2024 State by State Presidential Predictions

With less than a month before the November 5 Presidential election, I have a confession to make.  For the first time since 2000, I don't feel as though I have any legitimate insight as to who's gonna win this election.  That's not gonna stop me from making my quadrennial predictions, of course, but with all of the competing trends and untrustworthy polling, it feels like a genuine jump ball.  I won't be a bit surprised if Kamala Harris prevails either narrowly or decisively, and I won't be surprised if Donald Trump prevails either narrowly or decisively.  While my predictions below indicate a split decision among the seven primary battleground states, it wouldn't surprise me if Donald Trump swept them all.  And while it would surprise me if Kamala Harris won North Carolina, it wouldn't surprise me if she cleaned up in the other six.

The only thing I feel confident in stating is that if Kamala Harris wins, it will be because of reproductive rights, and if Donald Trump wins, it will be because of immigration.  These two issues represent the purest distillation of our bitterly divided country's priorities.  Reproductive rights are extremely salient among upscale and educated voters while downscale voters don't seem particularly moved by the issue.  Conversely, illegal immigration is spectacularly salient among downscale voters while upscale, educated voters tend to shrug with disinterest when the topic is litigated.  The election is thus, even more than usual, poised to be a tectonic battle between two groups that don't understand each other and are constantly talking past each other.  That means that the only consequential question is....which group will be larger?

Whenever Trump has been on the ballot in the past, the "deplorables" have charged the polls in unprecedented numbers to overwhelm the college boys, which is why I think a statistically tied polling landscape will ultimately tilt in Trump's direction.  On the other hand, the Dobbs backlash was a big deal in the midterms, enough to consolidate Democratic gains in upscale suburbs and throw off Republican-friendly polling models despite lackluster fundamentals for the incumbent party. Kamala Harris's blank-slate campaign about "joy" would be unlikely to win over enough suburban soccer moms to win if they weren't scared to death about their teenage daughters getting pregnant and having limited options to terminate.  Likewise, the guy who tried to have his Vice President murdered probably wouldn't be able to get across the finish line if a biracial working-class coalition wasn't existentially petrified by repeated images of mass humanity standing at the southern border getting a free ticket inside if they merely claim "asylum".

Still, only one of them can win.  Below I'll break down my expectations in the safe blue states, the safe red states, and the remainder of states that are either in the center or the periphery of the battleground....

Safe Biden States

California--Harris +25 (Biden +29)

Colorado--Harris +12 (Biden +13)

Connecticut--Harris +20 (Biden +20)

Delaware--Harris +16 (Biden +19)

Hawaii--Harris +28 (Biden +29)

Illinois--Harris +15 (Biden +17)

Maine--Harris +9 (Biden +9)

Maryland--Harris +33 (Biden +33)

Massachusetts--Harris +32 (Biden +33)

New Jersey--Harris +13 (Biden +16)

New York--Harris +16 (Biden +23)

Oregon--Harris +16 (Biden +16)

Rhode Island--Harris +20 (Biden +21)

Vermont--Harris +34 (Biden +35)

Virginia--Harris +10 (Biden +10)

Washington--Harris +18 (Biden +19)

 

Safe Trump States

Alabama--Trump +29 (Trump +25)

Arkansas--Trump +29 (Trump +26)

Idaho--Trump +32 (Trump +31)

Indiana--Trump +19 (Trump +16)

Iowa--Trump +11 (Trump +8)

Kansas--Trump +14 (Trump +15)

Kentucky--Trump +28 (Trump +26)

Louisiana--Trump +21 (Trump +18)

Maine CD-2--Trump +8 (Trump +7)

Mississippi--Trump +20 (Trump +16)

Missouri--Trump +18 (Trump +15)

Montana--Trump +21 (Trump +16)

Nebraska--Trump +22 (Trump +19)

North Dakota--Trump +37 (Trump +33)

Oklahoma--Trump +36 (Trump +33)

South Carolina--Trump +13 (Trump +12)

South Dakota--Trump +29 (Trump +26)

Tennessee--Trump +24 (Trump +23)

Utah--Trump +24 (Trump +20)

West Virginia--Trump +41 (Trump +39)

And lastly, the potentially competitive states:

Alaska--Nobody has The Last Frontier on their list of battleground states but that's more based on lack of curiosity than any serious tracking of its sharply leftward trendline in the last few Presidential cycles.  I don't really understand why, beyond a faster-than-the-national-average pace of racial diversification, but Alaska has gotten much less Republican at an accelerated pace since Sarah Palin was on the national ticket.  There's almost no polling this cycle so it's entirely unclear whether the trend will continue, but the lack of clarity keeps this on my "states to watch" list even if I'm highly doubtful that Harris can erase Trump's 10-point margin from 2020.  Still, the trend is too hard to ignore and I'll predict Harris inches toward a single-digit loss.  Prediction: Trump +9  (Trump +10 in 2020)

