Why ________ won

Pre-gaming the reasons for Harris and Trump

The question I get asked the most that I also hate answering the most is who I think will win. The truth is that most pollsters don’t have very much top-level-clearance, super-secret information that’s much better than what’s publicly available—which is a lot. (I could maybe answer this question better if you wanted to spring for a private N=2000 nightly tracker in the battlegrounds, but that’s a discussion for next cycle.)

The data tells us that the probabilities are 50-50. My own personal hunch is that Trump wins. But I don’t weight my hunches very highly—maybe at 10% vs. 90% for the data. So let’s call it a 55 percent chance that Trump wins.

The more interesting question (that I don’t get asked as much) is if so-and-so wins, why will they have won? I’ll try to answer that in this post for both candidates. And in the spirit of questioning my initial biases and assumptions, I’ll state the case for Kamala Harris first.

Why Harris will have won if she wins

She fulfilled voters’ basic ask: she was neither of those two

How many times did we hear that people hated the idea of a Biden vs. Trump rematch? Well, this time, voters got what they asked for, as the Democratic Party took the unprecedented step of replacing its nominee after the primaries.

Harris has run a cautious campaign and largely avoided taking tough positions, with no glaring mistakes other than her deer-in-the-headlights answer on The View for what she would have done differently from Joe Biden.

She rehabilitated her favorable rating after emerging from Joe Biden’s shadow, and is only slightly underwater on favorability, a tough task for a national candidate in the modern era. Enough voters think that she is change from Joe Biden that he is not seen as a toxic albatross around her neck, in the same way that the media hounded Al Gore about Bill Clinton’s scandals. She’s done all this despite not visibly throwing Biden under the bus, while nearly closing the gap between her and Trump on the economy and the cost of living.

She won crossover voters turned off by Trump’s chaos

We’ve heard a lot about how the electorate is now Republican-leaning, and Republicans are making gains in voter registration.

The electorate was also Republican-leaning in the AP VoteCast exit poll in 2020 and that didn’t stop Joe Biden from winning by a margin that exceeded the partisan split by 5 points. He did so by winning more Republicans than Trump won Democrats and winning Independents by around 15 points. This is a historic reversal of the situation where the Republican nominee had to win more crossover Democrats and Independents, because Democrats had a persistent advantage on party ID. It’s also the situation we saw when a Republican-friendly electorate still elected Democratic Senate in 2022 and denied Republicans a workable House majority.

The dawning realization that there are now more Republicans than Democrats in the electorate is what led Harris to have formalized Republican outreach where Biden did not in 2020, campaign with Liz Cheney, and accept the endorsement of his father, the liberal devil incarnate as recently as Adam McKay’s 2018 movie Vice.

She did not do this in the hopes of peeling off new Republicans, I don’t think. Rather, this was a constituency that had already flipped in 2016 and 2020 that she absolutely needed to keep on-side lest they be tempted to return to their political roots because their poor assessment of Biden’s performance.

Add to this MAGA’s MSG hijinx last week, and wavering Republicans might have second thoughts about returning to the fold. Harris isn’t perceived as the moderate Joe Biden was in 2020, but she might be just enough.

It’s the revenge of the Emerging Democratic Majority

The ultimate plot twist of this election might be if the widely discounted — even by its initial authors! — theory of the Emerging Democratic Majority actually manages to rise from the dead.

It’s true that racial minorities are moving to the Republican Party. In fact, I’ve written a whole book that focuses heavily on this fact. But a reason I did not title the book something like the The Emerging Republican Majority 2.0 is that I don’t believe this fact guarantees a durable Republican majority on its own. Demography, after all, is not destiny.

But what if it is?

If Harris wins and maybe if she doesn’t, Democrats will have won 8 out of the last 9 elections in the popular vote. And even when the deck is stacked against them, like in the Senate or the Electoral College, they have been given license from their party members to run campaigns that appeal to right-of-center electorates in a way that’s not true in the reverse for Republicans.

College graduates have risen to a 42 percent share of the electorate, up from 39 percent in 2020. That’s not a majority, but the widely predicted-slowdown in educational attainment is not manifesting in voting numbers, giving Republicans a smaller base among working class voters. And while Trump makes gains among nonwhites, those voters are less well represented in the pivotal states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If Trump hits a wall with whites, because education polarization among them is basically done for now, he has few places where he can make up the rest of the margins he needs. The end result could be comfortable Trump wins in most of the Sun Belt battlegrounds—and agonizing narrow defeats in the three Rust Belt battlegrounds.

A final note that a misunderstood piece of the original John Judis-Ruy Teixeria Emerging Democratic Majority thesis is that it required a requisite amount of white working class voters in places like the Rust Belt. The Democrats’ white working class base is greatly reduced, but a case can be made that Harris has the needed support in blue-collar Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to win the White House. And while abortion is far from the top of voters’ priorities—no matter if you ask it as an open-ended question, in a short list, or a long-list—Harris can probably use it to her benefit with Obama-Trump counties in the Midwest where the gap between the Trump vote and pro-life side of abortion referenda was the largest.

