Let’s cut to the chase: Vice President Kamala Harris now looks slightly more likely than not to be the next president of the United States.
To be sure, this race is so close that only a fool would express major confidence in any prediction. In each of eight states (including New Hampshire, along with the seven other states regularly assessed as toss-ups), factors as random as bad weather, traffic jams, or late-breaking local news could provide the difference between victory or defeat for Harris or for former President Donald Trump. Still, a number of factors taken together seem, to this experienced observer, to favor Harris.
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Among those considerations, especially for number-crunchers, are some data points and trends to which we will return later in this column; but, first, to understand the most important two factors that favor Harris, at least for a race this tight, consider the pithiest words of political wisdom I ever heard. They came to me back in the 1980s, when I was a young Republican activist seeking a spot as a delegate or alternate-delegate at a national convention. One of the party regulars, someone who never said much or asked for anything for himself but who always seemed both to be “in the know” and to be wherever the most productive things were happening, was a guy named James “Canche” Plummer.
“How many votes do you have?” he asked, as I paced nervously about a half hour before the decisive balloting. In answer, I shrugged my shoulders.
“Quin,” Canche said, “Ask for the votes, and count the votes. Ask for the votes, and count the votes. Got it?” And then he smiled and walked away.
Canche was right. And this year, the two first reasons Harris may have an edge is that her campaign appears to be doing a better job at asking for votes and at counting the votes expected to come in.
As has been well reported, the vast majority of voters already have made up their minds. In a razor’s-edge race, though, even the small number of still-deciding voters will make the difference. And, albeit at the risk of some overgeneralization, there are two main groups of still-deciding voters.
One group consists of largely apolitical young men who are “low propensity voters,” meaning they only rarely bother to vote. The other are centrist or somewhat right-leaning but socially moderate suburbanites, including but not limited to the proverbial “soccer moms.” They tend to vote in almost every election, one way or another. This year, an unusually high number of them are choosing not which candidate to vote for — they already in their minds have ruled out one or the other — but deciding whether they can stomach voting for one candidate at all or if instead they will leave the presidential ballot unfilled (or cast a write-in vote) while still voting for other races down the ballot.
The Trump campaign has been targeting the most low-propensity voters while preaching to the MAGA choir in terms of style and message. Attitudinally, Team Trump isn’t even making a pitch for the suburbanites or others in the middle who are more likely to vote. Consider, for example, Trump’s controversial rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Almost every one of the featured speakers was a true-believing Trump acolyte who reinforced the very elements of Trumpism — the vulgarity, the anger, the divisive rhetoric — that so many suburbanites find appalling. Nowhere were there reassuring figures such as former presidential candidates Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Ben Carson, or even Ron DeSantis, or any cultural figures who could add a “seal of good housekeeping” vibe.
In sum, Trump again not only refused to make a pitch for high-propensity voters still on a fence, but also essentially insulted them. In that light, the incredibly nasty series of anti-Puerto Rican “jokes” told by a pro-Trump comedian at the rally probably cost Trump more in suburbia than among those of Puerto Rican descent themselves.
Whereas Trump isn’t even seriously asking for votes outside his MAGA base, Harris repeatedly asks for votes of those otherwise philosophically ill-disposed toward her. While her feints toward the ideological center on a host of issues have been ham-handed and, I think, inauthentic, the feints themselves, along with her rhetoric, have sent the message that she is relatively unfrightening and perhaps at least broadly acceptable. Her campaign’s strenuous efforts to publicize support from Republicans and to include top former Republican office-holders onstage have said, essentially, that she values the votes of those beyond her base.
Some of us think Harris’s appeals to the center are outlandishly disingenuous, but the very act of making the appeals nonetheless can work wonders. So, Sally Q, who was thinking of casting a write-in vote, may instead vote for Harris. Johnny Doe, who was leaning toward a decidedly reluctant vote for Trump, now may leave the presidential line blank. At the margins, then, Harris keeps gaining.