Arizona--There appears to be two competing demographic trends in Arizona.  The first is an upscale white population trending toward Democrats.  The second is a downscale Hispanic population trending toward Republicans.  The former group was disproportionately represented in the 2022 midterms, allowing for Katie Hobbs' surprise victory over Kari Lake in the gubernatorial race.  With Presidential turnout in 2024, expect the electorate to look more like the one in 2020, meaning the tie will be broken depending upon which group's growth has eclipsed the other.  My bet is that growth among MAGA-leaning Hispanic men outnumbers growth of Dobbs-averse white women, enough to give Trump a win.  But I won't be a bit surprised if it goes the other way.  Prediction: Trump +2 (Biden +>1)

Florida--The Sunshine State only makes my list because of its "swing state" legacy and the usual array of polls showing it close.  I have no confidence that any pollsters are capable of effectively modeling the dynamic electorate of Florida as the state continues to serve as a sponge for Republican-leaning demographics moving in by the hundreds of thousands, rendering the poll modeling from just one cycle ago obsolete.  Expect to see a lot of terrified pundit faces on November 5 as the Florida returns roll in by 7 p.m. and they're disastrous for Democrats.  Prediction: Trump +11  (Trump +3)

Georgia--The opposite scenario from its neighbor to the south, the Peach State's demographic profile keeps moving in a straight line to the benefit of Democrats.  I underestimated the speed of its transformation in 2020 when I predicted a narrow Trump win, and polling for this cycle tracks almost identically to four years ago at this time.  With that said, Harris has no room for error with upscale whites in suburban Atlanta, a demographic which Biden consolidated but where Stacy Abrams floundered in the 2022 gubernatorial race. Victory for Harris requires that she holds nearly all of the Biden-Kemp voters, and I'm gonna predict she falls just short.  Prediction:  Trump + >1.  (Biden + >1)

Michigan--Polling in the Wolverine State has not been particularly kind to Harris in recent weeks.  I can't remember the last time any poll has showed her leading by more than 3 points with most even closer than that, an unnerving contrast to four years ago when the polling average showed Biden winning by double that.  Media pundits are likely to chalk this up to collapsing support for Democrats among Palestinian-American voters in the Detroit suburbs.  I'm sure that's part of it, but there's more going on here.  My recent column musing how more than half of active UAW members appear to be Trump supporters is another red flag.  But perhaps the biggest issue of all is the rural white-working class vote.  Democrats likely have a long way to fall before they hit bottom among these voters, and there's millions of them in the Midwest generally and Michigan specifically.  Harris is just as likely to lose this race in Bay City as she is in Dearborn.  I'll narrowly lean in the direction of a Harris win, but I'm less confident about it with each passing day.   Prediction: Harris +1  (Biden +3)

Minnesota--Biden had a more decisive win than expected in the Gopher State in 2020, consolidating suburban centrists in a way he didn't do elsewhere in the Upper Midwest.  I expect Harris will hold on to that coalition, crushing Trump everywhere in the orbit of the Twin Cities.  However, she will do no better with the kinds of voters that Tim Walz was selected as running mate to help her with than....Tim Walz himself did in his 2022 gubernatorial re-election bid.  In fact, I expect Harris to do quite a bit worse with them, leading to a nominally tighter statewide margin this year than four years ago.  Prediction: Harris +5  (Biden +7)

Nebraska's 2nd District--Every indication is that metropolitan Omaha is sprinting in the Democrats' direction, with poll after poll showing incumbent GOP Congressman Don Bacon poised to lose.  I'd be surprised if Trump even got close here, in contrast to the further Trump consolidation I expect in Nebraska's other two Congressional districts.  Prediction: Harris +8  (Biden +6)

Nevada--So many states currently appear to be on the knife's edge and the Silver State is yet another.  I suspect the same trend lines are bedeviling Democrats here as they are in Arizona, with Hispanics becoming more amenable to Republicans generally and Trump specifically.  The magnitude of the drift is very hard to predict but as of now, I think Trump will come up just short.  Just as my prediction of Arizona in the opposite direction, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if I was wrong here.  Prediction: Harris +1  (Biden +2)

New Hampshire--The Granite State swung left in 2020 and it seems unlikely they'll swing back this year, at least not far enough to become Trump country.  The MAGA embrace among the contemporary GOP probably nudges New Hampshire out of the party coalition for the foreseeable future, at least in federal races.  Prediction: Harris +8  (Biden +7)

