wasn’t necessarily fatal among an electorate that had become very online by 2020. It’s possible to imagine that a more disciplined attack campaign, in line with how Steve Bannon went after Hillary in 2016, might have been able to land some blows on Biden.
But unfortunately for the right, things had changed quite a bit on their side over the prior four years. Instead of putting together a coordinated effort highlighting the most potentially incriminating evidence, the new online right-wing media world would spend the final three weeks of the election barraging the American public with images of Hunter Biden’s penis. It turned the entire scandal from something that could have been a desperately needed last-second boost for the Trump campaign into a complete joke. The only thing that saves it from F Tier is the fact that Biden’s polling fell a tad in the aftermath.
Still, even now after years of obsessing over Hunter and long after Americans have soured on Biden as a politician, it’s still not clear that this story has accomplished what it was supposed to for the right. In character rating surveys conducted before Biden withdrew from the race, pollsters found that the public viewed Biden less favorably compared to 2020 across the board, but had soured on him the least when it came to being “honest and trustworthy.” There, he still held a significant advantage over Trump despite losing to him overall.
2024 Equivalent: Someone claiming to find a message in a bottle in the ocean that proves that Tim Walz is a CCP agent.
Like the Hunter Biden laptop story, the eleventh-hour revelation that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving in 1976 is more interesting because of its backstory than the impact it actually had on the campaign. As the official story goes, the news only came out at the last minute as the result of an elaborate game of telephone. First, an unnamed man was arraigned for drunk driving in Kennebunkport, Maine on the same night that a young W. was in 1976. 24 years later, this same man tells his chiropractor in Portland that he was surprised that the campaign was about to end without the story coming out. That chiropractor then goes on to call a local part-time probate judge named Billy Childs to tell him about what he had heard. Then, at the Cumberland County Courthouse on the Thursday before the election, Childs strikes up a conversation with some nearby lawyers and court employees about what he had heard from the chiropractor. One of these lawyers is a man named Thomas J. Connolly, a local Democratic activist who had drawn Bush’s ire by calling him a “wiener” earlier that year. Connally then went on to find court records confirming the story, which he then forwarded on to local reporters. Within hours, it would be the biggest story in the country.
It’s just a shame that it was kind of a dud. While this story, unlike the Hunter laptop, didn’t have any legitimacy issues, it really didn’t say much. Bush having a troubled early life wasn’t anything new. His story of rising up from his failson ways through the Power of Faith™ had been an integral part of his biography ever since he entered politics. It hadn’t been a dealbreaker back then, and it wasn’t going to be one at the tail end of the campaign, especially after Democrats had spent a decade under Bill Clinton arguing that personal misconduct didn’t really matter. The story breaking at the absolute last minute also allowed Bush to raise questions about the motivations of the news outlets, which is honestly understandable. Even after knowing how the story came to be, the idea that the evil liberal media just sat on it until the perfect time makes a lot more sense than the actual fugazi chain of events that led to it making the news.
All of this is enough to make this scandal something of an archetypical low-impact October Surprise. The only thing that saves it from F Tier is the possibility that it may have actually impacted the way some people voted. When the results came in, Gore outperformed the final polls; the fact that he won the popular vote at all was actually something of a minor upset. It may seem strange that such a weak-tea scandal could have had such an impact, but 2000 was a pretty weak-tea election.
2024 Equivalent: If Republicans saved this exact same story about Walz for the end of the election.
Moving into C Tier, we finally reach October Surprises that had clear, discernible impacts on the actual election results. Hurricane Sandy earns a spot among these heavier hitters, but it still sits in something of a weird place. If you went by media coverage at the time, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was one of the most impactful events in modern political history. The 2012 race had been covered as a tossup the entire way through, but then Hurricane Sandy happened, and Obama went on to win decisively. One could very much imagine that his response to the disaster was what did it—that, by finally convincing voters like Mike Bloomberg that Obama was a strong leader, it accomplished the principal task of the campaign for him and handed him the win.
There’s a chance that this happened to at least some extent. Obama actually outperformed the final polls in the 2012 election on Election Day, both in national and state polling. But it’s not clear at all that this was because of Sandy, as all of those Romney-favoring polls were released after the disaster. Direct movement in his favor compared to 2008 was also limited exclusively to the NYC area, which did little other than help him pad his popular vote margin. So, ironically enough, it might have just been the case that Obama’s 2012 campaign was too effective for Hurricane Sandy to have as much of an impact as it otherwise could have. He didn’t need a disaster recovery to convince people that he was a strong leader because a majority of the electorate already saw him as one. Given his mediocre record, the fact that he had accomplished that to such an extent that an outstanding hurricane response was basically redundant speaks to how outstanding his re-election campaign was. In fact, one might call it one of the all-time great presidential campaigns in modern history—but that’s a story for another list.
2024 Equivalent: It just happened, and in a swing state. But unlike Obama, our Democratic incumbents are taking their time to show up.
Occurring right at the end of the 1992 campaign, the additional indictment filed against Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s longtime Defense Secretary, over his involvement with the Iran-Contra scandal and its aftermath stands as an October Surprise at its most basic. By the time he was running for a second term, George Bush had been haunted by Iran-Contra in particular and questions about his integrity in general for years. This question of trustworthiness was one of the many things that had put him in rough shape when the 1992 campaign began. It was an ironic predicament to be in considering that his primary opponent was a Clinton, but it was a big problem nonetheless—and it only got worse when Weinberger was first indicted that June. It was around that time that he fell to a substantial deficit to Ross Perot, and then Bill Clinton, that he would spend the rest of the campaign desperately trying to make up.
By late October, 1992, Bush had actually made a great deal of progress in doing this. After he yanked a reluctant James Baker from the State Department to manage his bid—a role in which the Houston blue blood managed everything down to his haircuts—he had gained back substantial ground. After having trailed Clinton by as much as 25 points in the summer, some final polls in October began to show him within the margin of error. It was at this time that the additional Weinberger charges were filed, bringing up what was possibly Bush’s worst issue at the worst possible time. His numbers tanked, at least according to the limited polling we have of the election, likely costing him victory in several states. The only thing that saves this from being higher up is that Bush wasn’t in a more competitive position when it broke and the lack of data we have about its impact, but it’s hard to think of how it could have come at a worse time.
2024 Equivalent: Trump getting indicted again but in a mysterious new way that actually meaningfully hurts him. Alternatively: Antony Blinken getting sent to the Hague.
This one is pretty simple. Bin Laden made this video, wherein he declared his intention to strike America again, with the intention of boosting Bush’s odds in a national security-dominated election. As American voters were too stupid to put two and two together as to why he might do that, they rallied behind their President, giving him a hefty polling boost that may have very well put him over the top. You can think of it as something of an inverse of the Weinberger indictment: something that, while not fundamentally changing the race, still played an important role by giving a major issue a hefty increase in salience at the last minute. This tape is also notable for the very amusing reaction it elicited from the U.S. intelligence community, as detailed by journalist Ron Suskind in his book, The One Percent Doctrine:
At the five o’clock meeting, once various reports on latest threats were delivered, [Deputy CIA Director] John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: “Bin Laden certainty did a nice favor today for the President.”
Around the table, there were nods….There was some speculative talk of why—knowing that bin Laden acted out a strategic rationale—he would have done this…“Certainly,” [CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence Jami Misick] offered, “he would want Bush to keep doing what he’s doing for a few more years.”
But an ocean of hard truths before them—such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush re-elected—remained untouched.
“It was sad,” [Chief of the CIA Weapons of Mass Destruction Department Rolf] Mowatt-Larssen remembered. “We just sat there. We were dispirited. We had nothing left at that point.”
2024 Equivalent: Samuel Alito releasing a tape saying he will kill again.
Although technically two separate and unrelated occurrences, both the Wikileaks drops and James Comey’s infamous letter to Congress occurred so closely to each other and had such similar impacts that they are best understood as the same event. The story here was very simple, which is precisely why it was so effective. For as popular as she might have been at some points during her career, the countless scandals Hillary Clinton had racked up over her decades in politics had made her all but completely unelectable. Democratic elites refusing to see this did nothing to stop it from remaining true, and it caused her to enter the election as the secondmost disliked candidate in the history of polling. The only person to ever see numbers worse than her was her opponent.
Hillary was never going to win the election on her own strengths. Her only hope was getting people to focus more on Trump’s flaws than on hers. That’s a very easy task in theory, but it’s also one that becomes a bit more difficult when the last few weeks of the election cycle are dominated by transcripts of you saying that you hold separate “public and private positions,” consider yourself “center-right,” and dream of an entire American continent without borders. When the public then gets a last-minute reminder that you were, in fact, under criminal investigation for mishandling classified documents, it becomes a lot more difficult. While these scandals might not have been enough to tilt the election to Trump by themselves, they were incredibly effective in concert. Across all modern elections, it’s hard to think of any other late-breaking event that had such a major impact without changing the basic fundamentals of the race. The only possible contender is the one that happened in the same month, in the same year.
2024 Equivalent: If the JD Vance documents had anything interesting or funny.
Don’t let the revisionist history fool you: this was a gigantic scandal, arguably the biggest single one in American history. It was the kind of thing that ruins entire lives, and it probably would have for Trump if he hadn’t been running against the precise political family that had spent decades running on the argument that sexual misconduct didn’t really matter in serious politics. The fact that the tape still brought him down to a seven point deficit even in that context shows just how utterly devastating it was. I will always maintain that even the substantial effect that the scandal had with Hillary in the race only scratched the surface of what it could have done. Against a Bernie Sanders or a Joe Biden or even a Martin O’Malley, it’s entirely possible to imagine that the tape could have secured them a double-digit blowout victory. It could have—should have—been the cause of a historic course correction, wherein the right was brutally punished for being moronic enough to nominate Donald Trump and shunted out into the wilderness. Hillary Clinton should never, ever, ever be forgiven for robbing us of this.
2024 Equivalent: The Trump n-word tape comes out.
The most important events in American history to be flatly ignored by mainstream historians, this country has never been able to comprehend what the GOP did to it at the end of the 1968 and 1980 elections, and it likely never will. Every time the right attempts to concoct a last-minute shift in their favor through things like the migrant caravans in 2018 or by calling Tim Walz a Maoist this year, it only shows how far they have fallen. Back in the day, the right just didn’t sit idly by when their opponents looked set to take a decisive advantage at the end of a race. They didn’t sit back and let liberals get away with their schemes like “ending a war” or “solving a hostage crisis” when it might have been inconvenient to them. They stood up, rolled up their sleeves, called up their ex-CIA contacts and solved that shit. They prolonged those damn wars. They colluded with those damn ayatollahs. And they won.
That’s what it’s like when you have a real will to power. It’s hard to think of any possible 2024 comparison to this, because it’s hard to think of the modern right ever being this competent. And if you’re curious as to how the right devolved from Anna Chennault and George Bush to Chris Rufo and Matt Walsh, you won’t have to wonder for long. Stay tuned for a miniseries on this exact topic coming out very soon.
]]>With the first and last debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump now having come and gone, the 2024 presidential election has finally entered its home stretch. With the exception of the VP debate in early October—which, if history is any indication, won’t have any impact on the election at all—there are no set major events to get to between now and November. The tickets have been confirmed, the conventions have been held, the debates have been debated and Trump’s trials and sentencings have been delayed and postponed. Absent possible developments overseas, which I will go over later on in this article, all we have left to watch going forward are the polls, which are now more important than ever before.
This has put many commentators in something of an awkward position. For the past number of months, the default mode of political analysis has been to emphasize uncertainty above all else. And this wasn’t ass-covering. It was the correct stance to take. For the longest time, we legitimately did not know what the main dynamics of this race would be or what the tickets would even look like. We didn’t know if Biden would drop out, or who would replace him if he did. When he was replaced with Kamala, we didn’t know how she would be received, what role the conventions would play, how the debate would go or how important it would be. Even those, like myself, who felt that one candidate was in a better position than the other had to emphasize that such analysis was highly theoretical and completely liable to change.
But now, suddenly, without any warning, we are in a position where we truly do know a lot about what may happen in November. If you don’t believe me, just look at history. It was at this point in 2016 that we knew that Hillary wasn’t going to cruise to victory, and that there was something about Trump that kept drawing voters back to him even after major scandals. In 2018, it was evident around now that Republicans had run out of time to stop a blue wave, but that Democratic hopes of flipping the Senate were likely dashed. In 2020, it was clear that Biden had a very real advantage over Trump, and in 2022, there was already a mountain of evidence that we weren’t on track for a red wave that year.
We are in a similar position for this year’s election. When she first entered the race and was still trailing in the polls, I went out on a limb to say that Kamala had enough opportunities ahead of her to already be on track to defeat Trump. Now, it appears that those pieces have come into place. While things look set to be close and not everything has gone according to plan, we have enough information about the dynamics of this race to know that it is Kamala Harris who holds the advantage in the race to 270 electoral votes. Here’s why she’s on track to win, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love Mark Robinson.
The Official Ettingermentum Post-debate Electoral College Ratings. No Tossups.
Here is my newly updated, post-debate map of where the race stands. My last two ratings were highly theoretical, influenced less by polling and more by how I was pricing in the two major upcoming events of the campaign: the DNC and the debate. Back then, I was higher on Kamala than what the numbers said because I was very open to the possibility that those big moments could do quite a lot to solve her biggest problem: people not knowing enough about her to feel confident voting for her. As it turned out, she wouldn’t solve this problem to the extent I thought she would, largely a consequence of poor campaign strategy. As such, Trump’s floor is firmer than it was back in August. Still, she did enough in those primetime moments to solidify her position in the states that matter the most. This has been enough for me to change my rating of the race in the tipping point state from Tilt D before the debate to Lean D now.