Why Trump will have won if he wins

It was always a change election

Can you name a Vice President who has been elected to succeed an unpopular incumbent president? In fact, incumbent Vice Presidents don’t have a great track record even when their boss is popular — just ask Richard Nixon and Al Gore. Kamala Harris succeeding an incumbent administration that she’s part of with 40 percent job approval would indeed be surprising—if not shocking.

All Trump has to do is ask the question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and ask why Harris hasn’t done the things she promised to do in the last three-and-a-half years, as he has done countless times.

Election Day is almost here, and Americans’ perceptions of the economy and the state of the country have not improved enough for the incumbent party to be favored for re-election, as many “experts” claimed earlier in the year. In October, the economy added just 12,000 jobs, with downward revisions in previous months.

Kamala Harris gave Democrats a fighting chance, but in the end, she is still perceived as a loyal soldier in Joe Biden’s administration. And Biden had to drop out not only because of his age, but because Americans didn’t like the job he did in office. His approval rating hasn’t risen, as it often does for lame-duck presidents in the last year, showing that asking voters to re-elect him at 82 wasn’t the only factor in his departure.

In our final pre-election survey, “can bring about needed change” ranks second with 34 percent in the traits voters consider to be important in the next president. First is “strong and decisive leadership” (36 percent). Trump leads on both attributes. Harris leads on “cares about people like you” (19 percent) and “has the right temperament” (9 percent). Harris’s core sales pitch has a smaller total addressable market, so her positive message inherently is more fragmented, tying together more disparate themes and issue appeals than Trump’s relatively simple messaging around “change” and “strength.” In a sense, his job is almost as easy it was in 2016, when the dominant characteristic people wanted was change, and he owned those voters.

Actually, Trump is an above-average candidate this time

The shift at McDonalds. The garbage truck stunt. The raised fist in Butler, PA. Shooting the breeze with Joe Rogan for 3 hours. Trump’s sense of the moment and ability to generate images that break through with the average person is light years ahead of Kamala Harris, who relies more on celebrity associations and stagecraft from her advance team. His act could well have grown long in the tooth after a third successive campaign, but there’s little evidence of flagging enthusiasm among Republicans down the stretch. In many ways, he’s at his best as a candidate, even though his less desirable attributes have also shown through brightly (remember the debate, or his questioning Harris’s race). Trump’s campaign has been much more high-variance than Harris’s, but the positive moments as of late have outweighed the negative.

A clear and convincing case can be made that more people have switched from Biden-Harris 2020 to Trump 2024 than have the other way around. Perceptions of his time in office have improved, to the point where a majority retrospectively approves of the job he did as president. The idea that he can’t get more than 47 percent of the vote is overrated; he currently is polling at 48 percent—much higher than both of his previous campaigns, and regularly reaches 49-50 percent in battleground polls. For the first time since he was elected, skeptical Republicans and independents have a had a direct comparison to what a Democratic alternative to him would be like, and for many this alternative has been found wanting. It’s hard to believe this wouldn’t manifest in an increased vote share.

Trump is also likely to perform better in states like Arizona and Georgia than the MAGA JV team Republicans put forward in 2022. Trump’s humor and charisma means he can gets forgiveness for his missteps that Kari Lake or Herschel Walker wouldn’t. He’s a much better political acrobat than the candidates Democrats gleefully point out blew the Red Wave in 2022. And also, much better on this score than his opponent.

Harris is just not that good at this

Kamala Harris is the only nominee in modern history not to have gone through a primary nomination process. Her 2019 presidential campaign crashed and burned before the Iowa Caucuses, leaving a trail of far-left positions that have come back to haunt her in this campaign.

You have to have some level of game to become the senator from the largest state and Vice President, and Harris has proved herself an able debater and street-fighter both against Trump and in her Fox News interview.

But without a clear adversary in view, her performances are halting and rely on rote memorization and cliché. She has said little of note in the course of the campaign.

She’s probably an above-average political performer for the U.S. Senate, but the level of performance required to win a presidential general election is an order of magnitudes greater. A primary process normally separates the exceptional from the merely above-average.

In a sense, she is the Democratic Gerald R. Ford, who was unexpectedly thrust in the role of vice president and became the country’s first unelected president. He nearly salvaged an impossible situation for his party after their post-Watergate lows. He had mid-level political skills, but he conveyed at least some level of normalcy and corrected for the deficiencies of the previous incumbent. But he was easily upstaged by Ronald Reagan in the primaries and still fell short in the general election when the electorate was clearly ready for change.

Trump will probably have the electorate he needs

Early voting has been strong for the GOP pretty much across the board. While the Democrats could easily stage a comeback on Election Day with voters who temporarily shifted to voting by mail in 2020, they are still waiting for this wave of votes to materialize. In state after state, Republicans have shown enthusiasm and a willingness to turn out early in a way they haven’t in the past. The Democrats’ ability to do the same is as-yet unproven. There are also worrying signs for them in the decline in the Black share of the electorate in states like Georgia and North Carolina, and in absentee voting out of Philadelphia.

No, it doesn’t just “come down to turnout.” But turnout is usually aligned with persuasion. The side that’s making the stronger argument to swing voters is usually the side that has the advantage in turnout. Contrary to conventional belief, turnout and persuasion are the same thing—having the right energy and vibe coming from the candidate usually translates to higher turnout from partisans and independents moving your way. And the early voting numbers are a sign that Team Trump is doing something right.