Welcome to How Good Is This, Really?—renamed from the original How Bad Is This, Really?—a recurring feature in which we took the temperature of the presidential election.
Polls, from the standpoint of the Electoral College, are basically tied. There is nothing more to be learned, even by looking at them really hard, about who is favored to win the swing states. But we can put them in context with the other things we know about the race to draw some conclusions about the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses—and how each campaign hopes those perceptions will work to their advantage when the votes are counted.
So let’s play a fun (?) game: Imagining the story we might be telling a week (or longer) from now to explain a Kamala Harris victory—and, conversely, what we might be saying if Donald Trump wins. Which of these hypotheticals seems more plausible?
Despite lagging rally attendance and small-donor enthusiasm—and the persistent belief of many Americans that he is a reckless and untrustworthy figure—Trump was able to take advantage of swing voters’ unhappiness with inflation and undocumented immigration to again win the presidency.
The last couple of news cycles before the election were tough for Trump: His former chief of staff described him as a “fascist” and one of his supporters called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at a rally in Madison Square Garden. Harris, meanwhile, tried to remind voters of Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the previous election. But his relentless advertisements in swing states, which framed Harris as a radical on subjects like crime, immigration, and trans rights while tying her to the economic record of unpopular incumbent president Joe Biden, proved effective enough to make up for it.
While Trump largely avoided mainstream media interviews and declined to debate Harris a second time, he made a point of appearing on a number of podcasts popular with young men, ultimately winning record totals of their votes and polling better with younger Black and Latino voters than any Republican in a generation.
Harris, meanwhile, was on the whole viewed more favorably than Trump by the electorate, but had trouble making up for her late start on the campaign trail; voters often told members of the press that they didn’t feel that they knew enough about who she was or what her plans were for the country. Conversely, while voters reported that they did not feel favorably about Trump as a person, they remembered his presidency as a time of relative economic prosperity. (His favorability did, it’s worth noting, tick up after the July attempt on his life in Pennsylvania.)
In the end, polls underestimated Trump’s chances for a third straight time, as “low-propensity” voters—including many who skipped the 2022 midterm, causing MAGA Senate candidates to underperform—turned out to support the GOP with Trump atop the ticket.
Nothing in the scenario described above would shock anyone who’s been following the campaign. But the thing about a close race in which pollsters themselves seem unusually unsure about what’s going on is that it would also not be shocking if the opposite happened. Here’s what that would look like:
Over the past few years—especially in the 2022 midterms—we’ve seen this story play out several times: A Democrat who portrays themself as sensible and mainstream defeats a Trump-aligned candidate who comes off as extreme and divisive. And now it’s happened in the presidential election, with Kamala Harris defeating Trump himself.
Echoing recent races in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a coalition of Democrats and independent voters proved sufficient to defeat a controversial MAGA candidate who refused to acknowledge 2020 results. Voters generally found Harris to be smart and trustworthy, and although her favorability rating overall is an evenly polarized one, it was still easily higher than Trump’s.
In the closing month of the campaign, Harris conducted a blitz of interviews on both legacy media networks and streaming shows, successfully shoring up support among both younger Americans of color and moderate women. (She appeared at several rallies with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney and a received a late endorsement from Arnold Schwarzenegger.)
She benefited from late-campaign media scrutiny of Trump’s hostility to the norms of democratic government, as well as his now-infamous Madison Square Garden rally. In her own speeches and paid “messaging,” though, Harris focused primarily on contrasting Trump’s support of tax cuts for the wealthy with her own policies, which she promised would benefit middle- and working-class voters. Ultimately, she was able to overcome the association between the Biden administration and inflation, and convinced voters that she would be capable of addressing the “cost of living.”
It turns out the polls underestimated Harris this cycle—probably because, in an era of rampant spam calls, pollsters are having a harder time reaching voters. (Some suspect that pollsters wary of underestimating Trump for a third time actually went too far with “weighting” assumptions favorable to him. One who apparently did not was the Des Moines Register’s Ann Selzer, who delivered a shocker the weekend before Election Day showing Harris leading Trump by 3 points in a state Trump won by 8 points in 2020.) In the end, Harris won a typical Democratic share of nonwhite voters , and her party’s performance overall was in line with what one would have expected from improving economic indicators, other elections held earlier this year, and its voters’ relatively elevated enthusiasm.
Harris’ traditional get-out-the-vote operation—boosted by enormous fundraising from small and large donors alike—also proved effective in comparison to the Trump campaign’s deployment of an untested system that revolved around a new app promoted by right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. Bad idea, counting on Charlie Kirk and young men in general to do something important!
Well, what do you think?
The Harris-friendly version seems more plausible to me. For one thing, the issues that Trump would win on, in Hypothetical No. 1—crime, immigration, and inflation—peaked as problems, statistically speaking, two years ago. Crime and border crossing numbers have been falling, and the economy has been improving.
For Trump to win, swing voters would have to care so much about those issues that they’re also willing to overlook the fallout from the Dobbs decision, and the sort of extreme rhetoric—regarding the 2020 election, among other subjects —that they penalized MAGA candidates for in the 2022 election.
Is it possible that Trump has achieved a realignment of the national electorate under our noses—organizing a multiracial army of younger and male-skewing working-class voters who like his blunt manner of speaking and buy into his Apprentice-era reputation as a business mastermind? It’s not crazy to think so—but those voters didn’t show up two years ago for the candidates he endorsed, and at age 78 he is not exactly at the peak of his charismatic powers, to the point that it’s become a running story that his supporters drain out of his rallies before he finishes speaking. He also hasn’t exactly been putting the economy at the top of voters’ minds in the closing weeks of the race, instead making a series of news-making pronouncements about subjects like taking fluoride out of drinking water and his enemies getting shot.
Meanwhile, Harris has stayed on topic with a message that is half about kitchen-table issues (housing costs, etc.) and half about the threats—invasive abortion bans, political violence—that a second Trump administration would present. She hasn’t become an Obama-style sensation as a personality, but she gave competent-or-better performances in the race’s biggest televised moments, and her public image improved over the course of the campaign. Of the two candidates, she’s the one who is perceived to be less divisive and more grounded in reality. In U.S. politics since the 2016 presidential race—which, admittedly, remains a pretty significant exception—that has been the profile of a winner.
Ha ha! Oh boy.
We conclude this column with a rating on the Shovel Meter, a measure of exactly how sedated you might want to be, on a scale of one to five shovel blows to the head, if you’re concerned about Trump’s reelection.
There are no more shovels, because either way, it is time to face reality, whatever it may be. Onward we go!
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