You can thank the Great Lakes swing states for this. From the very beginning of this election, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have been the rain on Donald Trump’s parade. It was in these places where Democratic post-Dobbs strength was at its most extreme during the 2022 midterms. It was there where an imploding Biden campaign had its last hopes of scraping together a bare electoral college majority. And now, they are why this race is not a tossup, because Kamala Harris has a clear (if not overwhelming) edge in all three of them.
While the scars of 2016 may make some shy away from recognizing any sort of Midwest-based blue wall, superstition should not stop us from recognizing clear facts for what they are. In all of these states, recent polling has ranged between mid-single-digit Kamala leads at best and ties at worst. That sort of distribution indicates that she is in the lead in all three states, which means that she is in the lead in enough states to get to 270 electoral votes. Notably unlike 2016, these results make perfect sense in light of both local and national trends. All three states are the whitest states on the swing state map. This may have looked like a bad sign before, but it’s a positive sign now, when recent demographic shifts have shown Democrats improving with whites and Republicans improving with nonwhites. On top of this, all three states are strongly socially liberal on issues like abortion, and, as mentioned previously, have had incredibly strong down ballot results for Democrats since 2016. In the end, none of the polls that show her doing well in this region of the country are telling us anything we haven’t already known for a long time.
Conversely, these same exact reasons also make Kamala’s relatively weak position in some Sun Belt states more believable. While I can nod my head at surveys that show Kamala doing well or doubt surveys that show Kamala doing poorly in Pennsylvania, I can’t say the same about poor results for her in Arizona or Georgia. Democratic success in states like these will be heavily threatened by any slippage among minority voters, which both polling and countless recent election results indicate is on track to happen. Long term trends notwithstanding Democratic margins in both states were extraordinarily narrow in 2020. Just slight dips in turnout or margins with nonwhites will prove fatal, even if leftward shifts among secular whites (who exist in far smaller quantities in the Sun Belt compared to the Midwest) may provide a bit of a cushion.
Even if there may be ways to stop such a shift—it’s worth noting that surveys in Sun Belt states have shown down ballot candidates, like Ruben Gallego, notably outrunning Kamala among nonwhites—Kamala’s campaign’s strategy does not seem equipped to accomplish that. While her numbers did see something of a minor boost in Michigan and Pennsylvania following her debate victory, her numbers in the Sun Belt have either remained stagnant or gone slightly downward. One possible reason for this is that her focus on looking strong, presidential and moderate may just have more of an appeal to wavering white voters, who are put off from her due to racist stereotypes, compared to wavering nonwhite voters, whose discontent with her boss’s administration runs far deeper than superficial concerns. If this is the calculus she’s made, it’s hard to call it the wrong move electorally, even if such a focus may be a dire sign for the future of the party.
But even if they do make some theoretical sense, it’s also worth noting that Trump’s leads in these Sun Belt states are both far from overwhelming and haven’t necessarily extended to the rest of the Sun Belt. At the same time that she has struggled in recent polls in Georgia and Arizona, Kamala has also found leads in North Carolina and Nevada. Of these states, a blue North Carolina makes the most sense to me. It was very close in 2020, is the whitest of the four Sun Belt swing states (giving Kamala the biggest cushion against racial depolarization), and contains a Republican Party that has Mark Robinson on the ballot. Robinson was already a very plausible drag on Trump before it was revealed that he had repeatedly referred to himself as a Nazi and fantasized about what might be generously called nonconventional sex with a supposedly nonexistent sister-in-law. Now, he is a one-man turnout machine for Democratic voters. If nothing else, the consensus that there is no such thing as “reverse coattails” will be stretched to its breaking point in the Tarheel State this year.
As for Nevada, this is a state that I wavered on quite a lot before finalizing this map. In theory, it makes complete sense that Nevada would be one of the first states to go to Trump in an election defined by racial depolarization. Even by Sun Belt standards, it is both very nonwhite and very uneducated. But, and in contrast to when Biden was in the race, none of the recent polling in Nevada indicates that Trump has a decisive advantage there. While polling is very sparse, the limited data we have seen since the debate has shown a Kamala lead. This is quite important in Nevada given that pollsters have historically underestimated Democrats there. You could even make a real argument that Kamala would be favored there even if Trump had a slight advantage in the averages. I’m interested in what additional polls may say about the state, but, for now, you can do the math.
As to why Kamala is holding strong in the Silver State, it’s hard to say definitively. Perhaps it may be the state’s incredibly strong pro-choice leanings, which, when combined with a referendum on the subject this year, may be boosting Democratic turnout. Perhaps it’s a testament to the power of organized labor, which is substantially more influential in Las Vegas than it is in Phoenix or Atlanta. Maybe it’s just evidence that trends won’t be as intense this year as we thought they might be; while Nevada did trend to the right in 2020 while Georgia and Arizona trended left, it still voted to the left of both by roughly two points.
Either way, anything that moves the state into the Democratic column will be welcome news to the party. Even though Trump’s bid to steal Omaha’s electoral vote failing means that Nevada has lost its most likely route to being the tipping point state, it could still find its way there. Most notably, Kamala losing Pennsylvania but winning North Carolina will put Nevada in a position to put her over the top, leaving us at the mercy of its agonizingly slow vote count. Thankfully, the state’s early voting numbers will likely give those of us who follow these things obsessively a good idea of the winner of its 6 electoral votes far ahead of time.
Above all else, what makes Kamala’s current strength in the right states so important right now is the likelihood that the race will be relatively stable going forward. While some have argued that there is no way we can know what the “normal” state of this election is, I disagree with that assessment. All of the most trustworthy indicators out there have presented a clear picture: a national Democratic advantage by a clear, if not overwhelming, margin. Special elections have indicated this. The Washington primary has indicated this. Polling, as things stand, indicates this. There is no indication that Donald Trump, who has been active in national politics for more than nine years, will be able to change these fundamentals. Even if he could, six weeks of campaigning is not nearly enough time for him to do so.
But, as I mentioned earlier, there is still one big, glaring possible exception to this: the eruption of a war between Israel and its regional enemies. I, along with anyone who follows the conflict in the region seriously, recognize this possibility to be both immensely concerning and indicative of a generational failure of leadership on Biden’s part. It’s not hard to imagine that such a late-breaking development could change the dynamics of the race in a way that benefits Trump’s campaign. The former president seems to think so; there’s a reason he’s been advising Netanyahu to stonewall a ceasefire deal and outright asking Israel to “defeat [the Vice President].”
But at the same time, it’s also worth recognizing how much of a liability the conflict already is to Kamala’s campaign. While her refusal to accept a Palestinian-American’s speech endorsing her at the DNC may imply that she has something to gain from associating herself with Biden’s handling of the conflict, this could not be further from the truth. Voters have long seen Biden’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza as one of his biggest failures. They have also long seen foreign policy as one of Trump’s biggest draws as a result. That is far from a good thing, but it also means that any penalties Kamala might face over foreign policy incompetence are already priced in. If Israel’s conflicts expand further, it won’t rob the Vice President of anything near a winning issue. At most, it will just increase the salience of an issue that’s already bad for her.
That’s not nothing. But it’s also probably not everything in a country where more than 80% of people probably can’t locate Lebanon on a map. Conversely, there also is a possible upside in this: the possibility that the issue becomes such an obviously terrible one for Democrats that Kamala finally feels compelled to distance herself from Biden on one of his worst issues. That would be an unambiguously good thing, but it has also been an unambiguously good thing for quite a while, and she still hasn’t done it. Because of that, I’m not holding my breath.
]]>Hello everyone! Welcome back to our subscriber Q&A series. These questions came from comments on the last Q&A article and the discussion post from last week. As always, use the comments here if you’re interested in sending a question for the next edition to the series. Now, let’s start off with a quick question.
Cbdb asks: If he had been the nominee in 2016 or 2020, who would the best running mates for Bernie be? Also is the Art of Losing on Sanders 2020 still otw?
This was something I gave a lot of thought to during that brief period when Bernie was the frontrunner back in 2020. For me, the answer was overwhelmingly obvious: Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin. She had everything you could have possibly wanted. She supported Medicare-for-All throughout her entire career while easily winning elections in the state that appeared set to be—and, indeed, would be—the one to decide the election. Her record on foreign policy included early opposition to the Iraq War. She even supported impeaching Cheney as a member of the U.S. House. Since her state had recently elected a Democratic governor, her election to the Vice Presidency wouldn’t imperil a Democratic Senate majority, although it would necessitate an annoying special election. I will still defend it as something of a dream ticket to this day, even though his most likely choice may have actually been Kamala, who he reportedly preferred above all other contenders (including Warren) for Biden’s running mate.
For 2016, things are a bit trickier. Back then, Wisconsin had a Republican governor, which would have made Baldwin a far more problematic choice. But on the other hand, Bernie was on track to win in such a landslide that year that just one Senate seat probably wouldn’t have been that important. Adopting such a mindset would have opened up his world of opportunities tremendously. In this case, a smart pick could have been someone like Sherrod Brown. Like Baldwin, Brown would have helped Bernie double down on his central appeal of being a trustworthy outsider while providing a bit of an olive branch to the establishment. However, you’re really wary of giving up a seat in a competitive state, Elizabeth Warren could have been a simple pick that doubled down on his winning messaging. Amy Klobuchar could have also been a solid pick that made an overture to the center, but I’m not entirely sure that such overtures would have been needed, or even helpful, since Bernie’s strength was always his independence from systems people hated.
As for The Art of Losing: Bernie, I absolutely still plan to do it, and it will have a far more expansive range than just the 2020 election.
Jim Mason asks: Is it true that Dem politicians who pivot to the center in contested federal elections are more successful than Dem politicians who run from the left? Every time I complain about Kamala pivoting to the right on an issue, my friends tell me she's just doing what she needs to do.
Yes and no, but mainly no.
It is true, and it is very much worth recognizing, that candidates with centrist positions and associations on both sides of the aisle often do well in elections. It also is true that being associated with extremism can tremendously hurt candidates. This has long been a truism in political science, and it still remains the case today, as demonstrated by a project by Split Ticket that evaluated the median WAR score of each faction in Congress.
On the extremes, this chart shows results that run closely in line with conventional political wisdom. Specific groups of representatives on the ideological fringes, from MTG to AOC, had the worst results by an order of magnitude. At the top, although by a smaller degree, were the nation’s last RINOs; strong incumbents like Brian Fitzpatrick and David Valadao who are capable of winning over substantial numbers of Democrats and independents. But it’s at the middle of this list where things are the most interesting. The gap between the Blue Dogs, ranked second-best, and the Freedom Caucus, ranked third-worst, is only two points; the same size as the gap between the Blue Dogs and the GOP Problem Solvers, and a substantially smaller gap than the one between the Freedom Caucus and the Squad.
This means that the vast majority of politicians rated in their system all had nearly identical results relative to expectations despite having substantially different beliefs. The Congressional Progressive Caucus stands out in particular here. Consisting of nearly half of the Democratic caucus, the CPC backs an agenda largely resembling that of Bernie’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns: supporting single-payer healthcare, substantial increases in government spending, and a more dovish foreign policy. If voters were evaluating their representatives simply on the basis of ideology, with centrism as an ideal, this group would be near the bottom of this list. But it isn’t. It’s right in the middle, with its median member actually having a net positive WAR score—practically in line with the Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus and actually better than the median rating for the centrist New Democrats, who have a slight net negative score. Even the Blue Dogs, an explicitly conservative caucus, only outrun them by a point. A similar phenomenon can be observed on the right, where the Freedom Caucus only has a median WAR score of -0.8; a clear underperformance, but hardly outright unelectable.
What this tells us—or, at least, what it tells me—is that ideology is far from the sole thing that decides how well or how poorly a candidate will do on the ballot. Instead, it is just one of many factors that determine how voters make their all-important judgments about the character of politicians: whether or not they’re trustworthy, competent, honest, etc. The role it plays here can often be quite substantial, and it can often work in the ways that conventional wisdom says. Candidates with more moderate positions can very well benefit from being coded as reasonable problem-solvers. But it can also work in ways contrary to conventional wisdom, like how many progressive candidates can benefit by just as much by being seen as independent truth-tellers.
In the end, optics, branding and consistency are always going to be more important than precise policy positions when it comes to how candidates are evaluated by voters. We have seen this happen time and time again. On the left, politicians like AOC and Mark Pocan have practically identical policy positions, but the former underperformed in 2022 while the latter didn’t because she was coded as an extremist and he wasn’t. In the center, Joe Biden was massively more popular when he ran for president in 2020 than Hillary Clinton was when she ran for president in 2016, even though they had almost identical positions and backgrounds. This was in no small part because she constantly changed her positions while he had stayed more consistent, which made him come across as far more trustworthy than she did. On the right, even politicians with deeply hardline beliefs have managed to ride moments of perceived independence and/or competence to dramatically outperform other Republicans with similar beliefs but less inspiring backgrounds. In the end, how you perform is a lot less about the exact beliefs you have and a lot more about the story you tell.