New Mexico--Always on the outside periphery of the battleground states, the Land of Enchantment is regularly taken for granted as safe Democratic.  I suspect it holds for Harris this year, but if the swing to the GOP among Hispanics nationwide materializes, it's bound to disproportionately affect the most Hispanic state in the country.  Prediction:  Harris +7  (Biden +11)

North Carolina--Just as has been the case for the last three Presidential cycles, I'll believe North Carolina is poised to go Democrat when I see it.  And just as has been the case for more than a decade now, I suspect for every vote Democrats pick up from liberal expatriate Yankees in the metro areas, they will lose a Yellow Dog Democrat in the reddening rural areas of the state.  Furthermore, after the horrific consequences of Hurricane Helene, I suspect Tar Heel State voters to be particularly cranky next month and unlikely to reward the incumbent administration.  Prediction: Trump +3  (Trump +1)

Ohio--Only part of the battleground because of its legacy, the Buckeye State is likely to be a black eye for Democrats up and down the ballot again this year.  I suspect the Haitian immigrant situation playing out in their backyard will be especially salient among hundreds of hardscrabble Ohio communities who don't want the Springfield treatment to happen to them.  Prediction: Trump +12  (Trump +8)

Pennsylvania--Four years ago, everything went Biden's way just enough in the state he was born in to eke out a 1-point win.  It looks like it's gonna be an even tougher slog this year and my hunch is the Keystone State's demographic similarities to the Buckeye State will start to reveal themselves with similar electoral trend lines.  After John Fetterman's surprisingly decisive win there two years ago, I'm not filled with confidence about this prediction, but the Democrats really need to pull a lot of Dobbs-critical women out of their hats from the outer periphery of suburban Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to make up for all of the old union guys dying off or flipping MAGA.  Right now, I'm thinking Harris's decision not to pick Josh Shapiro as her running mate looks like a huge mistake.  Prediction: Trump +1  (Biden +1)

Texas--It appeared as though the perfect storm was brewing in the Lone State State four years ago, with enough Trump critics in upscale suburban population centers joining forces with the state's growing minority groups to get Biden within a stone's throw from victory.  The only problem is that the minority groups didn't play along to the degree needed to get Biden as close as the polls suggested.  It was actually quite jarring how much the pendulum swung toward Trump among Texas Hispanics, and since I expect that trend to accelerate four years later, Harris doesn't even seem likely to do as well as Biden.  Abortion rights voters in the suburbs could surprise me here and keep this race close, but I think the border issue runs circles around abortion in Texas this year.  Prediction: Trump +8  (Trump +6)

Wisconsin--I stand by my original instinct for the Badger State this year.  Most people will be looking to margins in Milwaukee, Madison, and the suburbs for tea leaves on who pulls out Wisconsin this year.   I'll be looking to Chippewa Falls, a perfect stand-in for the hundreds of rural, working-class communities in Wisconsin where I suspect Harris support collapses a few points below Biden's already anemic numbers from four years ago. Given that Democrats have so much more room to decline among rural voters in Wisconsin, I'd be a little surprised if Harris is able to pull this one out.  Prediction: Trump +2  (Biden +1)

If my predictions materialize, the Electoral College would break 291-247 in favor of Trump.  And my state-by-state margins also point in the direction of a popular vote photo finish, with the distinct possibility of a Trump popular vote win.  If Trump defies almost all expectations and prevails in the popular vote, I suspect this would be made possible by gains that outpace the national average in three of the four most populous states.  Florida will likely lead the pack in goosing Trump's national numbers with the tea leaves also pointing to New York being primed for a sharp turn toward Trump.  The demographic group where I expect the biggest movement is Hispanic men toward Trump, and if I'm right that will decisively shrink Harris's margins in her home state of California, among many other places.  Beyond that, I'm expecting softer margins for Harris among Jewish voters and at least some shrinkage in numbers among African Americans, led once again by men.  The mainstream analysts' instincts are always to ignore entirely the possibility that rural whites might get even more Republican than they were in previous cycles, but expect to see a continuation of that trend as well, with Trump's margin growing by the millions even among a shrinking population base.

Which groups will be moving toward Harris?  She may do a point or two better among women, but that will be offset by men going at least two points in the other direction.  Beyond that, upscale whites in the suburbs will probably reject Trump even more than they did in 2020.  This group's cultural footprint punches far above the weight of its actual voting muscle, so if you're a candidate poised to make gains primarily or exclusively among them, you might want to prepare for a rough election night.  

Then again, maybe I'll be proven wrong.  Maybe the abortion issue is capable of realigning yet another wave of previously untapped upscale suburban women with numbers that manage to overwhelm all of the other demographic groups that appear poised to shift toward Trump.  It's certainly a possibility, but it seems more likely that growth in the demographic groups where Trump is expected to improve will have math on their side.

