This Is Not a Prediction

But it's not a pipe either.

Daniel Drezner suggested there had been a perceptible change in the vibe around the presidential election in the last few days, driven perhaps in part by a change in the Harris campaign's rhetoric: after all these weeks of calling themselves the underdog, they've started allowing themselves to look confident: "We are on track to win this very close race," says campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon. Harris in her new stump speech says, "Make no mistake: we will win." 

That's a strategic decision, no doubt—there comes a moment when being the underdog stops paying off and you want your voters to start feeling they're on a bandwagon of winners, and this was a logical place to make that transition, but there's more to it than that. There's a fire in Harris's and Walz's rally crowds that's like when they were first introduced to the audience in late July and early August, while Trump's malevolent juggalos (as opposed to the musical Juggalos, who don't seem at all malevolent and have given Harris the nod) are plainly dwindling in these final days, as in the scene in Reading shown at top.

I can't at this point imagine Trump winning, and I mean that literally: I should be able to imagine it, I normally have a pretty decent imagination, but my mind just won't go there. 

Maybe it's one of those self-care moves, a sign of mental health even. I can always start imagining it again tomorrow if I have to. We've been preparing for it for two years at least. But for now, imagining Harris winning is so much easier. I'm not saying she will win, I'm just saying she should. If the world makes sense, you know, which is not an easily defended prior assumption and I'm aware of that. I understand she could lose; I'm just not imagining how it happens, or why, for the time being. 

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They're running such a technically good campaign, for one thing. "Flawless" is the word that keeps coming up (googling "Harris campaign flawless" returns 850,000 results). They have raised inconceivably huge amounts of money—I'll go back to protesting against that sooner or later (and Obama for breaking the public financing system in 2008)—and they've spent it with discipline, whereas Trump has had difficulty raising money and spent far too much of it on paying his legal bills (that goes back to a while ago, but he's still doing it). 

The Republican National Committee used to have a really good reputation for getting out the vote in ground operations but has been squandering it this year (under the leadership of Trump's daughter-in-law Lara, who still hopes to have a career as a pop star when she grows up), first by abandoning their traditional base of well-off older white folks in favor of expanding their reach among "low-propensity" male voters to include those who traditionally vote Democratic when they vote at all, young and often minority members (credulously accepting pollster advice that those people are trending toward Trump); then by abandoning GOTV altogether and turning to spending resources on suppressing the vote of people they suspect might be "illegals" or otherwise disqualified. And they've completely outsourced GOTV to organizations like Turning Point Action, Charlie Kirk's "total grift operation" (in the words of a "veteran GOP strategist" interviewed by Semafor), which seems to have reduced its ambitious early plans ($108 million in six swing states) to one Arizona county (an important one, Maricopa, but still), and the neophyte campaign manager Elon Musk and his $119-million America PAC, whose contractors turn out not to have knocked on all of the doors they claimed to have knocked on, with workers basically taking his money for nothing, and the PAC struggling with a host of other problems:

“I don’t even know where some of these people came from. Some of these people came straight out of the comments of the Nelk Boys YouTube channel,” an operative aligned with the PAC said, referring to the pro-Trump influencers. “These are, like, broccoli-cut Zoomers.”

The operative formerly on the effort described a “shock wave” reverberating around the universe of operatives and canvassers currently or at one time close to the PAC as more information about the canvassing effort was made public over the last 10 days. 

“Elon Musk is brilliant at what Elon Musk does,” this person said. “You would never ask a political consultant to build rocket ships. I don’t think you should be asking someone that builds rocket ships to manage political operations when they don’t 100% understand what they’re looking for.”

Musk may well be a genius in more than his own conceit, for all I know (I haven't seen any evidence), bbut there's no reason other than a slavering worship of rich people for thinking he knows how to do this job, and there's all kinds of gossip that the work just isn't getting done. A neighbor of mine who went canvassing for Democrats in Pennsylvania over the weekend told me her party didn't see any Republicans knocking doors at all; there were Trump yard signs, but no Trump workers at all, and Semafor finds professionals doubting the operation fully exists:

“I’m as plugged in as they get — and yet I don’t even know who my friends and family back home can contact for a yard sign or to knock doors in their precinct,” a Republican operative who votes in a swing state told Semafor.