I understand why some people, especially those who want to feel a greater sense of control over the future of this country, are resistant to this conclusion. The line between “reasonable centrist” and “gutless flip flopper” or “brave outsider” and “lunatic radical” can be hazy. The judgements involved can be maddeningly superficial and often inconsistent. But landing on the right side of such judgements is substantially more important than having a policy platform fine-tuned by focus groups. This is extremely important, and it is something that I am worried that the Kamala campaign does not entirely understand. The task facing them—making their candidate appear like a strong, new figure, separate from her unpopular boss—is a simple one. If polling is to be believed, it’s something they have already done a lot to accomplish (whether that be due to their own skill or the public simply wanting to like her). But I do not think it was because she moved to the center on policy. If anything, her surge has occurred in spite of those moves, which have likely only hurt her, hobbled her momentum, and muddled her image.
Think about the situation Kamala Harris was in when she began her campaign. She was a member of a party that was performing pretty strongly across the board, with her unpopular geriatric boss being the sole exception. In order to win, she would need to do what every Vice President with presidential ambitions has been forced to do—break away from her boss and establish herself as her own person—except in record time, and with intense scrutiny. In this context, her platform in 2019 being so different from Biden’s could have been a major asset for her. While not all of her positions from back then were exactly winners, she had still provided herself with a bounty of popular positions to the left of her boss that, if emphasized, could have made her look both independent and consistent and strong. Her past support for Medicare for All particularly stood out as an excellent way for her to have made a major break from her unpopular boss and reframed the conversation in a way that could have benefitted her side.
But instead of projecting any consistency or independence, she chose to engage in a slow series of flip-flops back to Biden’s positions without ever articulating why. This, coupled with her lack of policy specifics in general, temporarily reframed the race around concerns about her: what she actually believed in, why voters should trust her, and who the real Kamala Harris is. This was an entirely unforced error, and although its damage was minimized by her success in the debate, it is still one of the largest issues currently surrounding her campaign. So, dear reader, if you ever have this discussion with your friends again, you should respond by saying that what Kamala “needs to do” isn’t to play to an imagined center, but to present an image of herself that people can have confidence in—and that poll-testing her every position only makes that harder.
TrolleyJoe asks: Will there ever be in the near future another Bernie, i.e. a figure who managed to unify a broad coalition from the politically disaffected to left liberals to the genuine radical left into a enthusiastic and national movement? Who are the best candidates for that? What would that person have to be and how could they succeed where Bernie failed?
It depends on what you mean by “another Bernie.” If by that, you mean someone the broad “left” of the party can unite around in a primary, the answer is easy. But if you mean someone of his particular political profile—rock-solid on policy while simultaneously not being seen as much as an extremist by voters—only a few names stand out, and it’s hard to imagine any of them being capable of uniting the left in the way that he did.
You can call this the AOC problem. I’ve entertained other possibilities in the past, but, at this point, there’s no getting around it: she and her allies are his successors. There is simply no world where Senator G. L. Upshitto (D-WI) will be capable of competing with a national political celebrity like her, no matter how consistent they are on single payer or how talented they are at winning over Midwestern hicks. But it’s also hard to imagine a world, at least in the immediate future, where AOC manages to find the kind of electoral sweet spot that Bernie was in. As the Split Ticket chart included in the answer to the previous question demonstrates, her wing is definitively coded as extremist in the worst possible way. Where Bernie is seen as a brave independent outsider, she and her allies are seen as unproductive rabble rousers. The result is that her net favorability in New York, which voted for Biden by 23 points, is only a measly +4 statewide.
You can give any number of reasons for this. Perhaps it's a sign that modern, activist-driven progressive movements don’t have the kind of broad appeal that Bernie’s more traditional left-wing message had. Perhaps it’s a product of the context in which both figures came, and that Bernie’s background of waging a lonely fight against a bipartisan consensus makes him stand out in comparison to newcomers who are seen as part of a trend towards the “extremes.” Or perhaps it’s the most likely explanation: that racist, sexist voters simply respond more positively to an older white man fighting against the system than they do to a young, nonwhite woman doing the same thing. Either way, it puts the left in a very curious position for the foreseeable future: forced to legitimize itself once again in the aftermath of two credible primary bids.
Shane asks: I’m curious if you have thoughts on what it would take to clean up NY state and local politics to make the NY party actually govern as Dems. Are we doomed to Hochulgeddon and the Adamspocalypse for the foreseeable future?
My understanding of New York state politics is that it represents the final stage of a problem that I have also observed at the national level for Democrats: the decadence that comes when a political class achieves power primarily through internal networking as opposed to actually facing the pressure—and turnover—that comes from actual competition. The way I see it, the fact that Democratic voters didn’t demand that their elite make any changes in the aftermath of Trump’s win in 2016 was extraordinarily impactful. It left their entire party in a bizarre state of arrested development, still solidly under the thumb of a class of people who have already proven themselves to be failures countless times. The result of this is a Democratic President who supported the Iraq War and a Democratic presidential candidate whose entire campaign is staffed by the people who ran the worst presidential bid in modern history.
New York is what this problem looks like when you have this same level of elite incestuousness, but over an even longer span of time and in an environment where it is practically impossible to lose. It is no surprise that such circumstances have yielded a dysfunctional party that has failed to either properly govern or be electorally successful. In these cases, the only way out is through. People as incompetent as Hochul and Adams simply have to be primaried, because there’s no way what they’re doing ends well. Right now, polls indicate that Kathy Hochul is less popular in New York than Donald Trump. Those numbers are not good. They are the sort of numbers that put you in serious danger of New York going all the way and electing a Republican governor sometime in the near future.
This would be a complete disaster, but it would also provide something of a silver lining: an opportunity for a real shakeup. Past this point, there are two possible paths to getting a political class in the Empire State composed of at least some people who aren’t on a first-name basis with Lis Smith. The first is for an activist-driven reform movement of progressives, who take power and establish a separate power structure that exists off of the support of the people themselves. This would be ideal, but has practically no precedent outside of low-turnout House primaries in modern times. The second path is for a woke billionaire to bulldoze the entire political establishment and rebuild it from the ground up in his own image. This may not be ideal, but does have a recent history of surprising success, arguably making it the best chance New York has of decent governance in the near future.
Mallory asks: What do you foresee for Kamala’s cabinet if she wins? Do you think there will be a lot of continuity from Biden’s cabinet or do you think there will be some real turnover? What realistic outcome would humiliate Pete Buttigieg the most?
There will likely be a lot of turnover for positions that don’t require Senate confirmation, like White House staff or positions like National Security Advisor. But for most cabinet positions, there’s a real likelihood that Kamala will be forced to keep most of his team on if she wins. This is because the Senate is likely—not certain, but likely—to have a Republican majority even if she wins the election. Still, no Democratic president has come into office without a Senate majority since Grover Cleveland in 1885, so we can’t say with too much certainty how much they’ll act. Unlike in 2015, when Republicans serially obstructed an unpopular Obama, we know with some certainty that voters don’t like McConnell-level obstructionism—it’s not for nothing that he’s the single least-popular politician in the country. And after four successive defeats, they’ll likely feel a lot of pressure to show a new kind of face to the country, especially if Trump makes good on his recent promise to retire from politics in the case of a loss this year.
Because of this, along with the fact that Kamala’s picks will likely be closely in line with D.C.’s hawkish consensus, there is ample reason to expect that she will manage to replace big names like Antony Blinken at the start of her administration with appointed names. At the same time, it’s also likely that her appointees will be identical to people like Blinken—i.e., morons. But for domestic policy appointments, things may be a little harder to predict. Republicans will likely see obstructing key appointees for Treasury or Commerce as less risky in comparison to obstructing key appointees for top diplomatic and national security positions and may be entirely willing to stonewall them. This may incentivize Kamala to keep Biden officials like Yellen, Raimondo and, yes, even Pete in their current positions, both in the name of stability and as a means of avoiding extended floor fights.
This puts Pete in something of a weird position. I can imagine that he would rather start off a new term in a far higher-profile position—UN Ambassador, perhaps—as opposed to the prospect of laboring away in a C-tier cabinet office for eight or even 12 years. It’s not the worst gig if you can get it, but it’s hardly a path many politicians have taken to true stardom.
Emil Pérez asks: What do you think will be the outcome of the VP debate between Gov. Walz and Sen. Groyper?, how will it influence the election?
All the things I have read point to it being something Vance should win. His performances in his debates against Tim Ryan in 2022 are often cited as a major reason as to why he didn’t outright lose that election (although I think that McConnell’s money is a far more obvious and important factor). On the other hand, Walz himself has admitted that he doesn’t consider himself a great debater, which has been corroborated to me by friends of mine who worked in Minnesota politics during his races. While I am loathe to give Vance credit for anything, I can imagine that he does have some real hard-won experience at arguing with people, if only because of the time he has probably spent on alt Twitter accounts named shit like SemenGroyper and Chaise1488. Given the format and how many difficult positions the Harris-Walz ticket still hasn’t effectively addressed, I can imagine Vance managing to find his sole win of the cycle this October.
However, if there’s anything that JD Vance’s career has taught us, it is that you should never bet on him meeting or exceeding expectations. He would not be in the position where he is as one of the most disliked politicians in the country if people actually liked the things they were supposed to about him. Even if Walz may not have Vance’s experience of arguing with people about transubstantiation, the fact remains that he is popular while his counterpart isn’t. Simply putting a spotlight on what has worked for him and what has failed for Vance so far could be enough for the Minnesota governor to do better than even his own campaign seems to expect him to.
Tug McMenace asks: Is there reliable polling indicating that Americans are pretty right wing on immigration policy? It's galling to me (a naturalized immimgrant) that the Dems ONLY tack right on immigration. The increasingly distrubing fascist scape goating of immigrants by the GOP SHOULD present a great opportunity for Dems to defend immigrants and make a case for a humane immigration system. Instead, they're silent at best, and complicit at worst in dragging the immigration rhetoric rightwards. I don't understand it, and wonder if you had some insight into what data Dems are using to guide their immigration policy.
As things stand, pretty much all of the data we have indicates that the public has moved decisively to the right on the issue of immigration over the course of Biden’s presidency. While a near-plurality of voters said that they wanted immigration outright increased in 2020—the highest number ever—current attitudes in favor of decreased immigration are the highest they have been in decades. It’s worth noting, however, that public attitudes were largely in line with historic trends up until Democrats completely capitulated on the issue. As late as 2023, those who supported immigration either remaining at its present levels or outright increasing outnumbered those who wanted decreased by a margin of 57 to 41. It has only been this year, in the aftermath of Democrats embracing GOP-drafted bills stripping away the rights of migrants, that support for decreasing immigration has risen to majority support.
Some may say that this is a consequence of how big the problem is, but illegal crossings were already highly elevated in 2021, 2022, and 2023, when attitudes on the issues were at typical levels. It has only been since Democrats joined forces with the GOP in presenting crackdowns as the only acceptable policy response that the public has solidly in line with restrictions. The party is, as some may phrase it, creating their own reality. It’s just not a very good one.
]]>As practically anyone who commentates on politics will inform you, polls are far from perfect. They will all be prone to error, and they can be next to useless by themselves. As such, aggregators and commentators have long taken extensive efforts to minimize and properly depict these risks. But in recent years, another big problem in polling has emerged. This is a recent trend of new polling firms with extensive ties to the far right (if they even have a track record at all) releasing floods of polls with good results for Republicans right before big elections.
While polling firms associating with or even being historically biased towards one side of the political spectrum is nothing new, it should be safe to call this phenomenon somewhat novel. While past elections usually only saw one or two well-known firms with systemic Republican slants, the Biden era has seen the rise of a huge number of such pollsters, who often put out just as much (if not more) data than nonpartisan firms. It’s been enough to vex political professionals, to say nothing of the laypersons out there who just want to know how the race stands. Usually, this would be the place for polling experts to help make things clear, but for whatever reason, these established figures have done nothing to establish any quality control that could prevent these actors from influencing their averages and forecasts. To the extent they have addressed them, it has been to defend the inclusion of firms named RacismElections, usually with unconvincing excuses that refuse to address the obvious problem at hand.
As such, those without an extensive knowledge as to the background and beliefs of these pollsters are left flying blind, unaware as to how they should interpret their results showing Trump with a lead in every swing state. It is here where I hope to be of some service. A major reason why I stayed confident in my belief that 2022 wouldn’t be a red wave, even as both forecasts and commentators began to believe that it would be, was that I chose to doubt these polls. This was something that practically nobody with a byline was willing to do, and it ended up being the correct call. This year, I believe that it will end up being correct again. Here is the first-ever overview of America’s Mickey Mouse pollsters—or, in other words, your only guide for survival between now and November 5th.
For many of the firms on this list, there is room for reasonable people to disagree on the extent to which they should be ignored. Even if they may often have questionable results, and even if they may face strong incentives to get said results, they’re all still companies. They are run by adults. They conduct polling for a living, and they need to provide some kind of benefit for some people out there to make ends meet. That benefit may not always be finding the most accurate possible numbers—we’ll get to that in a moment—but the end result is still numbers produced by professionals who get paid for their work.
At a glance, this may not sound remarkable at all. One might very reasonably expect this to be the case for every pollster that gets included in big-name forecasts and averages. But it is not. Ever since the 2022 midterms, a new cottage industry of “pollsters” run by right-wing Twitter accounts—and, in at least one case, right-wing high schoolers—has grown with rapid speed. Despite only having been around for a short period of time, these firms have already shown a consistent and predictable tendency to publish results that are very strong for Republicans and getting then things wrong, often dramatically so. Naturally, their polls have been included in major models and averages from the very start, without any indication that they have been produced by hobbyists lacking any credible experience. Without ever being asked to prove themselves, these pollsters have been instantly presented as fully legitimate, worthy of consideration alongside the most well-established outfits in the country.