Lastly, despite my reputation for pessimism as it relates to Democratic prospects, this is actually the first election of my lifetime where I've predicted a Republican will win the Presidency.  I was too young to make "predictions" about the elections of the 1980s, but beyond that, I predicted Democratic victories in eight consecutive Presidential elections.  It was easy to predict Clinton wins in 1992 and 1996.  In 2000, when all the polls were showing Gore would win Florida, I called a popular vote win for Bush but an Electoral College victory for Gore, the opposite of what actually happened.  In 2004, I was convinced the undecideds would break for Kerry, giving him New Mexico, Iowa, and Ohio and thus the Presidency.  An Obama win was obvious at this time in 2008 and his re-election seemed far more likely than not at this time in 2012.  Almost everybody who wasn't a MAGA true believer got 2016 wrong, and I was among them, thinking Hillary had so many paths to victory that it was a near-impossibility for Trump to prevail despite his momentum.  And of course, terrible polling showed Biden was poised for as big of a victory in 2020 as Obama had in 2008, making that one an easier call the month before the election than it actually should have been given how close it ended up.

I submit these predictions with unusually low confidence and the acknowledgment that I'm at least as likely to eat crow on November 6, 2024, as I was on November 9, 2016.   For that matter, I'm not even sure we're likely to know anything by November 6.  If the electoral vote is anywhere near as close as what I predicted, it'll likely be several more days before we have a definitive winner, and that in itself is another indication that we have some real and intractable problems as a republic.

This will be my official predictions as I've never felt comfortable making predictions two days before the election and pretending that was insightful.  I'll probably give updates the weekend before the election if my opinion has changed in any state, but I'll stand by these numbers barring a seismic development.

"Newshour" Story on UAW Clarifies Why Trump Can Win

Earlier this month, "PBS Newshour" did a Labor Day feature profiling the United Auto Workers and Trump's "surprising strength" with their members.  I went into the story not expecting to learn anything new beyond the usual anecdotal man-on-the-street chatter.  In some ways, that's what I got, but the relative consensus of Trump competitiveness was striking even amongst the people that Trump's party has so openly treated as their enemies.  

Much of the interview was spent talking to a UAW member who was a Trump supporter and, when asked what share of the UAW membership he believed was going for Trump, his response was "70%...and that's being conservative".  Strikingly, when a pro-Harris union leader was asked the same question, the best he could come up with to counter it was "that the number was closer to 40%".  The third party who broke the tie was a long-time Detroit journalist who opined that the real number of UAW Trump support was "likely somewhere between those two guesses".  In other words, at least half of UAW members are supporting the Republican nominee for President in 2024.

Now, if you'd told me that more than half of Teamsters were supporting Trump this year, I wouldn't be surprised.  That was reinforced this week when the Teamsters President refused to endorse a candidate and risk alienating the decisive majority of his members who wouldn't have been onboard with a Harris endorsement.  Likewise, if you'd told me that a majority of members of the pipefitters' union were Trumpers, I also wouldn't have blinked.  But the UAW is a different beast entirely.  

The only reason the UAW continues to exist in 2024 is because Barack Obama bailed out the U.S. auto industry during the financial crisis when Republicans loudly, passionately, and unanimously called for burning the industry to the ground with the primary objective of wiping the UAW off the face of the Earth and sending its members to hell during the inferno.  The political party that shamelessly advocated for the UAW's annihilation 15 short years ago now likely has the support of more than half of its members.

More recently, UAW leader Shawn Fain led a ballsy and surprisingly successful negotiation during last year's strike and got the majority of what they wanted with the public support of President Joe Biden.  It seemed like the perfect formula to at least consolidate UAW member support and put the Democrats on track for a decisive victory in Michigan.  But even this very recent reminder to UAW members of who their friends are appears insufficient to keep most of the members from voting for those who gleefully plan to exterminate them, and have been not been bashful in sharing their desire to exterminate them for at least a generation.

My instinct is to chalk this derangement up to either the overarching supremacy of culture war politics or the abhorrently short memories of a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately populace, but particularly as it applies to Trump, I think there's more going on here.  The original sin in the Rust Belt was the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement.  Its legacy of ruin and rage in factory towns throughout Middle America resonates more than the legacy of Obama's bailout.  The disaster that would have been in 2009 doesn't register the same way that the disaster that was in 1994.  

There has long been an opening for any politician of either party who was openly critical of NAFTA, and Donald Trump sagely filled that void in 2015.  The union members who held their noses and voted for another generation for the party whose President brought NAFTA to their doorstep didn't hesitate for a second to abandon them once somebody came onto the scene vowing to renegotiate the agreement.  The fact that Trump followed through with that unlikely campaign promise was the shrewdest moment of his first term, even if direct results aren't necessarily tangible.