Another Republican operative had questions about how outside groups are coordinating and whether data is being shared. And multiple people argued that the campaign has perhaps been over-focused on poll watchers as part of Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, an effort driven by Trump and prioritized by Lara Trump and Michael Whatley, his allies heading up the RNC.

A third Republican strategist in a swing state said they’ve seen “no ground activity at all” and complained more typical volunteer work had been crowded out by “election integrity” efforts.

“They’re really only focused on recruiting folks to volunteer to be poll watchers,” the third Republican strategist said. “I mean, they do a lot of that shit. But what’s the point of watching the vote if you haven’t turned out the vote?”

And then, while Trump and Vance call people they don't like "garbage" and "trash", and Trump menaces Liz Cheney with a nine-gun firing squad and mimes fellating a troublesome microphone ("That sucks," said Jimmy Fallon's announcer), Harris and Walz are so exceptionally good. I'm especially impressed by the way they woo the anti-Trump Republican vote not by promises of triangulation (though Harris does overemphasize the "control the border" part of her immigration plans and downplays the part about citizenship for the 11 million undocumented foreigners stuck in the US since the Clinton administration) but rather by asking them to join in protecting the Constitution in spite of their differences, on the Cheney example, as when Harris told reporters in Madison on Saturday:

What I am enjoying about this moment most is that in spite of how my opponent spends full time trying to divide the American people, what I am seeing is people coming together under one roof who seemingly have nothing in common and know they have everything in common...

Or by treating them as adults who can engage in a real policy discussion, as in this discussion (via James Fallows) between Tim Walz and some Trump-supporting union members in Erie County, PA.

which will knock your socks off, please watch and share. Of course you really have to know your stuff as well as they know their own lives and be pretty familiar with their lives too to bring it off. It's impossible to imagine a poseur like Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz or Jerk Dork Vance talking to constituents like this, to say nothing of spoiled aristocrats like Trump (the hardest work he's ever done is posing in a construction site photo up with a gold-plated shovel, and he's never read anything more complex than Page Six at all, including instructions for repairing a broken backhoe).

The only data, in fact, that doesn't suggest Harris is winning doesn't suggest Trump is winning either—those stupid voter polls showing the two candidates locked neck and neck, for the last three months with practically no perceptible motion. It just says ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, with a claim to extreme scientific rigor, and I can't understand why we're supposed to regard this with so much reverence in opposition to everything we know, including all the actual election results since the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was revealed in June 2022, in everything from the national midterm to special congressional elections to referenda on abortion, which is that the fight for reproductive rights draws out voters that the polls fail to identify in huge margins.

Especially since it's so clear why the polls might be wrong: namely, that the companies, not content with fighting the last war, are fighting the one before that, from 2020, when they correctly called Biden's victory but underestimated the total popular support for Trump by an average of over 3 points in the states, with similar error in governor and senator races (referred to by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, AAPOR, as the highest error rate in surveys of the popular vote in 40 years), and decided to change the way they weighted their sample in a big way, perhaps in part, as I was telling Bluesky yesterday, because the presidential race seems so much more important than any of the others (I wish they would take legislatures as seriously), and in part out of fear of Trump, because the errors bolstered his loudly expressed contention that they were biased against him and "fake news".

So they all made the same changes to their voting models, all in the same direction—what's referred to as "herding"—and perhaps introduced some new and different error (I can't say, but I'll bet it had to do with the false identification of Trump voters as the "white working class", which I've been complaining about for years), leading to the situation in which all the polls find the race much closer than it is in fact and all mostly agreeing with each other.

The hypothesis got some dramatic support over the weekend from Iowa, where a local poll in the Des Moines Register by the famous Iowa pollster Ann Selzer found that Iowa was supporting Harris over Trump 47% to 43%, though Trump had beaten Biden in 2020 by 53% to 45%, with particularly startling assistance from women over 65, who backed Harris 63% to 28%. Because Selzer and her track record are so admired, it gave people a lot of pause.

Steve M notes the Iowa poll and a bit of a parallel in Nevada, alongside other Harris-favoring factors, but rightly urges us to be cautious, but as I say I can't imagine Trump winning and don't expect to try until tomorrow, if I have to. (Steve also warns us to be worried about the Trumpy resistance if/when Harris wins, and I expect to start imagining that pretty soon.) For now, I just want to get this non-prediction out in advance of the real numbers.

After the 1964 oil by René Magritte, lithograph by Artvalue, Luxembourg.