This represents the lassez-faire attitude held by major election sites at its most egregious. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with Twitter personalities and/or politics-obsessed teenagers getting into polling as a hobby, the bar for the inclusion of their work in major, agenda-setting forecasts and averages should be a lot higher than zero. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that they should be required to prove themselves at least once before being taken seriously, as that is how everything else in the world works. However, the powers that be have decided that such demands represent reverse ageism, so it does not appear that this situation will become any easier for regular people to navigate any time soon. With that in mind, here’s a quick rundown on who these firms are and what they are up to.
Patriot Polling. The innovators who practically founded this entire field, the two high schoolers who created and ran Patriot Polling in 2022 were the first to prove that neither experience nor the ability to vote were necessary to be taken seriously by mainstream election analysts. After bursting on to the scene in October of 2022 with the first ever poll to show Dr. Oz leading the Pennsylvania Senate race, the firm immediately saw its results included in FiveThirtyEight’s averages and model. Over the next three weeks heading into election day, the firm would release a slew of polls showing incredibly strong results for Republicans, all of which (with the notable exception of their poll of the New York gubernatorial election) were incredibly off.
While Patriot Polling does provide a surprisingly transparent overview of its methodology, two simple facts remain: it is run by right-wing teenagers, and these right-wing teenagers have so far done nothing to indicate that we should look past their complete lack of qualifications. Perhaps one day they will manage to prove themselves, but that day has not come yet.
SoCal Strategies. A new pollster having just hit the scene this year, SoCal Strategies is perhaps the most interesting of this crop of firms. Despite the person behind this firm, a user named “SoCal Populist,” being a hardline partisan member of right-wing election Twitter, he has made a concerted effort to appear unbiased and trustworthy. And unlike other up-and-comers of similar backgrounds, his data this year hasn’t been egregiously biased towards the GOP. While he’s so far found Trump up in every swing state he’s polled,he also found Kamala Harris with a three-point lead following the debate and some strong advantages for down ballot Democrats. A possible reason for this, which we know because SoCal has been surprisingly transparent about his process, is that he doesn’t really conduct his polls directly like most firms. Instead, he has employed a software service known as Pollfish to get responses to his surveys, which he then weights himself using his own likely voter model. Control over weighting isn’t nothing—the different ways different pollsters weight similar data can end up having a major impact on the final result of a poll—but this setup does mean that SoCal himself is removed from a lot of the process behind his polls, as one would honestly hope for.
If there’s any glaring reason to ignore this firm beyond the obvious fact that it is run by a right-wing Twitter account and has no prior track record, it’s that their surveys are incredibly low cost relative to pretty much every other pollster, which doesn’t bode well for the quality of the data they’re getting. Overall, though, their practices don’t seem to be quite as bad as their background might imply. I wouldn’t include them if I ran a polling average myself, but they’re definitely the most sympathetic of this trio.
Quantus News and Polling. The second right wing Twitter personality to start releasing Pollfish polls this year, Quantus is something of a Goofus to SoCal’s Gallant. Whereas SoCal has undertaken extensive efforts to appear legitimate, Quantus has gone out of his way to brag about how his polling has moved the averages in Trump’s favor.
It has also recently been revealed that several of his surveys received funding from undisclosed right-wing sponsors. While the person running Quantus was able to completely avoid any consequences from FiveThirtyEight by calling both this post and his lack of transparency a “misunderstanding,” I think it speaks for itself.
So far, we have three new pollsters that are included on every major polling site without any proven track records. But don’t let this make you think that only the right wing kids are running questionable operations. On this front, there are countless right wing adults who have been doing the same thing for years, and they’re more than giving these guys a run for their money.
If you spend enough time reading about the newfangled Twitter and/or teenage pollsters, it can be easy to feel somewhat sympathetic to them. They may have no credentials, horrific personal beliefs, and often no past track records to go off, but they at least want to be seen as credible and legitimate. It’s a refreshing contrast in comparison to the oldheads in the world of right-wing polling, who have long since given up even attempting to play the game of looking like anything other than blatant partisan hacks. It is with these firms that we see the purest example of the new right-wing polling incentive structure in action. With their established profiles, these outfits can get extremely easy coverage in right-wing news outlets simply by putting out surveys that match whatever narrative the right is pushing at any given moment.
This throws a major wrench into the historic justifications that aggregators have given to justify including as many firms as possible. As Nate Silver game theory puts it, all pollsters stand to benefit, financially or otherwise, by having the most accurate results possible; that’s what gets them attention, clients, and/or funding from parent organizations. But in our new world, with an extremely polarized media and rampant election denial, right-wing pollsters don’t really stand to gain much from being ranked #1 in his ratings. In fact, they stand to gain a lot more by producing polls that maximize their chances of getting on Fox, where they can provide fodder for whatever story the Murdochs are trying to push at any given time. And if they end up being wrong, that’s no matter. Like Trump, they can simply declare the result rigged if it doesn’t go their way.
For this reason, I strongly disagree with the tendency for established aggregators to give these firms endless benefit of the doubt. To me, at least, the game they’re trying to play is painfully obvious. Here are the biggest culprits.
Rasmussen Reports. As it has denied everything from the 2020 election to vaccine safety to the Holocaust, Rasmussen Reports has gone through many changes over the years, but it has never wavered in its mission. From Obama v. Romney to Harris v. Trump, this grand old man of right-wing pollsters has always been out there to give Republicans the best numbers possible. Their game has become so obvious in recent years that even FiveThirtyEight, which is almost always ready to forgive any transgressions committed by someone willing to give them data, chose to ban them from their site earlier this year. Even their name isn’t real. Scott Rasmussen himself hasn’t been associated with their firm in 11 years.
Of course, it’s not exactly hard to tell where this firm’s sympathies lie. If you’re ever unfortunate enough to see their head pollster, Mark Mitchell, on your Twitter feed, you’ll see him constantly and angrily arguing that good polls for Democrats can’t be real because he personally doesn’t like Democrats. If there’s anything left worth saying about this firm at this point, it’s that it’s not even worth commenting on their results when they’re weirdly good for Democrats. Don’t feel tempted to say that “even Rasmussen has Democrats up by x.” It means nothing. They will invariably follow up that poll with one that shows a massive swing towards Republicans that they will credit to whatever controversy the right is trying to hype up that week.
Trafalgar Group. Although it is not the most tenured right-wing pollster in the country, Trafalgar may very well be the most famous. After first entering the polling scene in 2016, Trafalgar wasted no time before releasing surveys with incredibly favorable numbers for Trump—surveys that would wind up being credited as “the most accurate in the country” when the rest of the industry experienced major polling errors. Their director, Robert Cahaly, would say that they had accomplished this by knowing things other pollsters didn’t—self-aggrandizement that the mainstream media readily accepted as fact.
While Trafalgar would wind up drastically overestimating the right in 2018, a year where mainstream pollsters were generally quite accurate, this wouldn’t tarnish their reputation in 2020. When they came out with strong numbers for Trump again that year, they would be credulously covered as “the only firm that got 2016 right” by the likes of The New York Times. And although Cahaly’s prediction that Trump would win the election wouldn’t come to pass, and he would end up finding the wrong candidate ahead in many swing states, just the fact that he had shown the decisive states to be close when mainstream outfits were depicting a Biden blowout grew his legend further. News outlets would immediately crown Cahaly as “America’s most accurate pollster”—a title he would immediately use to lend credibility to Trump’s claims of election fraud.
Looking at this, some aggregators would see Trafalgar for what it is—a propaganda outlet described as a pollster—and ban them from their site. But leading aggregators like FiveThirtyEight would refuse to make such qualitative considerations. Even though Nate Silver would manage to perfectly articulate how Trafalgar could have simply lucked out in 2020, he chose instead to only look at their on-paper success and conclude that it must have come from a superior methodology. It was a curious claim given that Trafalgar had provided no explanation as to what its actual methodology was, but that wouldn’t stop FiveThirtyEight from not only giving the group one of its highest ratings on its site, but implying that it could save the polling industry itself from death.
They would not be rewarded for such confidence. During the 2022 midterms, Trafalgar would end up having one of the worst cycles in the history of polling. This wasn’t just because they overestimated the right by predictably ridiculous margins—including one race where they undershot the Democrat by thirty (30!!!) points—but also because of new insights as to how they actually conducted their polling. In a stunning article by Split Ticket, the authors revealed that Cahaly informed them that he had a set pool of 75,000 respondents who Trafalgar called for all their polls, and that they decided which of these respondents they wished to contact ahead of time when planning out a poll. He was choosing his own samples, which more or less means that he was deciding the results of his polls ahead of time.
I have not paid any attention to Trafalgar's polls since the release of that article. You shouldn’t, either. As of now, they are still rated as a B+ pollster on the Silver Bulletin pollster ratings.
McLaughlin & Associates. The story with these guys is pretty simple: they’re the single worst-rated pollster on all of FiveThirtyEight, which naturally means that they have been Trump’s personal pollster for years. While I’m a bit skeptical of the explanation that the Republican-slanted pollsters out there are putting out their slanted numbers for the purpose of soothing Trump’s ego, that is probably literally true in the case of these guys.
Harvard/Harris. These polls, which often have strongly Republican results, are conducted by Mark Penn, a former Clinton advisor who has since shifted strongly to the right and worked as a consultant during his term as president. Among other things, Harris is notable for conducting blatantly leading questions about the Gaza War that prime respondents to side with Israel, which are then used by AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations to manufacture consent.
InsiderAdvantage. Moving beyond the realm of the big names like Rasmussen and Trafalgar, we get into the real meat of this list. These are the very new, more innocuous-sounding firms who were the heart and soul of the flooding of the averages in 2022. InsiderAdvantage was a proud soldier in this army, dutifully releasing polls that matched all of the right’s big narratives at the end of the race: that Republicans were up in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, and were taking Democrats down to the wire in Arizona, New Hampshire, and even Washington. While just getting one election cycle wrong isn’t, and shouldn’t be, fatal for pollsters, it’s still worth considering InsiderAdvantage’s background when evaluating them when their results so consistently favor one side.
So, here’s the rundown: InsiderAdvantage is run by a man by the name of Matt Towery, a Republican and former member of the Georgia House of Representatives. Towery has been active in the polling world for quite a long time, and he has held a consistent message throughout his career: that pollsters and the media are systematically biased against Republicans. This began with him simply accusing them of methodological errors in how they conduct surveys, but it has since blossomed to full-on election denial—not much unlike Robert Cahaly, who Towery hosts a podcast with.
It would be negligent to ignore this conspiracizing from Towery when evaluating polls from his firm. In addition to how all of InsiderAdvantage’s polls from 2022 happened to precisely match incorrect right-wing narratives about the race—narratives that Towery has said a liberal media is nefariously crowding out—his recent behavior also raises major eyebrows. On Monday, after initially reporting his Pennsylvania poll to have a 49-48 lead for Trump, Towery released a survey that found him up by two. Conveniently, this was the exact number Trump needed to keep the lead in the RealClearPolitics average in the aftermath of a Suffolk poll released that same night that found Kamala up by three in the Keystone state. I’ll let you come to your own conclusions here.
Of course, InsiderAdvantage was far from the only firm to skew the averages with strong numbers for Republicans in the past. Other outlets who released similar numbers in 2022 and have ties to the far-right include:
Remington Research Group. At the end of the 2022 elections, Remington released polls that found Walker up in Georgia, Oz up in Pennsylvania, and Kelly with a +1 lead in Arizona. Remington is led by Titus Bond, a man with an admittedly badass name and hilarious professional portrait who describes himself as a “Republican political operative.”
co/efficent. This firm found Walker up in Georgia, Oz up in Pennsylvania, and Republicans within striking distance in New Hampshire and Washington in 2022. Their president is a man named Ryan Munce, a former Republican strategist who habitually posts right-wing talking points on his professional Twitter.
Moore Information (now Peak Insights). This firm, which has an exclusively Republican clientele, published surveys in 2022 finding Walker up in Georgia by more than the margin of error and the Washington Senate race as an exact tie. Now rebranded, they have been mostly quiet this cycle with the exception of a poll finding the Arizona Senate race as an exact tie.
Additionally, no analysis of this universe would be complete without mentioning RealClearPolitics itself. These guys so blatantly rig their averages to give Republicans the best numbers possible that there are far too many examples of it to count. Their averages are only useful as a benchmark if you want to see someone try their absolute best to make Trump look as strong as possible with the data available to them.
The point of this article isn’t to say that any poll with any association with right-wing organizations, or any firms run by right-wingers, is by definition fraudulent or even low-quality. This is an assumption that a lot of people have made since even before 2022, and it can often lead people astray. Just for one example, I can’t count the number of times that I’ve seen people just assume that polls from Fox are right-wing trash, even though they’re conducted through a joint partnership of one Democratic firm and one Republican firm. For as degraded as right wing discourse has become, some on their side do still care about winning elections, and they still see at least some incentive to conduct and produce actually useful results.
But to assume that all right-wing pollsters are following these exact incentives and acting entirely in good faith would be naive. To doubt a pollster because of their association with or support for Republicans isn’t to engage in partisan discrimination, as some have said. It’s to engage with American conservatism as it actually exists. This is a faction that, for the past four years, has been denying the results of the most recent presidential election. They see the media in this country—mainstream pollsters very much included—as their sworn enemy. They think that established outlets only release strong numbers for Democrats with the sole purpose of depressing conservative turnout, and they want to fight back. This is not a joke to them. They take their beliefs seriously, and we should, too.