I still think it's delusional for UAW members to think their future is brighter with a Republican administration than a Democratic administration, but it would appear that that's where we are.  Those of us concerned back in the mid-90s that a Democratic President signing NAFTA would realign American politics have certainly been vindicated, even if that realignment took longer to fully materialize than expected.  A Democratic Presidential nominee could very easily lose the 2024 election because of something her predecessor did more than 30 years earlier.

About Those Senate Polls.....

The 2024 general election season is officially underway with Labor Day having come and gone.  The latest rounds of polling indicate zero convention bounce for Kamala Harris and actually show nominal movement toward Trump.  I have zero faith in contemporary polls for giving an accurate read on the race but Trump's mirage of resilience in the face of his campaign going completely off the rails in the last month will undoubtedly result in a lot of entirely legitimate sweaty palms among Democrats.  But another theme that has remained consistent throughout 2024 and continues to heading into the general election campaign is that Democrats are outperforming Harris (and Biden before her) in nearly every competitive Senate race.  In some cases, the Democratic Senate candidate is running way ahead of the top of the ticket.  But is it sustainable?  Or even real in the first place?

It's hard to qualify the answer to the second question.  Voters have been late to engage this cycle even in the Presidential race and I suspect their interest is lagging even further in the Senate races.  It's likely to only be in the next few weeks that voters start paying attention downballot, insofar as paying attention even matters anymore given the degree of polarization in contemporary politics which ultimately renders nearly every Senate race a mirror image of the Presidential race.  And that probably helps answer the first of my two questions.  I just don't see the Democratic advantage in battleground Senate race after battleground Senate race being sustainable now that the general election season spotlight is shining.  The gravitational pull of hyperpartisanship seems extremely likely to rear its head.

The two Senate races that epitomize the Democratic overperformance that I suspect won't last until November are Nevada and Arizona.  In the Silver State, first-term Democrat Jacky Rosen has been crushing GOP challenger Sam Brown by an average of 10 points.  This one makes the least sense on paper as Rosen is about as anonymous of a Senator as exists in the country and certainly doesn't have the kind of unique brand that would explain this kind of overperformance.  Perhaps Brown's physical deformity left a bad first impression on voters or perhaps he simply hasn't gotten the kind of exposure needed to close the gap on Rosen, but the only way I see Rosen winning by double digits as the polls suggest is if Harris significantly outruns the polls as well.  Since it's Nevada, that's a possibility but I'd be stunned if the gap between Harris and Rosen was ultimately more than 2 or 3 points.

Ditto for the open seat in the Grand Canyon State.  Polls would have us believe Democrat Ruben Gallego is running away with it and that the GOP challenger, 2022 gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, is so badly damaged that voters are unable to take her seriously.  Considering how closely Lake is tied to Trump, it defies any kind of credibility that there would tens of thousands of Trump voters who split their tickets and vote for Gallego in the Senate race.  The premise currently being peddled of Lake being way behind while Harris and Trump are neck and neck is assuredly unsustainable.  I'd be surprised if there was more than a single point of separation between the Presidential and Senate ballot lines in Arizona come November.

As for what's widely agreed upon as the Democrats' two most vulnerable incumbents--Montana's Jon Tester and Ohio's Sherrod Brown--I still think the "settling" of the races post-Labor Day dooms them both.  It looks like Tester's goose is already cooked, with a trio of recent polls showing him running behind GOP challenger Tim Sheehy.  Nobody should be surprised to see him losing, but what's delusional is that the conventional wisdom peddled by both parties as recently as last month is that Tester could run 15 points ahead of Harris at the top of the ticket and still win....but would only be doomed if Harris were to lose Montana to Trump by 20 points or more.  This is far-fetched.  Not since 2012 has any Senate candidate run double-digits ahead of their party's Presidential nominee.  Granted, Tester was one of those who did in 2012, but the more recent example that better depicts the contemporary polarized spread was 2020 when popular Democratic Governor Steve Bullock ran for the Senate and lost by 10 points in a year Trump beat Biden by 16.  And by modern standards, that's a really big spread between the Presidential race and the Senate race.  It's unthinkable that Tester would be able to triple that spread as would be needed to win in Montana this year.  I expect him to lose by double-digits just as Bullock did four years ago.

The Ohio story has been a bit different thus far as long-time Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown is leading his heavily flawed GOP challenger Bernie Moreno in all recent polls, including polls showing Trump winning the Buckeye State by 10 points.  Republicans are nervous about this race, even assigning Brown magical survival powers.  I don't think they should be nervous, particularly since campaign laws have prevented Moreno from running ads since his primary while Brown has been pulverizing him on the airwaves.  Between Moreno's pending comeback on the airwaves and the strong partisan tide at the top of the ticket for Trump, it's a pipe dream that Brown can defy gravity for another two months.  Recall that Brown underperformed polls the last time he was on the ballot in 2018, and that was a Democratic year.

