An experiment. Today, I’ll present the arguments for why Trump appears to have the advantage as we approach the last weeks of the 2024 campaign. Tomorrow — barring some breaking news that is more important — I’ll present the arguments for why Harris appears to have the advantage. Everybody who loves this post is going to hate tomorrow’s article, and vice versa.
You don’t win the presidency by winning the popular vote from coast to coast; you win the presidency by winning enough states to reach 270 electoral votes.
As CNN’s Harry Enten put it Monday: “Pretty clear that Harris is ahead nationally right now . . . and I don’t think it matters all that much. . . . Her advantage in the battlegrounds is basically nil. Average it all, Harris’ chance of winning the popular vote is 70 percent. Her chance of winning the electoral college is 50 percent.”
Some Democrats are no doubt exuberant this morning about a Morning Consult poll that has Harris ahead nationally, 51 percent to 45 percent. But when you look at the swing-state polling, it’s fair to wonder if any post-debate national-polling bump Harris is enjoying is just her running up her margins in already-won deep-blue states like New York and California.
There are some people who complain about the RealClearPolitics average because it includes pollsters they don’t like and deem too friendly to Trump and Republicans, such as Rasmussen Reports. Fine, let’s look at the five most-recent polls in each state listed over at FiveThirtyEight, just to bend over backward and show there’s no thumb on the scale for Trump. The seven swing states, moving loosely from west to east:
Nevada: Harris by two, Trump by one, Trump by one, even, Trump by one. Looks an awful lot like a toss-up.
Arizona: Trump by two, Trump by one, Trump by two, even, Trump by two. Narrow advantage for Trump. (When I write, “narrow advantage,” it means just that. It is not a guarantee that Trump is going to win this state.)
Wisconsin: Harris by two, Harris by three, Harris by three, even, Harris by two. Narrow advantage for Harris.
Michigan: Trump by one, Harris by one, Harris by three, Harris by three, even, Harris by one. Narrow advantage for Harris.
Pennsylvania: Even, Harris by three, Trump by two, even, Trump by two. Looks an awful lot like a toss-up.
Georgia: Even, Trump by two, Trump by three, Trump by four, Harris by one. Narrow advantage for Trump.
North Carolina: Trump by three, Trump by two, Trump by one, Harris by one, Harris by three. I’m going to put this one in the Trump pile, in part because Trump has already won the state twice, but if you scored it the other way, I wouldn’t think you were crazy.
Note that almost all these polls have a margin of error of three-and-a-half-to-four points.
The first conclusion is that none of those states appear out of reach for either candidate. We are currently on track for an election that is closer than 2016 and 2020. On its home page, RealClearPolitics offers a daily updated “this day in history,” allowing you to compare the RCP polling average on this date to the averages from four years ago and eight years ago. (You youngsters out there may be shocked to learn that Ohio and Florida used to be swing states — used to be the swing states! — and Georgia and Arizona used to be considered safe red states.) With the occasional exception, Trump and Harris are closer to each other in each swing state than Trump was to Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton in those previous cycles.
On the map, if we give Trump the red states he’s expected to win, as well as Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, he’s at 262 electoral votes. If we give Harris the blue states she’s expected to win, as well as Wisconsin and Michigan, she’s at 251 electoral votes. Nevada’s six electoral votes aren’t enough to put either one over the top; the election comes down to Pennsylvania.
(Hmm. I wonder if there’s anything Harris could have done differently that might have increased her odds of winning Pennsylvania. Oh, well!)
There are another two wrinkles that I think offset the chase for 270 but are worth keeping in mind. The states of Nebraska and Maine allocate their electoral votes by congressional district, which is how four years ago, Trump won one electoral vote in Maine and Biden won one electoral vote in Nebraska.
The most recent poll that broke down the results in Nebraska’s second district was conducted in late August, and SurveyUSA had Harris leading in the second district, 47 percent to 42 percent. Those numbers are in the ballpark of the result in the second district in 2020, when Biden won 52 percent to 45 percent.
Four years ago, Trump won Maine’s vast northern second district, 53 percent to 45 percent, while losing the state overall, 53 percent to 44 percent. Back in August, the University of New Hampshire polled Maine and broke it down by congressional district, finding Harris ahead statewide, 55 percent to 38 percent, and ahead in the second congressional district, 52 percent to 47 percent — the UNH Pine Tree State poll characterizes that district result as “too close to call.”