And even if you go as far as to assume that these stances are complete bluffs, which you absolutely shouldn’t, the commercial incentive for accurate data simply does not exist on this part of the right. Their audience is not interested in knowing about the objective state of the race. They simply want to see numbers that say what they believe is popular, to the point that they have revolted against entire cable networks for showing them election results that they didn’t like. The gap in the market is obvious, and it has been one that these firms have been more than happy to fill. As a reward, they’ve been granted massive online followings, regular appearances on Fox News, and endless benefit of the doubt from aggregators who refuse to look at the reality staring them in the face.
As of now, all of the professional firms mentioned in this article, with only one exception in Rasmussen on FiveThirtyEight, are included and the averages and forecasts produced by FiveThirtyEight, the Silver Bulletin newsletter, and RealClearPolitics. The polls released by the teenagers and right-wing Twitter accounts have not been included on RCP and the Silver Bulletin, but they have been included on FiveThirtyEight.
]]>After last night’s second first presidential debate, the Republican Party has reached an inflection point. The warning signs had been growing for quite some time, but now, a devastating conclusion has become unavoidable: Donald J. Trump is not fit to serve as President of the United States for a second term. The eloquent statesman of years past, who once so valiantly defended the size of his penis and blamed Bush for 9/11, is gone. In his place is a doddering, decayed husk who was unable to make even the most basic points and fell for laughably obvious traps. Despite facing an opponent that he and his allies constantly mocked as a pushover, he got demolished, losing the prime-time event he himself set up by a massive margin.
Even if they are unwilling to admit it or simply incapable of recognizing it, the reality facing conservatives is undeniable. Their decision to place loyalty and sentimentality above common sense and nominate the oldest presidential candidate in history has failed. An election that could have otherwise been a layup against a historically unpopular administration has now become one they are on track to lose because of Trump’s negative qualities. Thankfully for the party, many of his problems seem to be specific to him, much like Joe Biden’s age was before he was swapped out. So, who on the Republican presidential bench stands as a conservative Kamala Harris or Gretchen Whitmer, ready to come in and finally realize the long-awaited dream of an electable Trumpism?
There has to be at least one person who could do it, right?
Right?
Senator JD Vance (R-Kekistan)
Wait. Oh shit. He might actually be worse.
Unfortunately for Republicans, the most likely person to head the top of the ticket in the event that Trump dies or suddenly realizes how much people hate him is somebody who is even less popular than he is. While it makes sense in theory that a young, articulate Midwestern Senator would be a better messenger of Trumpist rhetoric than a widely despised convicted felon, this has not been the case in reality. Despite Vance’s extensive efforts to craft an ideology designed to appeal to the most people possible, he has completely failed. This because years of exposure to Twitter accounts with names like TalibanGroyper and DaBasedPeepingTom has rendered him incapable of knowing how normal people act and talk, much less what they care about.
If his dream of a based working class coalition ever had a chance of being realized, it has been completely dashed by his insecure attachment to hardline social conservatism and his hyper-abrasive political style. The end result has been the worst VP selection in modern history. Voters do not like Vance. They do not trust Vance. They do not consider him to be even remotely qualified to be president. A generous reading would just put him in league with Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle; a more accurate one would rank him solidly worse than both of them. Even though he completely lacks his boss’s years of baggage, criminal history, and failure in office, his personal favorability rating is actually slightly worse than his is.
But don’t let this make you think that Vance would only be just as bad of a presidential candidate as Donald Trump. All the data we have says that he would be drastically worse. In a poll conducted this August that tested a hypothetical matchup between Vice President Harris and Senator Vance, Kamala led him by a margin of 57% to 39%. This, if accurate, would represent the largest single victory in any presidential election since 1984. For the record, this same exact poll only gave Kamala a 51% to 46% lead over Trump, strongly suggesting that there are a significant number of Trump supporters who would be reluctant to support Vance in a general election due to his youth and inexperience.
So, it seems as if that Trump may not actually be the unique electoral albatross that some conservatives have cast him as. Not only that, but his status as a former president may make him uniquely appealing in a way that his hypothetically more palatable but less experienced counterparts aren’t. Still, Vance may be something of an extreme case; he’s only been in office for about a year and a half, and he’s associated with an abnormally high number of controversies and bizarre statements. Surely somebody with his beliefs, but a more credible resume, should be capable of squaring this circle.
D Tier is empty to reflect how much Vance sucks.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL)
Now we’re getting serious. Or, at least, we should be. Although he can’t be avoided in a list like this because of his status as Trump’s running mate, it was never any question that JD Vance would be a worse option for Republicans than Trump. He’s a freshman Senator who has only been in Congress for just over one year and performed horrendously the sole time he was ever on the ballot. Obviously, he’d do worse, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the dream of Trumpism-without-Trump is dead. It might just mean that JD Vance himself is remarkably unqualified and extreme. So, what would it look like if the GOP replaced Trump with someone with Vance’s exact beliefs, but a far more credible resume and electoral record? What would it be like if they were running Ron DeSantis, the sole member of the entire party with a legitimately impressive performance in the 2022 midterms?
They’d definitely be better off in comparison to Vance, if nothing else. Whatever else one might say about his bid for president last year, DeSantis never found himself running behind any Democrat by 18 points nationally at any point. But whether or not he would actually be a better bet for the party than Trump is still a completely open question. Contrary to the hopes of Trump skeptics on the right, who have spent years consoling themselves with a story that modern conservatism is a popular ideology that just has a Trump problem, DeSantis completely failed to find a broad appeal during his time in the national spotlight. Just the fact that he wasn’t a blatantly corrupt, perverted, lying criminal (at least to the degree of Trump) wasn’t enough for DeSantis to automatically win over voters who disliked the man he had modeled himself off of. By the time DeSantis exited the race, his national favorability rating was not only in the negatives, but outright worse than both Biden and Trump—the two men he was supposed to be infinitely more electable than.
The thing that should make this especially sobering for many on the right is that this happened as a result of DeSantis only doing the exact thing that was supposed to make him popular: presenting his ideology to the country. Unlike Biden and Trump, Ron DeSantis wasn’t a historically old candidate. He wasn’t marred by scandals. He didn’t have a term as a historically hated president under his belt. He just associated himself with hard-right politics, and that, and that alone, proved to be enough for most of the public to despise him. We don’t even have to theorize that this would have made him just as bad as Trump against Biden, Kamala, or any other Democrat. We have countless head-to-head polls from the end of his campaign showing him underperforming Trump’s national numbers on average.
During the same period in January when Trump was leading Biden by around two or three points, DeSantis was only tied with the President. Granted, some of this might have just been because some right wingers, angry at DeSantis decision’s to primary Trump, lied and said that they wouldn’t vote for him if he were the candidate. But even if you give him all of those voters and assume that conservative turnout is the exact same with him on the ballot—which is by no means a guarantee—you still see no discernible advantage compared to Trump, the person who is supposed to be a historic electoral albatross. Just merely not being Trump, it seems, is not enough for anti-Trump voters to automatically back a Republican if said Republican does nothing to differentiate themselves from Trump on policy.
So, fine. Let’s say that the ideology is the problem—that not only just not being Trump isn’t enough, but that just not being Trump and having experience isn’t enough. Let’s run forward with the wild idea that voters want someone who represents an actually credible break from the person they’ve despised for years. Is there anyone in the entire GOP who fits this bill?
Ambassador Nikki Haley (R-NWO)
Yes, her! It must be her! She has to be the one. She has everything: a credible resume, a more centrist appeal, and an ideology distinct enough from Trump's that she could be seen as her own person by voters. The media has been hyping her up as a Republican juggernaut for well over a decade; if there’s anyone who could conceivably outperform Trump, Nikki Haley has to be the person. The data backed this up, too, at least at one point. In some of the same exact polls where Ron DeSantis was struggling to just run even with Trump’s numbers against Biden, Haley roundly outperformed him. At the end of 2023, some polls found her leading Biden by as much as 13, 16, and even 17 points—historic numbers for any candidate in any context, to say nothing of our era of extreme polarization. So, is this the answer? Could Republicans finally find themselves in a dominant position just by shedding just a few of the more controversial aspects of Trumpism and presenting a more palatable face?
If we were talking about the Nikki Haley of late 2023, I would be willing to seriously consider it. Back then, she appeared to have entered a kind of goldilocks zone: MAGA enough to keep most of the base happy with her, but “mainstream enough” for many independents and Democrats to see her as a “reasonable Republican.” Had she managed to maintain this kind of appeal, she could have gone on from a loss in the primary to establish herself as THE electable Republican for years to come. But instead, she used her time as Trump’s last remaining opponent to go full tilt as a 2016-era anti-Trumper, instantly branding herself as The Enemy in the eyes of much of the Republican base. Not only does this make her all but DOA in future GOP primaries, but it stands to present major complications for national viability in the remote scenario where she somehow becomes the Republican nominee. By the end of her campaign, polls began to show her losing to Biden in states like Texas as a result of RFK Jr. siphoning off massive numbers of conservatives from her.
This weakness on her right flank will plague Haley in any scenario where she becomes the Republican nominee. The only thing that keeps her from being lower than she is is the fact that polarization will probably cause most of these voters to return home, and that her very real appeal with moderate voters may allow her to stem at least some of her remaining losses with them. But even if the Trumpist right suddenly woke up one morning, realized their mistakes, and decided that they needed her, she still wouldn’t be a sure bet for them. Her (ostensible) rejection of the insane conspiracies and radicalism that defines Trump’s brand isn’t nothing—it’s exactly what makes the Republican base hate her. If she continues to reject such things, they will continue to hate her. But if she embraces them wholeheartedly, she will lose exactly what makes her appealing to moderate voters and the media in the first place and risk becoming a new DeSantis. It’s an extremely tricky situation—one that she’s probably not smart enough to navigate.
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Could this be true? Is there actually nobody better than Trump right now for the GOP? It may be. Blatant imitators like Vance are held back massively because they lack the experience Trump has that makes voters see him as a credible candidate. More qualified imitators like DeSantis are unable to do much better than Trump because they’re still held back by his toxic ideology. Other figures who look strong on paper, like Brian Kemp or Glenn Youngkin, could very well end up in the same position. More distinct alternatives like Haley can poll well when they can hide back in the background, but forcing them to choose a side sends them crashing.
This is the terrifying reality facing the GOP right now: not that the addled, incoherent, decrepit Donald Trump we saw on Tuesday is stuck on the ticket, but that he might actually be the best they can get.
]]>This shift in momentum away from the Harris campaign has been at its most obvious at the national level, where recent high-quality polls have given her mediocre-to-concerning results. While this hasn’t yet cost her her national lead, her popular vote advantage has shrunk by enough for many to fear that she has entered a danger zone that puts her at risk of losing the electoral college despite winning more votes nationally. Such an assumption may feel safe to make in the aftermath of 2016 and 2020, but recent polling numbers in the actual must-win states have been showing something interesting—and contrary to the budding consensus that Trump is back on track to win.
Across the country’s top battlegrounds, credible polls haven’t shown Trump’s support improving all that much as the Vice President’s support has slipped nationally. Kamala has proven to be remarkably resilient in these states, which has allowed her to keep an advantage in the electoral college as she heads into her first debate against Trump. As things stand, her electoral coalition, as measured by polling, looks to be far more efficient than what Biden saw in the polls at similar points in the race—a major challenge for the Trump team that they don’t appear to be fully aware of. Here’s the current state of the map, some theories on why this may be happening, and why it may present a big long-term concern for the GOP over the next two months.
As promised, here are my current, pre-debate ratings for the electoral college. Across the board, there aren’t all too many significant changes from my rating in August, which is something of a statement in and of itself. When I published this piece roughly one month ago on August 13th, Trump was in something of a nadir. He had just fallen behind in the national polls and looked as if he might continue to fall with no end in sight. The DNC was looming as a credible opportunity for Kamala to solve her biggest problem—voters not knowing much about her—and leave him in the dust. Kamala’s chances to win were nearing their peak in top prediction models, standing at approximately 56% in Nate Silver’s forecast. Now, none of these things are true. Trump’s standing in national polls has slightly recovered, the DNC has come and gone as an arguable flop, and Kamala’s standing in Silver’s model has cratered to a 35% chance to win at the time of writing. So why, then, has my map only changed marginally, with only a few states seeing adjustments to the right?
Truth be told, I wouldn’t have expected to feel this way if you told me that all of this would happen in August. If I had heard that the DNC would be a polling non-factor that Kamala’s national lead would outright fall by the time of the debate, I wouldn’t have penciled her in as a slight favorite in the Sun Belt states where she wasn’t seeing clear leads at the time. For the entire time that Biden was on the ticket, states like Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina were solidly polling to the right of the country. While I expected Kamala to make disproportionately large gains in those states due to her relative strength among nonwhites compared to Biden, I thought that a gap of some measure would persist that would keep her from winning them unless she had a solid lead. I was willing to believe enough in her momentum that I still penciled her in as narrow favorites in those states, but that was a distinctly different degree of confidence compared to how I felt about her standing in the Great Lakes swing states, which I all rated Lean D.
As it has turned out, this expectation I had was wrong in a way that has benefitted the Vice President. She has not required a strong national lead to contend in the Sun Belt, because the gap between her strength there and her strength nationally is not as large as I thought it might be. Even as her national popular vote advantage has fallen to only two points or so, she has still polled competitively across these four states. As of now, some averages still have her outright leading in Nevada and North Carolina (!) while only trailing narrowly in Arizona and Georgia. In effect, these states are behaving similarly to how I expected the Great Lakes swing states to behave around last month—a tad to the right of the country, but not so biased towards Trump that Kamala would have to be up by 4+ points to contend in them.