On the other side of the aisle, don't expect Maryland's former Republican Governor Larry Hogan to continue keeping it close in the Bay State.  It's just too overwhelmingly Democrat.  In the end, there's no serious case for his candidacy and he'll almost assuredly lose by double digits.  He's gonna be the Linda Lingle of 2024.  I'd be astonished if he didn't.

That brings us to the trio of "blue wall" states, all of which are hosting competitive Senate races.  The polling has been more unpredictable in these three Senate races and has failed to show the kind of commanding Democratic overperformance noted above in Nevada, Arizona, and Ohio.  This could be big trouble for Democratic incumbents Tammy Baldwin and Bob Casey, as well as Elissa Slotkin running for the open seat in Michigan, given Trump's tendency to outperform the polls in all three states in November.  In other words, these three races already seem to be in the place where I expect Nevada, Arizona, and Ohio to be by election day, with little voter interest in crossover voting detected.  I don't think Republicans are likely to pick up all three, but the sweep is certainly within reach if the race breaks in any way toward Trump in the next two months.

Now is it possible that I'm wrong and Democratic Senate candidates like Gallego, Rosen, Brown, and Tester continue to run ahead of Harris by double digits or high single digits?  I mean, after all, this kind of ticket-splitting was very common in the Bush years and even into the Obama years.  As an eye-opening example, recall that 20 years ago North and South Dakota had FOUR Democratic Senators.  Could it happen again in 2024?  Possible, but doubtful.  In 2020, only 43 out of more than 2,000 counties with Senate races on the ballot voted differently in the Presidential race than they did in their state's Senate race.  Have we become that much more bipartisan in the last four years?  I don't see it.  

The only vaguely plausible scenario for this to occur was more tenable two months ago when it looked like Trump was poised to beat Biden.  Perhaps there were wide swaths of reluctant would-be Trump voters that wanted to hedge their bets with a Democratic Senate.  Ultimately I think very few voters nowadays make such a calculation, and even if they did, those voters probably aren't nearly as confident that Trump will win now as they were two months ago.  That makes the prospect of 100,000+ Arizona voters casting a ballot for Donald Trump but deciding that voting for Kari Lake for the Senate is a bridge too far that much more implausible and unlikely.

I'll return with formal state-by-state predictions in the Presidential and Senate races next month.

Will The Kamala Sugar Rush Subside Before Election Day?

Just a few things have happened since my last post on here.  I felt a little guilty referring to President Biden as a "selfish old man" when he was stalling his departure from the race even as the walls had been closing in on him.  Biden's more than half century of public service has been far from "selfish" and there's been more upside than downside to his Presidency, but I still say he was being selfish by choosing to run for re-election and refusing to bow out even when it was abundantly clear that he wasn't up for nearly five more years on the job.  But after observing the last three and a half weeks in American politics, it makes me wonder if anything we've seen thus far in 2024 has been real.

Republicans seemed like tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists when they insisted that Biden would be replaced as the Democratic nominee before the convention.  It turned out that they were right, but it mostly doesn't seem like the comedy of errors the Democrats endured through June and July could have been planned.  After all, Hanlon's razor tells us to never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.  Still, what about that June debate?  

I wrote a post on here blasting the debate for being planned so early in the cycle.  It didn't make sense and still doesn't that Biden would call for a general election debate in June....unless of course an escape hatch was being plotted back in the spring when the debates were requested.  Even up to the point of Kamala Harris taking the reins from Biden, I wouldn't have believed that this switcheroo had been in the works for a while as it all just seemed too risky.  But having seen the way events have unfolded since July 21, it becomes harder believe that the state of the race today is merely a happy coincidence.

Within 48 hours of Biden abandoning his re-election bid and endorsing Vice President Harris, she secured nearly unanimous support from every establishment Democrat.  It made sense that the party wanted to avoid a messy nomination fight or to try to take the nomination away from a woman of color who was next in line, but the instantaneous speed at which Harris transformed from a national embarrassment to a folk hero doesn't make sense.  I shared the relief most Democrats felt when we put the burden of Biden's endemic performance deficiency in the rear view mirror, but that doesn't explain the Harris rallies with tens of thousands of attendees seemingly put together on the fly with A-list performers in tow.

