Blackcap Blog

Published at 07:46 on 6 September 2024

The Keys to the White House

Alan Lichtman has finally called it: Harris will win in November.

But that’s just one metric, and although it has had a remarkable run of being accurate, no metric is infallible. Plus, there are always judgement calls, and many of Lichtman’s calls are in retrospective only, when confirmation bias can enter the picture (e.g. Lichtman wasn’t around when McKinley was running against Bryan).

However, there are other signs in Harris’ favour.

Trump Is No Longer a Purely Theoretical Threat

In 2016, he was. Nobody so extreme and so unqualified had won before. Therefore it was easy for voters to wave it off as a purely theoretical threat and cast protest votes against Hillary Clinton (a historically unpopular and weak candidate).

This factor helped Biden in 2020, and given that Trump is running again, it helps Harris this time as well.

Trump Is More Tarnished than Ever

This is the first election Trump has run in after he tried to instigate a coup to remain in power. That coup attempt cost Trump; some top Republicans like Liz Cheney who had reluctantly gone along with him until that point broke with him.

Moreover, Trump is older than ever and his age is now exacting an increasingly visible toll on him. Mental decline means Trump is more rambling and erratic than ever. (This, after Trump spent months making age a campaign issue when he was running against Biden.) Yet more tarnish.

Because of how polarized and how fascism-friendly many Republicans are, this won’t cost Trump very much support. However, it doesn’t have to cost Trump very much support. Because the electorate is so closely divided, every little bit of lost support measurably hurts Trump. For every Cheney and Kinzinger there are thousands of GOP-leaning voters in swing states who won’t be voting for Trump this time.

Harris Excites Her Base the Way Biden Did Not

There is a real Obama vibe about Harris. Like Obama, Harris is a groundbreaking candidate; she would be the first female president. Left-leaning (and even many centrist) voters are real suckers for such things. Yes, it is petty and not policy-based. So what. We are talking about actual voters in actual US elections, not hypothetical voters in some hypothetical ideal republic.

Atypically, Democrats are Campaigning Competently

One of the most frustrating things about US politics is the rank incompetence of the Democratic Party. Election after election, they make stupid campaign mistakes that leave easily winnable votes on the table. Sometimes they manage to win regardless, which goes to show just how badly Republican administrations sometimes manage to mess things up.

Not this time. For the first time in literally sixty years, Democrats are doing a good job at campaigning (yes, LBJ, whatever his flaws, was the last Democrat both willing and able to play political hardball).

Also Atypically, Republicans are Campaigning Incompetently

A lot of this is due to just how much the GOP has become an inward-looking political subculture. The rest of it is due to the Harris campaign’s competent nature. Republicans just can’t process how well the whole “weird” rhetoric worked against them. The idea that they might be the political weirdos and not, as their mythology insists, the voice of the Real America, the Middle America (Harris’ choice of a Midwesterner as a running mate really paid off), just makes their brains explode.

For once, it is the Democrats that are setting the terms of the debate, while the Republicans are assuming the role of suckers by responding to the term-setting (whenever the Republicans talk about not being weird, the debate is still over whether the Republicans are weird, i.e. the debate the Democrats want).

Conclusion

Odds really do seem to favour Harris. This is not to say it won’t be close (given polarization, it probably will). This is not to say that Trump could not win (odds favoured Hillary Clinton in 2016). But the odds do really seem to be in Harris’ favour; this is not just wishful thinking on my part.