Still, there’s another side of this, which is that the Great Lakes swing states (minus Wisconsin, although that may be due to a lack of polling) are behaving about how I would have expected last month if I had known that Kamala would struggle. Part of why I felt confident enough to put Pennsylvania and Michigan in the Lean D column was that I expected something of a boost for Kamala after the DNC that would bring her to a solid position in those two states. That didn’t happen, so her position in both states is unsteady right now. It’s not nearly as unsteady as Silver’s forecast has it—unlike him, I’m not accepting every survey put out by Julius Evola Strategies that shows Trump leading in PA—but it’s not Lean D territory, either. Even if you look solely at high-quality surveys in both states, you can’t avoid some mediocre numbers for the Vice President. In Michigan, the EPIC/MRA poll showing Trump with a one-point lead in the state is far from ideal given that firm’s record for accuracy, even if other surveys there have looked better for her. In Pennsylvania, Kamala hasn’t found a lead larger than just one point since Quinnipiac’s poll of the state nearly a month ago, which obviously isn’t ideal.
Does this mean that the dream of a Great Lakes Blue Wall is dead? It would probably be more accurate to say that it never really existed in the first place. I didn’t have Michigan and Pennsylvania at Lean D because that was what I considered to be the natural state of affairs. I had them at Lean D because I was seriously considering the possibility that Kamala was on track for a full-on-surge that could put her in a truly solid position in all three states. That didn’t happen, so they look about how I expected them to look—basically tied. The more accurate thing to say is that the Republican dream of a Sun Belt ballast that would vault them to the threshold of 270 by default in the event of a close race doesn’t appear to exist. Just the fact that he’s contending in Michigan and Pennsylvania hasn’t also meant that he has the Sun Belt swing states locked up, or that he’s even leading in them at all.
This has the potential to be very, very significant. Had the states behaved in response to the flop DNC in the way I might have expected them to a month ago—i.e., the Sun Belt moving clearly in Trump’s column while the Great Lakes become pure tossups—the map would look roughly like how it does below. Trump would only need one of the three truly competitive states to win, while Kamala would need to sweep all three.
But now that AZ, NV, GA and NC don’t appear to have a particularly strong lean (or much lean at all) in Trump’s favor in the event of a close race nationally, this advantage is completely gone. Even if you’re generous to Trump and assume Wisconsin is closer than the polls say, Kamala still starts out with a slight lead in this whack-a-mole race to 270. North Carolina stands out as particularly important here—if Trump had a clear advantage in that state he won in 2020, he’d start out closer to the threshold, but he doesn’t, so the map becomes far more complex for him.
Still, there’s one major question here that is not only left unanswered, but has actually become more puzzling. Why are voters in these seven specific states all standing strong for Democrats while the rest of the country is shifting to the right? The current Split Ticket average has the national vote at D+2.5, representing an even two-point shift to the right from 2020. Applied evenly across all of the seven swing states, such a shift would be enough for Trump to flip all of them except for Michigan and Nevada. But when you look at the statewide averages, you see Georgia, Arizona and Michigan only shifting to the right by about one point, Pennsylvania only shifting to the right by 0.1, and Wisconsin and North Carolina outright shifting to the left by somewhere around two points. It is only in Nevada, which has long been theorized as fertile ground for Trump, where one can see a shift to the right about in line with the country—but even then, it hasn’t been enough for him to lead in the state. What gives?
My first thought was that this may be a consequence of ad spending. While voters outside of the country’s core seven swing states had an opportunity to see what Kamala is about through a seemingly-underwhelming DNC and an awkward CNN interview, swing state voters have been bombarded with ads about her for the past two months (as a Georgian, you can trust me when I say I’m speaking from experience here). This theory would make sense if we only saw this difference recently, but that hasn’t exactly been the case. The phenomenon of swing states shifting to the right by less than the country as a whole was evident as early as the 2022 midterms, and it showed up repeatedly in polls of the Great Lakes swing states when Biden was the nominee. It’s only in the Sun Belt swing states where this Democratic resilience is somewhat new, and that just raises further questions. Demographically, states like Arizona and Georgia are hardly similar to each other, and they couldn’t be more different than states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. What’s the common thread tying these states together and making them behave so similarly?
It may be a simple one: the fact that every voter in every one of these states knows what it’s like to live under Republican governance. Every single voter in every one of these states either currently has a Republican governor or had one within the past decade. All but Michigan are either Republican trifectas or divided governments. Many of them currently have draconian abortion bans. For Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in these states, the threat of Republicans in power isn’t just theoretical. It’s very real to them, and it may be leading them to demand less of Kamala when determining if they support her or not. This is something we’ve arguably already seen in the 2022 midterms, when Republicans made major gains in states where voters didn’t have to worry about their rights (like New York and California) while simultaneously wiping out in places where their rights were on the ballot (like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona).
If this is right, the voters in these states are simply too well-organized and battle-hardened to care about things that may put off other voters in less electorally relevant states. Their states may still go Republican if things truly fall apart for Kamala, but they aren’t going to have a crisis of faith over minor controversies in the same way voters in Long Island or Orange County might. Even if the Kamala campaign hasn’t gotten real yet, these voters already have—and they’re enough to keep the Vice President favored going into tonight.
]]>On paper, there’s still a lot here to be happy about for Democrats. Just one month and a half ago, the party was saddled with a candidate who couldn’t campaign and staring down the barrel of a Trump landslide. Quite a lot has gone right since then. As things stand now, Kamala Harris is a candidate with a national lead and break-even personal favorables. Her party is on a near-decade-long winning streak in the exact states she needs to win. Even the most Republican-slanted poll aggregators have still found her leading in enough swing states to make up 270 electoral votes; in her absolute worst swing state, she only trails by just over a point.
If you told the party two months ago that this is what they race would look like after Labor Day, they would be overjoyed. But over the past few weeks, those who wish to see Trump defeated have started to feel quite down on themselves. The excitement and hype that defined the early Kamala campaign has given way to a feeling that things are not going as they should. And while it feels temping to just call these people overly anxious or just too hard to impress, it’s not hard to see where this feeling of unease has come from. This period of stagnation and/or slight decline for Kamala hasn’t happened just any time. Instead, it has occurred right after her party’s national convention, when history tells us she should be seeing at least something of a boost. Instead, her numbers have gone down marginally—an unexpected development that has seen Trump’s odds improve everywhere from leading election models to betting markets.
Does this mark the beginning of the end for the anti-Trump cause? Not at all. It just means that we have reached the end of the beginning. If there ever was a chance that Kamala could ride to victory just off of vague feelings of excitement and hope, that’s clearly not possible now. The campaign has entered a new stage—one where voters are looking at her with a closer, if not necessarily critical, eye. And it has been at this stage of the campaign where her operation has started to look worryingly out-of-depth.
In an unfortunate sequel to how these same staffers ran Biden’s doomed re-election campaign, Harris 2024 has adopted a hyper-defensive approach: hiding their candidate from the media, eschewing policy specifics, and generally acting as if they have something to hide about her. Not only is this causing them to fumble what should be a prime opportunity to improve their standing, but it might end up being actively harmful to their candidate’s reputation. Here’s why I think that this race, despite everything, is still Kamala’s to lose, and why she might end up doing just that if her campaign doesn’t change its strategy.
To start, I’ll address the more controversial half of that statement first: that this race is still Kamala’s to lose. With her odds of winning the election plummeting into the mid-30% range on leading mathematical forecasts and top-rated pollsters putting out surveys with Trump leads, it can feel hard not to feel bearish about her chances. These developments are real, and they present some concerning signs. Still, I’d much rather be Kamala than Trump right now—and it’s for many of the same reasons that I thought that 2022 wouldn’t be a red wave.
The biggest factor supporting the pro-Kamala argument right now is the fundamentals: i.e., the ways the voters themselves actually behave in the sporadic elections that occur prior to Election Day each cycle. These data points, which are still far too often ignored in mainstream election coverage, have a very special place in my heart. They were what first convinced me that Democrats were in a stronger position than most thought during the 2022 elections, and they have continued to serve me well ever since. The entire time that Biden was trailing Trump, strong Democratic results in special elections (as well as other things, like Senate polling) formed the core of my argument that he, not the party, was the problem. This theory was overwhelmingly vindicated by Kamala’s immediate surge in the polls right after she replaced Biden, and it was what made me so confident in her chances from the catch. After years of receiving constant signs that America was desperate to vote for a regular Democrat against Trump, it now seemed that voters had gotten just that. With Trump’s image set in stone and his campaign completely out of touch, I was very open to the idea that this could simply be enough.
The best sign for Democrats right now is that the most important thing here—a majority of voters choosing their party against the Trump GOP—is still showing up in the data. Not only have we not seen any recent special election or primary results indicating that Trump has suddenly won over the electorate, but we just got the results from the biggest, most predictive pre-election indicator of them all, and it went very well for Democrats. By this, I mean nothing other than the Washington primary. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about or why this matters, first: congratulations for managing to stay off election Twitter. Second, here’s a brief recap. Over the past number of election cycles, the August statewide primary elections in Washington state have wound up being some of the most consistently reliable indicators for the national environment in each election. This is because the state’s top-two primary system makes every candidate running for office in the state compete on the same ballot, which makes the primary something of a preliminary general election held several months before Election Day itself.
What has made this primary famous (at least among a certain subtype of obsessives) is how it has gotten the eventual lean of each election cycle right when the polls and pundits have gotten it wrong. Here are the specific numbers, courtesy of a fantastic examination of the primary results by Split Ticket.
If you adjust the raw primary margin numbers about 12 points to the right to adjust for Washington's leftward lean relative to the nation, it tells a clear story. Back in 2018, it forecasted a Democratic blowout when commentators on all sides were arguing (or worrying) that it would be a 2016 redux. In 2020, it correctly portended a relatively close election at the same time that the polls incorrectly pointed towards a Democratic blowout. In 2022, it showed a relatively neutral year instead of a red wave environment. And this year, the Washington primary clocked in its single bluest result since 2018: more than five points to the left of its result in 2022, and nearly two points to the left of its result in 2010. Using the 12 point shift as a rough rule, this implies a national generic ballot margin of about D+4. In this scenario, Democrats would comfortably flip the House and be heavily favored in the electoral college, assuming that Kamala Harris runs in line with a generic Democrat.
It’s all very solid news for the party. But close observers of the spreadsheet may notice one thing: that, in 2016, Washington voted Democratic by a near-identical margin as it did this year, but Trump still won anyways. This instance highlights the potential problems with having just one state to go off of. While Washington can sometimes be representative of nationwide shifts, it can sometimes be off. The state is very urbanized and well-educated compared to the rest of the country. In an election where educated urban areas shift one way, while the rest of the country shifts another (as happened in 2016), the Washington primary results may give us an incomplete and/or outright misleading view of what November may look like in states that aren’t like Washington—i.e., all of the states that stand to decide the election.
It’s a frustrating conundrum. To potentially resolve it, the folks at Split Ticket separated Washington into its urban and non-urban parts to minimize the influence of the more unique urban parts of the state. What they found was very interesting. While Washington state as a whole moved significantly to the left between the 2012 and 2016 primaries, non-urban Washington moved several points to the right—a possible canary in the coal mine for Hillary Clinton’s eventual collapse in rural America. Crucially, non-urban Washington did not continue to trend to the right between 2016 and 2020. It actually shifted to the left by a few points, which itself arguably foreshadowed Joe Biden’s modest comeback in the Rust Belt, which was both meaningful enough for him to flip the states he needed but not nearly as drastic as polling indicated.
Had non-urban Washington zigged while the rest of the state zagged this August, there would be real reasons to be skeptical of the overall good numbers in the primary and potentially fear a 2016 redux. But not only did this not happen to the same extent as 2016, it didn’t happen at all. This year, non-urban Washington was the bluest it has been in any election since 2012 (excluding the 2018 blue wave). It’s a result consistent with everything we’ve seen and theorized about how secular voters of all stripes have reacted to the rise of the religious right, and it’s a major shot across the bow to right wing hopes of continued movement towards Trump among the electorally invaluable northern white voters he will need to win. Basically, it’s further confirmation of everything we’ve known about American politics since Dobbs: the right’s appeal is shot, and they don’t have a path to national victory against credible opponents.
So, what’s the catch here for Democrats? For most of the party, there isn’t one. If you’re a candidate in a competitive House or Senate race, this is very good news for you. It portends a national environment to the left of both 2022 and even 2020, which should result in a House majority and at least 48 seats in the Senate. The only exceptional case here is the party’s exceptional candidate for President, who voters may not yet evaluate the same way they evaluate a generic Democrat.
The fact that this was the case in the first place, when Kamala entered the race two months ago, was unsurprising. In fact, it made complete sense. At that moment, the Vice President was entering the race later than any other major party candidate in modern history. She was incredibly low profile as Vice President, had a very short career in national politics before that, and was generally associated with precious few things other than the video where she said “We did it, Joe!” If this had dragged her down and left her unable to even contend in the race, it would have been highly unfortunate, but not really a huge shock. Fortunately, it didn’t take much time before she rose in the polls and reached numbers roughly in line with how you would expect a generic Democrat to have. Given how quickly she achieved this without really doing much of anything, I was open to believing that voters were simply willing to see her as the generic Democrat they’ve always wanted.