Looking at it from multiple weeks after the fact, it's hard to shake the feeling that this wasn't the game plan for months.  Whether Biden was in on it or a useful idiot whose cognitive decline inadvertently served its purpose to force him out of the race is open to debate, but that's nonetheless how it played out, and with storybook timing.  Harris got her endorsement from Biden and basked in the most successful campaign rollout in history, buying herself two weeks of positive media.  Then she picked her running mate, winning another two-week media cycle.  And next week begins the Democratic convention, giving her another two weeks of scripted, scrutiny-free salesmanship.  That takes us just about to Labor Day before even the first opportunity arises to test the Democratic Presidential nominee's proficiency for the position she's applying for.  

Whether this is serendipity or something carefully planned in a smoke-filled room back in the spring when Biden's cognitive slippage was unmistakable, it's been simultaneously clever and disturbing.  It's clever because it completely caught the Trump campaign off-guard and sent the GOP nominee into a messy and defensive spiral, but it's disturbing because the public and the media have so unquestioningly fallen in line in elevating someone to the highest office in the land based on a rudimentary image makeover.  It reminds me of the spring of 2008 when Hillary Clinton, when contrasting herself against Barack Obama in the primaries, successfully reinvented herself as a beer-swilling, white working-class hero, and both voters and the media seemed to buy it without hesitation, at least for the rest of that primary season.

The conventional wisdom has been that reality will catch up to Harris after Labor Day when the convention is over and her campaign gets more scrutiny...and, for that matter, when the Trump campaign and its surrogates finally settle on a more cogent line of attack against her.  I'm not so sure.  When Biden was the nominee, certainly in 2024 but even in 2020, the strategy was to silo him as much as possible from unscripted situations and let the press's anti-Trump bias work to the campaign's advantage by accepting that few hard questions will ever have the opportunity to be asked.  Four years ago, it was just a matter of Biden getting through the scheduled Presidential debates and then letting him be the guy who records videos from his basement for the rest of the campaign.  Expect more of the same with Harris, for the obvious reason that there's precedent for voters liking her much less when they get to know her.

Just as was the case five years ago, when she ran one of the worst Presidential campaigns in recent memory, Harris had nowhere to go but down when she opened her mouth.  She was astonishingly bad in debates ("I answered wrong because I didn't hear the question"...on three separate occasions) and awkward on the stump and in media interviews.  I suspect her handlers know that this version of Kamala Harris needs to be kept under wraps.  It's not a trend I like, and one that I think could blow up in the Dems' face much as it (almost) did in 2020 when the late-deciding vote broke for Trump who seemed to be working much harder to win.  In one sense, I'd be willing to accept whatever strategy is most helpful to keep Trump from returning to the White House, but for the second cycle in a row, the process makes me feel dirty.  Voters should see as much of their candidates in pressure-cooker situations as is possible, and nobody is ultimately served well if the parties work overtime to shield them from it.

And on a note of personal privilege, it appears my instinct was right back in 2006 when I speculated that recently elected southern Minnesota Congressman Tim Walz seemed like a guy who was going places.  I met him in person on the campaign trail as my parents lived in his district and I was impressed by his energy and charisma.  He survived six terms in a conservative-tilting Congressional district and then got the Democratic nomination in a crowded gubernatorial field in 2018.  His gubernatorial tenure wasn't perfect and he shifted dramatically left from the guy who was elected in Rochester in 2006, but he still got re-elected by a more comfortable margin than I'd have predicted in 2022.  And while I never could have foreseen he’d go national up until now, when I heard he was on Harris’ radar as a running mate, I quickly got comfortable with the idea that he’d once again rise to the occasion and exceed expectations.

Was Walz the best choice?  We won't know until the November 6 postmortem.  I think Josh Shapiro was probably a better strategic choice, but who knows what can of worms might have been opened over the Israel-Palestine issue if he was selected.  Walz should be a reliably plucky communicator on the campaign trail and in media interviews, generating positive buzz for the campaign.  I don’t think that moves votes from one column to the other, but it keeps the Democrats on offense and could enhance enthusiasm and thus turnout.

Indulging Octogenarian Egos, Chapter 36

Eighty years ago, amidst the fiercest months of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt was poised to run for a fourth term.  His health was terrible and while the country had its suspicions, it was an era of limited mass communication which allowed FDR and his campaign handlers to hide his condition from voters.  In November 1944, FDR was comfortably reelected to a fourth term...and died five months later.  Fast forward to 2024 and current President Joe Biden's campaign has spent the better part of a year operating as though it's still 1944 until it caught up to them spectacularly last month.  

Ten minutes into the June 28 debate--a debate that Biden requested personally!!--it was clear that the already troubled Democratic campaign was in much more serious trouble than we'd considered.  It was also clear that those closest to Biden--and even those only moderately close to Biden--had advance notice of the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee's cognitive decline.  There's no other explanation for why no Cabinet meeting or press conference had been held so far this calendar year.  Honestly, a modestly attentive 11-year-old could have picked up on Biden's escalating infirmity, and yet the entire Democratic establishment was ready, willing, and able to cover this up for more than a year.  Had it not been for the Trump campaign's willingness to accept an unusually early June debate request from the Biden team, the cover-up would have succeeded until after the conventions when it would have been effectively impossible to replace a spiraling geriatric from running again for the most powerful position in the world.  How the hell did it come to this?