Outside of the big seven, the rest of the states look pretty solidly in favor of one candidate or the other. In Virginia, Trump looked competitive against Joe Biden, but Harris has been consistently ahead by high single digits or low double digits since late August. It’s a similar story in New Hampshire, where Harris is consistently ahead by five to eight percentage points.
A Morning Consult poll had Harris within two percentage points in Florida, but that survey appears to be an outlier. The highly regarded Des Moines Register poll showed Trump leading in Iowa by just four percentage points, but we’ll only know that the Harris campaign thinks that’s real if she starts spending time and money there.
Finally, one small oddity — again, no one should expect Trump to win Minnesota, but the addition of Tim Walz to the ticket hasn’t really given Harris’s numbers much of a discernable bump there. In 2020, Biden beat Trump in Minnesota 52 percent to 45 percent. Harris’s margin in the past five polls of the state: seven points, four points, seven points, five points, nine points. It is conceivable that the Harris-Walz ticket will carry Minnesota by a smaller margin than the Biden-Harris ticket did. People said Harris didn’t pick Walz because she thought he would help in Minnesota . . . and they were right!
Republicans argue that the national media has treated Harris with kid gloves since she became the nominee. I think that’s largely true, but if there is an election advantage to getting lots of good press and little bad press, it seems clear the Harris campaign has maxed that out — and the race is still effectively tied. What is a pro-Harris media going to do between now and Election Day that’s going to move votes toward her in a significant way?
As I’ll discuss more tomorrow, since Harris became the nominee, Trump has responded badly. A way-too-long and rambling convention speech, a bad debate performance, hanging around Laura Loomer, an obsession with relitigating his 2020 defeat, an infuriating inability to stay focused on his strongest arguments about the economy and the border — Trump behaves self-destructively with such metronomic regularly that it is fair to wonder how seriously he wants to win this election.
And yet, even with all that, the race is tied.
This is likely an indicator that the electorate is in a sour mood about the status quo. Until he withdrew as the nominee, Joe Biden looked like a surefire loser, and his approval rating remains below 40 percent today. (This is one reason why Harris kept insisting in the debate, “I’m not Joe Biden.”) Sixty percent or more of Americans consistently tell pollsters the country is “on the wrong track.” Voters consistently rate the economy the most important issue, and most polls show they trust Trump more than Harris on that issue.
At this point, what other big, race-influencing events should we expect? There’s a vice-presidential debate, but it’s hard to imagine many voters altering their vote based upon the performances of J. D. Vance and Tim Walz. Trump says there won’t be another presidential debate.
There could always be a “black swan” event, like a terrorist attack, a sudden economic downturn, Iran successfully demonstrating a functional a nuclear weapon, or something like that. Most of those would probably be bad news for the incumbent party. (At this point, one must wonder if, God forbid, another assassination attempt against Trump will be a factor between now and Election Day.)
Maybe roughly half the electorate just doesn’t like her? Right here, Harris defenders will cite racism and sexism, and no doubt if you look hard enough, you can find Americans who will admit they won’t vote for a woman or won’t vote for a candidate with a Jamaican father or an Indian mother. But we should note that a majority of Americans felt unfavorably about Harris right up until the moment she became the nominee, and then once she was the nominee, everyone on the left fell in line and forgot their qualms about her.
The collapse of Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign — really her 2019 campaign, because she withdrew before the 2020 calendar year began — won’t be repeated, if for no other reason than dissatisfied Democrats had other options back then, and they don’t have other options now. But if she were the effervescent political talent that her fans wish she was, she likely would have made it to Iowa, wouldn’t she? Harris was a terrible manager of that campaign, and she’s had extremely high rates of staff turnover before and since.
One last point: The lesson of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign is that if the Democratic nominee’s campaign is having problems behind the scenes, we will not learn about it until after the election, when the correspondents with the best access to the inner workings of the campaign publish their books. From the outside, the Harris campaign looks like a majestically disciplined, organized, sharp, extremely well-funded, well-oiled machine. But that was the narrative about the Clinton campaign eight years ago, too. It was only after the election that we learned that “Clinton’s Wisconsin volunteers lacked basic resources such as campaign literature to distribute while door-knocking.”
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