Now that we’re deeper into the campaign and have more information, we can see that this has been the case for at least some voters who were unwilling to back Biden after his debate performance. Kamala hasn’t come close to falling back to his July nadir in even her worst surveys, and it would be hugely shocking if she did. But these easily gettable voters do not seem to be numerous enough to hand Kamala victory by themselves, to say nothing of achieving an actually decisive win. To be in the truly solid position enjoyed by the rest of her party instead of languishing somewhere between a narrow favorite and a 50/50 shot, she will need to actually do something to convince voters that she’s just as capable, competent and trustworthy as their local Democratic Congressperson. By itself, this isn’t all that surprising or even necessarily a cause for concern. What is concerning is that we’re already at a point where the Harris-Walz campaign has started to work at winning the confidence of these exact people through their media strategy. And not only has this failed to work so far, but it may be actively making things worse.
As of now, the Democratic Convention stands as the biggest and most concerning example of this phenomenon. Going into it, I was somewhat optimistic that the campaign could use their four days of primetime programming to accomplish the big-if-not-necessarily-difficult task ahead of them: to give Americans a sense of what their candidate stands for and see her as a prospective leader. It would require some big swings, but I was able to imagine them doing it. After all, this was the same candidate that made the gutsy and ultimately successful choice to pick Walz for VP and had reportedly been ignoring the moronic messaging advice from Biden’s closest associates. But when the proceedings actually began, it became clear that they would not be taking any real risks. Instead, they hewed to a deeply out-of-touch Beltway conception of safety: tightly embracing Biden, running to the right on the issues, and saying nothing about their candidate other than her biography and the fact that she supports good things that are good, like “less inflation” and a “lethal military.”
Unless all you needed to know to support Kamala was the fact that she actually wants to lower prices instead of raising them, her convention probably left you with more questions than answers about her—especially as it concerns how she’ll be any different from Biden. While I was open to the idea that she could still enjoy a boost in spite of that, it didn’t happen. Contrary to what I thought could be the case, and what the Kamala team seems to still believe, a meaningful share of voters just wants to see more from her before they feel fully comfortable getting behind her. This isn’t a particularly unreasonable set of demands, but they aren’t optional. If her campaign wants to win, it will need to meet them.
While the DNC has surely been the biggest opportunity the campaign has missed to meet these voters where they are over the last month, it has been far from the only one. For instance, one would think that the Kamala campaign would relish opportunities for major interviews to drive the news cycle and get people to know their candidate more. Instead, they’ve avoided them like the plague, only acceding to a single awkward sit-down weeks after it became something of an issue. Despite the popularity of liberal positions, her campaign has almost made it something of a point to avoid discussing policy, only committing their candidate to the most basic water-is-wet platitudes about supporting an economy that is, in fact, good. They only released an issues page on their campaign site on September 8th, less than two months before the election, and it appears to be a copy paste of Biden’s agenda. And I mean “copy paste” in a literal sense. If you send the link of the page to a friend, it includes a caption about “re-electing Joe Biden,” heavily implying that they had roughly the same exact platform in the works before he dropped out.
The issue here isn’t that stuff like this isn’t just that it will fail to win confidence, although that’s bad enough. It’s that it may outright lower confidence because it makes the Vice President look like someone with something to hide. If you’re someone just tuning into the campaign right now, you’re seeing someone who is hiding from the press, disavowing past positions on a near-daily basis with no explanation, and inexplicably hiding behind her unpopular boss on top issues. What kind of politician does this look like? Does this look like the tough-as-nails, ready-on-day-one former prosecutor that the Harris campaign has attempted to advertise her as? Or does it look like the Kamala Harris of Trump’s attack ads: an inept, out-of-touch, outright dumb lightweight and closet radical who can’t do anything right?
It’s hard not to see shades of the Biden team in all of this, especially since the same people who ran his effort make up her entire campaign staff. They handled Biden the exact same way back when he was running, with some of the exact same bullshit explanations as to why it was actually the savvy move, and it ended in complete disaster. And the most concerning part of this might not even be what it says about how her campaign understands strategy—it’s that it may be a sign that they are throwing strategy entirely out the window in the service of personal feuds and their own policy preferences. Biden and his people didn’t just hide from the media because he wasn’t capable of speaking properly off of a teleprompter. It was also a result of longstanding, petty feuds they’ve had with the media as a whole. Unable to admit that their glorious leader could have become unpopular for valid or even understandable reasons, they convinced themselves of a self-indulgent fantasy that the likes of The New York Times were out to get them and needed to be punished by being frozen out.
Even assuming that the Biden people are exactly right—that the media actually is out to get them and should be punished for their vile schemes—what they want is an indulgence that cannot be afforded right now. Hiding from the media when nearly 30% of the public is saying that they need to know more about you is a luxury, not a necessity. Insisting on steadfast support for Israel and freezing out Palestinian speakers because it’s what you personally believe, even though the public is more favorable to Democrats who support a ceasefire and arms embargo, is a luxury, not a necessity. Refusing to break from a historically unpopular president because you don’t want to hurt his feelings is a luxury beyond luxury itself.
The portrait of the Harris campaign that has been painted over the past month is not a campaign that is primarily focused on winning. It is one of a campaign that is insisting on winning in a way that makes it feel good: where it doesn’t need to engage with organizations it feels slighted by, doesn’t compromise on the things it doesn’t want to, and doesn’t need to admit the realities it doesn’t like. And it still may be enough to win. As shown above, people really want to vote for an acceptable Democrats against Trump and his cronies, and they may be willing to force themselves to see that in the Vice President even if she doesn’t give them reason to. But if this election is even a fraction as important as her campaign says it is, her campaign has no excuse for making us take this risk just to soothe their egos. They should be able to compromise on their bullshit conspiracy theories and coping mechanisms for just two months for the greater good. If they can’t, and they lose while the rest of the party wins, it will be hard to say that they weren’t asking for it.
]]>If your answer is “very little,” you’re far from alone. Beyond the novelty of him being the first and (so far) only president to win, lose, and then win back the White House, Cleveland didn’t really do much to earn himself a place in the public’s collective consciousness during his two stints in power. There are just two things about him that connect this Gilded Age pol to today: one, that he was the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms, which Donald Trump is aiming to do, and two, the fact that he was the last Democrat to come into the White House without securing a trifecta. That was the outcome of the 1884 elections, and it has not happened once in all of the 140 years since.
It sounds strange, but it’s entirely true. Working backwards, Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Carter all came into office with control over the House and Senate. So did Kennedy, Roosevelt, Wilson, and even Cleveland himself when he won his second term in 1892. Every single one of these presidents was able to hit the ground running after coming into office. Every single one of them had the politics of their early presidency defined by a reaction to what they did, not what they were prevented from doing. But with the way things are going, Kamala Harris appears to be on track to break this streak. In spite of the GOP’s best efforts to choke every race they can, they are still likely to win a bare majority in the Senate that will allow them to block the agenda of a President Harris for at least her first two years. The fact that this hasn’t happened for a Democrat since the days of gas lighting means that, if it occurs, it will be entirely uncharted territory, where the rules of past elections will no longer apply.
And we may not even get to see it.
Thanks to years upon years of political malpractice on the part of the GOP, what should have been impossible—a Democratic trifecta in 2025—is still somehow within reach. The party’s path to a majority in the upper chamber is narrow, but it is real, and it goes through five unexpectedly competitive states: Ohio, Montana, Texas, Florida, and Nebraska. In this article, I’ll go through all of them in detail to answer the all-important question of this cycle: whether Blexas, Blorida, and even Blubraska are actually in the cards, and what it might take to get there. I’ll also look at the likely scenario where the GOP nets a narrow majority and explain why I would consider that to still be both a complete humiliation and a possible step on the road to long-term defeat. Here’s the state of the race for Congress, 2024, and why I think that, contrary to the consensus of the past few years, the GOP faces a very bleak future in the upper chamber.
The Official Ettingermentum Senate Race Ratings: September, 2024. No Tossups.
Starting off broadly, we have the first update to my across-the-board race ratings since this April. The topline has changed slightly, but very meaningfully. Five months ago, I projected a 50-50 even split, with the median seat (Montana) rated as Tilt D. Now, I have the chamber at a 51-49 Republican split, with both the 50th and 51st seats (Montana and Texas) rated as Lean Republican. Overall, the odds of a Democratic majority are less likely, but the party has both a higher floor and higher ceiling than it did earlier in the year. Most of this article will be about this higher ceiling: what its exact height may be and how likely Democrats may be to reach it. But before we get there, I want to talk about how the party has solidified its floor first.
When looking at 2024 Senate elections ahead of time, what terrified Democrats the most about them wasn’t the possibility that they would just lose the chamber. For a map that included blue seats in Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia, that was taken for granted. The true threat in the eyes of many of the party’s strategists was the possibility that the party would be swept out of roughly half a dozen seats in purple states and be unable to compete in the chamber for a generation. These fears were especially acute before the 2022 elections, when it was taken for granted that Democrats would hemorrhage seats in Biden’s first midterm, but they were still very present afterwards. Going off of the 2020 results, many assumed that ticket splitting was no longer going to be a factor in presidential years, which would leave the fates of the party’s purple-state incumbents up to how the party performed at the national level. And since all of these purple states voted to the right of the nation in 2020, it was further assumed that Democrats would need to match or exceed Biden’s national margin of victory just to have a shot at holding these seats at all. That wasn’t considered to be an especially likely outcome, so a solid GOP majority in the chamber was regarded to be something of a foregone conclusion.
It didn’t take long before this line of logic was proven to be very reductive. Most glaringly, many neglected to consider a very important reason as to why why 2020’s Senate elections might have lacked expect ticket-splitting: the party had practically no strong incumbents on the ballot that year. Across the 15 races the party won in 2020, their winners were almost all either nonincumbents or first- and second-term Senators without much of a history of outperforming their party. A major exception to this was New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who’s length of service and long electoral history in the state makes her the best comparison to the Bob Caseys and Tammy Baldwins up for reelection this year. Her state having voted to the right of the nation four years prior should have theoretically put her on the chopping block, in the actual election, she won quite easily, outperforming Biden by a full eight points. This result provided a big exception to the new consensus that every presidential-year election post-2016 was set to be determined by the national environment, but most just wrote it off as New England weirdness and didn’t give it much thought.
It probably should have received more consideration. If the polls are even close to right this year, Shaheen’s race appears to be the model for most Democratic Senate candidates in purple states this cycle, whether they be incumbents or nonincumbents. Across the board, these candidates are outrunning Kamala by margins matching and sometimes even exceeding Shaheen’s 2020 overperformance, putting them in extremely solid positions in states that many thought Republicans would win by default this year. I keyed in on this in two states—Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—as early as April of last year, writing that the strength of the Democratic incumbents in both states, along with weak early GOP recruitment, led me to believe that both states were Likely Democratic. So far, this early confidence has been entirely vindicated. Over 16 months since I first published these ratings, Republicans have not led in a single poll in either Wisconsin or Michigan, despite their supposedly all-important rightward lean in 2020. Even the most Republican-biased averages find both Bob Casey and Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic incumbents in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin respectively, currently ahead of their opponents by more than six points. As I expected, only the closeness of these states at the presidential level gives the GOP any hope in these two Great Lakes states.
But just because I anticipated Democratic strength in these two states doesn’t mean that I didn’t make some mistakes. Recent polling in the Southwest has shown Democrats to be somehow, someway, in an even stronger position there than they are in the Great Lakes. In Arizona, Rep. Ruben Gallego, in his race against perennial candidate Kari Lake, has opened up a staggering eight-point lead despite a hotly contested presidential race in the state. In Nevada, Sen. Jacky Rosen, who appeared to be a completely unassuming first-term incumbent, has put together a hilariously large double-digit lead. With two months to go until Election Day, neither of these states appear set to be competitive at all, a valuable lesson in never giving the modern GOP the benefit of the doubt. The only quasi-competitive state where they haven’t been completely and utterly swamped is Michigan, where they have run something of a credible candidate. But even there, the party still hasn’t managed to find a lead in a single poll. You could make an argument that that contest is Likely D, too, but since the Dem in that race is literally CIA I’m not going to go out of my way to hype them up.
Altogether, giving Democrats the races I have rated as Safe, Likely, or Lean Democratic lands them a total of 48 seats—only two seats off from a majority and (presumably) a trifecta if they win the presidency. This bare minimum puts them in a very solid position in the upper chamber over the coming cycles even if they lose everything else, which I’ll get to in a moment. For now, though, let’s look at where the party stands in the five states that could feasibly get them over the line: Ohio, Montana, Texas, Florida, and Nebraska (seriously).
To begin our list of Democrat-curious red states, we begin with a contest that, so far, feels too good to be true for Democrats. In theory, Senator Sherrod Brown should be in grave danger this year. He’s running for re-election in a state that has been solidly red, and, unlike someone like Jon Tester, he lacks a truly impressive track record of overperforming the top of the ticket. But ever since pollsters started looking at the race last year, this human proof-of-concept for left-liberalism has been polling almost alarmingly well. He consistently found leads against a wide variety of opponents, including some with real name recognition, but always did his best against Bernie Moreno, a far-right used car salesman with no campaign experience.
Naturally, Republican primary voters handed Moreno the nomination in a landslide. Since then, he has failed to even poll within the margin of error in any of the surveys conducted in the state; even Republican-aligned pollsters have found him trailing in the mid-single-digits. While some have compared these early leads for Brown to Tim Ryan’s early leads against JD Vance to argue that they’re bound to fade, this, somehow, doesn’t give Vance enough credit. By early September 2022, JD had actually managed to come within the margin of error or actually lead in several polls. So far, Moreno hasn’t managed this. All of the polls in the race so far have found Brown leading outside of the margin of error, despite the fact that these same surveys have also found Trump leading Biden and Harris by large margins. As strange as it may be to see, the message from these pollsters is clear: a lot of Trump-supporting Ohioans are still behind their left-populist Senator.
