With just days to go until the 2024 presidential election, former President Donald Trump is well positioned to reclaim the office he lost four years ago. Granted, the future is always difficult to predict, especially in American politics, but all the evidence available right now favors Trump.
Trump has a lead in all the major swing states, according to RealClearPolitics, whose final 2020 averages were closer to the mark than others, such as FiveThirtyEight. The polls could be wrong, of course. They often are. But a closer inspection reveals underlying problems for Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump’s lead in Arizona and Georgia are substantial — 1.8 points and 2.5 points, respectively. Given that this is an average of the polls, it is effectively outside the margin of error. Importantly, Trump lost those two states narrowly in 2020 by just fractions of a point, so it would not take much to shift them back. His lead in North Carolina is slimmer, just 0.5 points as of this writing, but North Carolina is a notoriously difficult state to poll, often overstating the Democratic position.
Additionally, North Carolina has only voted Democratic once in the last 44 years, in 2008. It would be strange for it to swing left while the rest of the country appears to be swinging right. Last week, NBC News reported that the Harris campaign believes the Tar Heel State to be “slipping away.” The early vote data from these Sun Belt states back up the polling data. Republicans are running substantially better in the early vote than they were at this point in 2020.
If Harris loses all three of these states, her paths to the presidency are reduced to a single lane: sweeping Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This is a precarious position for Harris. Again, Trump is leading in the polls in all three states per RealClearPolitics. Surprisingly, his lead was strongest in Michigan — his worst of all the swing states from 2020. Trump is ahead 1.2 points, and Harris had not led in any poll of Michigan in over a month, though the streak has ended and Trump is back down to a lead of 0.2 points. Trump has also had a consistent advantage in Pennsylvania, where the pace of Republican registration in the final weeks leading up to the election had been brisk. The Democrats still have a registration advantage over the GOP, but it is half of what it was four years ago. That has been reflected as well in the Keystone State’s absentee voting. Democrats far outpaced Republicans on that front in 2020. They still do, but the lead is much smaller. And in all three of these states, Democratic candidates locked in competitive Senate campaigns are avoiding Harris and embracing Trump. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) has skipped several Harris events, and she and Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-PA) have run ads proclaiming their support for various Trump or Republican ideas.
Even Nevada looks good for Republicans. The Silver State, with its six electoral votes, is unlikely to be decisive in the outcome. Yet it would be a moral victory for Republicans to capture it, as the state has flirted with flipping red cycle after cycle but has remained stubbornly blue. Nevertheless, a modest Republican polling advantage is made more meaningful by the fact that the early vote in the state looks very strong for Trump. Clark County Democrats, home of formidable political operations such as the Culinary Workers Union, are not turning out in force, while rural Republicans are.
Impressionistically, the two campaigns are acting like they are seeing the same thing. Trump is running with confidence. Harris seems fearful and tongue-tied. From his photo op at McDonald’s to his appearance on Joe Rogan and his rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump seems like he knows he will win, and he appears to be having fun on the trail. Harris, on the other hand, has had much fewer campaign events. Some days, she has been totally inactive. Of course, campaign rallies do not move the needle substantially, but the local coverage is almost always favorable, and earned media late in the game is important. Moreover, they indicate broadly to supporters and fence-sitters that the candidate is engaged, committed, and determined to win. Harris does not give that impression at all.
And while Trump has been willing to talk to almost anybody about anything, Harris remains clammed up. She has done more interviews, most notably with Bret Baier on Fox News, but her answers were little more than regurgitations of old talking points one hears from her again and again. When Baier and others have tried to force her off the script, she responds with rambling, ersatz disquisitions on democracy and optimism. In all her months on the campaign trail, she has yet to offer clear answers to basic questions. How will you be different from Biden? Why did you, in your capacity as vice president, not address the problems you’re now promising to fix? When did you know that Biden’s mental acuity began to slip?
It is easy to wonder how much of these word salads are cynical. Does the Harris campaign believe it does not have to offer actual answers? Does she think she can filibuster during interviews and distract voters with special guest appearances from Lizzo, Eminem, and Taylor Swift? Maybe. More likely, however, is the reality that there are no good answers to these questions and that this race was always bound to end the way it seems to be.
The country is displeased with the state of the union. Every poll indicates that by a wide margin. Many voters also believe they were better off four years ago than they are today. This is a virtually impossible situation for an incumbent party to find itself in, especially when it is running against the guy who was president four years ago. Moreover, the Biden-Harris administration has governed amid spectacular failures, seen live on television, unequivocally linked to its own decisions — think of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the surge of humanity on the southern border. Even the most skilled politician would likely fail to navigate such turbulent waters with success. And Harris is far from skilled. While she is an improvement over Biden, she is utterly maladroit — unable to withstand closer scrutiny from anybody other than the most die-hard supporter.
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The Harris campaign’s best hope, even now at this late hour, remains “but Trump.” The 45th president’s popularity has improved, but he is still viewed unfavorably even as voters have warmed to his time in office. As Harris insiders told CNN last week, a key part of their strategy relies on Trump having the sorts of off-script moments that have alienated swing voters. And Trump’s danger to democracy, a key talking point of Biden’s that Harris had dropped, is now suddenly back. Harris is out there warning people about how dangerous the former president is.
Will it work? Maybe. Stranger things have happened in politics — such as Trump’s election in 2016! Regardless, that the Democrats have fallen back to fearmongering about Trump is an admission that they have failed to make good on their promises of honest, effective government.
Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford senior nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.