Meanwhile, as Harris’ campaign asks for votes, it also counts them better in advance, meaning it identifies them in ways that can get them to the polls. Except for the infamously inept Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, Democrats for 16 years nationally have far outpaced Republicans in get-out-the-vote operations. In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney’s GOTV technology embarrassingly crashed. In 2020, even an uninspiring, basement-bound Joe Biden turned out a record-shattering 81 million people to vote against Trump. In the 2022 midterm elections, as pundits across the political spectrum predicted a “Red Wave” in favor of Republicans, Democrats considerably outpaced expectations nationwide and kept their Senate majority as well.
This year, to their excellent organization and campaign technology, Harris and the Democrats have raised more than a billion dollars for the presidential race alone, giving them ample means to improve even more on their earlier successes in, essentially, pre-counting the votes.
The Trump campaign, on the other hand, is trying a truly bizarre strategy. Rather than having a direct handle on the bulk of its GOTV efforts — the pre-election “count the votes” job — the Trump campaign has “outsourced” major parts of those efforts to two outside groups, both of which are at least relatively new to this game.
This is politically foolhardy.
It is one thing, standard operating procedure, for campaigns to hope for outside groups to supplement GOTV efforts. A conservative campaign may know, for example, that pro-life groups, or pro-free-market organizations, are doing their own voter identification and turnout efforts that surely will help the candidate at issue.
It is another thing entirely to rely on outside groups for the principal GOTV job. A campaign that doesn’t control and run its own GOTV is a campaign flying at least partly blind, not to mention at the mercy of potentially inept outsiders.
In sum, the Trump campaign appears to be fumbling both parts of Canche Plummer’s sage advice.
With all that said, it remains true that close elections are very much a game both of numbers and of enthusiasm, and that prevailing economic attitudes and conditions also play key roles. Carefully parsing the numbers, enthusiasm, and economic trends, an observer again sees slight advantages for Harris.
First, especially for a campaign trying to gin up enough energy to motivate the low-propensity voters on whom Team Trump is relying, the enthusiasm gap should run measurably in that campaign’s favor. Instead, Trump’s Republicans are significantly trailing Democrats, with 77% of the latter expressing excitement about the race while only 67% of Republicans do.
Second, it is almost axiomatic that the fortunes of the incumbent party, in this case Democrats, rise and fall with voter perceptions of the nation’s economic direction. Not necessarily where the economy has been (although that is somewhat important, too), but where it seems to be going. This year, economic confidence bodes well for Harris’ Democrats. By all three different measures released on Oct. 29, consumer confidence is suddenly surging. Concurrently, while polls show voters still rate Trump more highly than Harris on ability to handle the economy, that gap has narrowed considerably in the past two months. If Harris was running neck-and-neck with Trump when his advantage on the economy was larger, then her improving ratings there should edge her ahead in the closing days.
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Meanwhile, for absolutely objective comparisons, it is undeniable that by the three major, traditional measures of the nation’s economy, today’s conditions are among the best in U.S. history. (Some of us would argue that the numbers rest on a dangerous quicksand of debt and unfunded mandates, but that’s a different story.) The current unemployment rate is 4.1%, the annual inflation rate is just 2.4%, and the federal funds interest rate is 4.83%. That combined index of 11.33% is, for example, significantly better than the combined 15.75% that earned Bill Clinton a near-landslide reelection in 1996. Meanwhile, both the mean and median household net worth, along with the stock market, have absolutely soared in recent years. Again, this bodes well for the quasi-incumbent Harris.
Granted, I haven’t done a deep dive state-by-state the way I once did for presidential elections, and the electoral map provides at least a half-dozen entirely plausible ways for the two candidates to finish within four electoral votes (out of 538) of each other. This race is way too close to call. Still, if Harris wins it by narrow margins, the explanations will lie in the combination of economic trends, the enthusiasm gap probably caused by Trump’s problematic persona, and, especially, a far better application of Canche Plummer’s two-part maxim.