All of this is enough for me to judge Brown to be the favorite even in the late stages of his race. But while his raw numbers (about D+5 so far) may warrant a Lean D placing, there are a few things that keep me from feeling truly confident in his position. The biggest thing here is the sheer lack of polling in his race. While the last three polls in the race have all found him ahead by five points each, none of the firms that have found these numbers are particularly reliable. The most recent poll, and the only one to sample voters this September, is by “SoCal Strategies”—i.e., a right-wing Twitter account. The two before that were conducted by Rasmussen Reports and ActiVote, both of which are unreliable for their own reasons. While it may be tempting to gloat that even the worst pollsters find Brown comfortably ahead, the more likely explanation is that they’re waiting for the right moment to put Moreno in the lead. The most recent result by a nonpartisan pollster is Marist’s Brown+5 survey of the race from early June, which is both a strong result and a bit too early to draw too much from.
Personally, I’d really love a similar result from a similar pollster over a more recent timeframe. That would be enough for me to proclaim Moreno a historically bad candidate with a real risk of losing, which I consider to be entirely plausible. But the lack of any real polling over the past few months makes me inclined to rate things a little more conservatively. I can see the vision of a truly spectacular Brown overperformance, but I’d like to see it corroborated by some more trustworthy firms before I feel truly confident in it. As of now, I have it rated at Tilt Democratic, slightly down from my Lean Democratic rating earlier this year. I want to believe; I just need a little more to go off of.
Moving on to Big Sky Country, we find a reversion to the mean that is both very disappointing and very predictable. If the idea of a Democrat winning off of their personal brand in Ohio has always felt a little implausible, it has felt nothing less than fantastical in Montana. The idea that Jon Tester could win here always rested on the hope that he was a truly exceptional figure, capable of winning over the kind of crossover support that no Trump-era Senate candidate has ever been able to (aside from Susan Collins). While some early data, like his reported 65% approval rating, pointed to this possibility, recent data indicates that he has somewhat predictably fallen back down to Earth.
While it’s worth noting that every poll of the state over the past six months has either been done by a Republican-aligned firm or commissioned by a Republican group, the facts are still the same: the numbers show Tester trailing. I’d love to call these results fake GQP propaganda in line with the surveys that found Oz leading Fetterman in 2022, and they probably are at some level. Many of these firms have included questions that are intended to prime voters to pick Sheehy. But this also isn’t the entire story. The surveys that found fake Republican leads in swing states two years ago were also regularly countered by more accurate polls that found their opponents ahead by about the margins they ended up winning by. No such contrary surveys have been published so far in 2024. It’s possible to interpret this as a sign that Democratic pollsters have looked at the race, but decided not to publish the numbers because they look too bad for Tester.
I don’t think that this is a guarantee—the lack of high-quality Senate polling this cycle is a bizarre trend across the board—but it is believable given just how deeply Republican Montana is. I won’t rule him out until we get more reliable data, but the sheer conservatism of Tester’s home state makes it easier to believe that things are over for him than it is for even Brown. Perhaps his personal popularity ends up pulling him over the line, but I’ll believe it when I see it. As of now, it’s only my personal distrust of GQP pollsters that keeps this race at “just” Lean Republican.
As one door closes, another opens. At the same time that polling in Montana became consistently cringeworthy for Democrats, they have found new hope in the Lone Star State. This opening is entirely because of one simple thing: Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz. While his status as a two-term incumbent should hypothetically be a boon for Republican odds in his seat, the exact opposite has been true in reality. Despite (or perhaps because of, his national profile) Cruz has been a lifelong underperformer. His extreme politics and unfortunate personal branding have caused to continue this into even his third campaign, where he has consistently underran Trump.
This mediocrity has been quite handy for Democrats searching for a potential replacement for Tester’s seat as his numbers have deteriorated. As Trump’s fortunes have declined in the past month, Cruz’s have fallen even further. The same polls that have found Trump with a decent-but-shrinking lead in the Lone Star State have also found Cruz with an smaller advantage within the margin of error. It’s entirely plausible that a small Trump win in the state could result in a Democratic victory at the Senate level, which puts the pressure on Kamala during the remaining two months.
As things stand, her current three-to-four-point national lead just won’t be adequate to make Texas close enough to push Allred across the line. Her numbers will need to improve just a tad, whether that be through the debates, a Trump imprisonment, or voters simply freaking out at the prospect of a Trump victory late in the campaign and running away. All three of these things are possible, but none are guaranteed. Thus, Texas remains leaning towards the GOP until further notice.
After Texas, Florida stands as the Democratic Party’s second plausible shot for a pickup that could sub in for a loss in Montana. The upshot for this race is simple: it’s a lot like the one in Texas, but broadly worse for Democrats across a wide variety of factors. Rick Scott is a bad candidate, but not quite as provably bad as Ted Cruz. Recent election results have been good for Republicans in both states, but they’ve seen better numbers in Florida than in Texas. And while Texas has moved steadily to the left during the Trump era, Florida has rocketed to the right. While the Sunshine State was 17 points to the left of the Lone Star State in 2012, it was only two points to its left in 2020. The long-term hope that exists for Democrats in Texas just isn’t there for the party in Florida, where it’s hard to think of any areas that stand out as growth opportunities for the party.
In my view, this gives Rick Scott a distinct edge in his contest that Cruz doesn’t have. What keeps this race still in the running as a potential pickup for Democrats is that, for whatever the future may hold in the state, it isn’t that red now. Seven points to the right of the nation and rising is a heavy lift, but it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility in the case of a Kamala landslide in the way that Montana or even Ohio may be. If the party had a particularly strong candidate in the state, or if Scott was clearly meaningfully weak, there’d be some reason to feel optimistic about Democrats picking it up even in a scenario where they don’t outright clean house nationally. But that’s not the case. So, as of now, their odds of winning the state’s Senate race are about the same as their odds of winning the state at the presidential level—i.e., not all that high. Right now, all this race provides the party is a hypothetical path to winning the chamber if they happen to do very well nationally, but ticket splitting totally falls off and leaves Tester and Brown and the dust.
Here’s the ultimate sleeper race of the 2024 election so far. This contest has been lurking in the background as a potential upset for a while, but it always felt so far out there that I refused to pay it much mind. It’s a scenario straight out of a left-liberal wet dream, starting with the candidate himself: Dan Osborn, an union president and strike leader running as an independent. He runs in a red state, and not only does he do better than those contemptible elitist Democrats, but he has a real shot at winning the whole thing against his Republican opponent. That’s right: it turns out all we needed to do to net unprecedented victories was to just do what we wanted to do in the first place.
I’m always very skeptical of stories like this, whether they come (as they very often do) from the hard right or my own team, so I assumed that his surprisingly good polling numbers were fake until proven otherwise. And this wasn’t just a hunch or undue pessimism or anything else—there were some good reasons for this. Between November 2023 and August 2024, four polls were conducted of the race showing a close margin, a tie, or an outright Osborn lead. But all of these polls were commissioned either by Osborn himself or a group in support of him, and some of them engaged in somewhat questionable practices that seemed to explain why Osborn’s numbers looked so strangely good.
Specifically, I was put off by the two polls from early August and July this year commissioned by Osborn that showed a close race. Before these two pollsters polled the contest between Osborn and his opponent, Senator Deb Fischer, they asked respondents whether or not they’d be open to voting for an independent in the Senate race. This sort of question ordering can be a really big deal. Political psychologists have firmly established that it can greatly influence how respondents respond to surveys later on by priming them to think a certain way, and it appeared that this was exactly what was happening in this poll.
While these sorts of tricks aren’t exactly uncommon in internal polling—GOP pollsters in Montana have done it repeatedly this year—Osborn’s low profile and unique background made me guess that they could have a bigger impact on the polling in his race than they usually do. This seemed to be confirmed when Fischer’s campaign commissioned a poll that did this exact trick, but in a different way. Before their pollster asked about the Senate contest, they asked voters whether or not they’d rather vote for a Democrat or a Republican for Senate. Voters answered Republican there by quite a large margin, as expected, and then went on to give Fischer a 24-point lead over Osborn. With such a dramatic difference between these two kinds of surveys, I decided to just defer to the fundamentals. And the fundamentals told me that a two-term sitting GOP Senator in Nebraska with a massive fundraising advantage was a pretty reliable bet to win.
All of this changed for me when the first nonpartisan poll of the race came out this week. Unlike the polls conducted by the Fischer and Osborn campaigns, this survey didn’t engage in any question-ordering trickery—it just straight-up asked voters about who they would vote for in the contest, as it should have. In general, the results were exactly what I would have expected. Trump led Kamala by 17 points statewide, as did the Republican nominee in the state’s special Senate election against his Democratic opponent. What I absolutely did not expect was for it to find the race between Osborn and Fischer in dead heat, entirely in line with the results from the Osborn-commissioned surveys that I had internally written off as unreliable.
Speaking as a proud former skeptic of Osbornmentum, I can’t find any reason to doubt these results, absent the usual caveats about name recognition. I can assume that partisanship will eventually carry the day for Fischer, as it has countless times for other GOP Senators with weak early numbers in red states, but I can’t fully guarantee it in a way that I might have been comfortable with before. The results in Utah’s 2022 Senate race, wherein the independent candidate Evan McMullin put together the largest overperformance of any Senate candidate that entire year, show that there’s a real appetite among some voters in red states for non-Republican independent candidates that aren’t obvious Democratic fronts. Osborn, as an ex-Democrat unionist running on a mostly liberal platform, might not be able to pull this off in the same way that a Mormon CIA officer could, but there’s at least something of an angle for him. His quite convenient “feud” with the Democratic Party that just so happened to erupt once the ballot was set could also help things.
With this precedent, I don’t think that he should be ruled out entirely, but make no mistake: it would be a massive, massive shock for him to win.
All of these are races that Democrats (or, in the case of Nebraska, an independent who is definitely-totally-for-real not a Democrat) could feasibly win. But minus possibly Ohio, they’re also races the party isn’t currently on track to win. Between the four contenders for a 50th seat, we have two Sun Belt monsters that all but require a blue wave to flip, a contest in a state that Kamala will never win, and a second contest in a state where she’ll never win and the candidate is a complete unknown. At this point, it’s worth working off of the presumption that, even if Kamala wins, they’ll fail to get over the line and she will enter the White House with a divided government. People seem to view this possibility with a lot of angst and fear, and while it would certainly be disappointing, I think that it would put the GOP in a far worse spot than people assume.
First, let’s take it for granted that the GOP manages to use the power of polarization to win both Montana and Ohio. That would net them three seats and give them a 52-48 majority in the chamber. That’s not nothing, but it would be very, very far from the kind of overwhelming majority that they were supposed to have by that point. In fact, it would be small enough that Democrats would be fully capable of contending for the majority in 2026. All they would have to do that year to win the chamber back would be to flip Maine, flip North Carolina (where Roy Cooper is likely to run), and hold Georgia and Michigan. If Sherrod Brown makes it over the line, this becomes even easier—in that world, all they will need will be the states they currently hold along with Maine.
The expected, pessimistic response to this is that this won’t be possible if Kamala is in the White House, because 2026 will be a midterm, which are bad for the parties in power. The expected, more optimistic response to that is to bring up 2022, which proved that Democrats can still compete against the Trump GOP in purple America in midterms even under the worst circumstances. Not only do I agree with this optimistic response, but I think it may undersell the opportunities Democrats may have in a 2026 with a Republican Senate.
Remember what I said about Grover Cleveland at the very beginning of this article: we have absolutely no roadmap for what the politics of a new Democratic presidency may be like under divided government. Every single example of a midterm election with a liberal in power, from 1934 to 2022, was dominated by the dynamic of a president with full control and an opposition running on checks and balances. This will not be the case in 2026 with a GOP Senate majority that will likely be obstructing Kamala at every opportunity. They will be incumbents, too, and our total lack of a roadmap for how voters may react to that under a liberal president who is promising things but can’t deliver them makes 2026 far from a guaranteed red wave.
If you really want to insist on examples of this actually happening, we do have some with presidents who weren’t Democrats. Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr. all came to power with a divided government, and their parties all had decent-to-good showings at the Senate level during their first midterm elections. The GOP only lost one seat in both the 1990 and 1982 midterms, and they actually outright gained two seats in 1970. Voters may be stupid, but they’re not complete automatons. In an era as polarized as this one, a neutral-to-Dem-leaning year in 2026 is not out of the question whatsoever, and if that happens, the GOP won’t be in for a good time. All they have been able to show in both 2022 and this year is that they can a) scrape together narrow wins in states like Wisconsin against an underfunded challenger and b) compete in states like Ohio, Montana, Texas, and Florida, not the actual purple states that hold the balance of power in the chamber. That may be enough for them to win a narrow majority when they’re afforded the crutch of a fluke seat in Maine, but it’s simply not a party that can sustain a majority over the long term.
Your eyes haven’t deceived you. There’s not something you’re missing that everyone else can see. A party not being able to compete in Senate races in Arizona and Nevada in an otherwise neutral year is not normal. It does not represent a healthy political movement, and it’s not something that can work out in the long run. Something about the party will need to change sooner or later, or the chickens are going to come home to roost one day. Let’s just hope that red-state voters this year will feel generous enough to keep us from waiting too long.
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