The answer is quite simple.  Despite a long list of very recent neon orange warning signs of the risks associated with deferring to the egos of octogenarians who don't want to relinquish power, Democrats from the President's staff to a near-unanimous slate of Congresspersons to rank-and-file voters in primaries in all 50 states stupidly put their trust in Biden's ego anyway.  Common sense was not allowed into the conversation at any point in the last year, even as geriatric Senators Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell suffered embarrassing and terrifying health episodes broadcast on national TV and, more notably yet, even in the recent aftermath of bequeathing a right-wing supermajority to the Supreme Court because its elder stateswoman rolled the dice on continued ego gratification and it came up snake eyes.  Somehow, even after all of those primal screams from the hands of fate, Democrats put their faith in the suffocating hubris of the gerontocracy largely without question, and as expected the result resembles a tragedy of Shakespearean proportion.

As of this writing, Joe Biden is still the official Democratic nominee for President, but few at this point expect that to hold.  His colleagues and campaign donors that had given him a pass before that debate have since given him the option of the easy way out of his ill-conceived reelection bid. Given that Biden won't take the hint, it seems inevitable that the likes of Schumer, Pelosi, and Jeffries--and potentially even Obama--will defer to taking the hard way next, a public vote of no confidence that will dry up campaign donations and destroy his campaign.  Then what?

The all-but-certain outcome is what seemed like a nightmare scenario a year ago...the ascendancy of bumbling Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket, another unfortunate legacy of bad strategic choices made by Biden dating back four years ago.  Such a scenario is still a nightmare as Harris has all the public relations skills of Pete Rose, but if the Democrats have any hope of turning this calamity around in the next three months, it'll require someone who can prosecute the case against their challenger Donald Trump who by all realistic metrics is running ahead.  Biden clearly isn't up to that job.  But given that Harris's background is as a prosecutor, it's possible that she can. Plenty of others in the party would likely be better at it than Harris, but given that elevating them to the top of the ticket would require the construction of an entirely new campaign infrastructure and starting fund-raising over from scratch with a half-billion-dollar head start for Trump, they are scarcely an option.  There are likely only two realistic options for the Democratic nominee for President and their names are Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Biden has been an above-average President, and I suspect an amateur like myself would be even more impressed by how he's managed the situation in Ukraine if I parsed the details and the crossroads of difficult options he's faced along the way.  None of that matters anymore though, at least if Trump wins in November.  Biden will go down in history as a goat, a guy who didn't know when to call it a day and sabotaged his party's ability to beat a challenger who is dangerous in every possible sense.  Part of me feels sad for Biden about this, but the more I think about it, the more furious I feel toward him for fomenting the totally avoidable political crisis unfolding in real time.  

Obviously Biden, or more likely Harris, could still find a way to win if the tide somehow turns their way or if there's widespread polling error undercounting the anti-Trump vote, but let's be real and put the odds of that at less than 20% right now.  So much is at stake but when it came down to it, averting national catastrophe appears to have taken a back seat to the ego of a selfish old man and the cravenness of those who enabled him.  A second Trump administration is likely on the horizon and plenty of people deserve that fate.  Far more of us did nothing to deserve this fate but are nonetheless poised to suffer it anyway.

How Much Will Israel or Convictions Matter In November?

I'll start out with the month's big headlines....the criminal convictions of both former President Trump and current President Biden's son.  In ordinary times, it would be an astonishing development that the son of the current President was just convicted of felonies and an even more astonishing development that the former President and current opposition party nominee was also convicted of felonies only months before the election, but for nearly a decade now we haven't lived in ordinary times and we probably won't live in ordinary times again anytime soon.  As proof that times are far from normal, the Presidential polling hasn't moved an inch since Trump's felony conviction...and very few expected that it would.  A potential future President who cannot visit dozens of countries because he's a convicted felon is no longer a dealbreaker for a majority of American voters, or at least a near-majority.

To clarify, polling data since Trump's conviction has indicated that 50% of American voters consider the felony conviction "disqualifying" to run for President, and 56% of voters say Trump should be replaced as the Republican nominee as a result of his conviction.  Insofar as any polling is trustworthy in 2024, that seems damaging, but the head to head numbers with Biden haven't changed.  How is this possible?  Because a significant faction of the poll respondents who agree that Trump's conviction is disqualifying and believe that he should be replaced as the nominee still plan to vote for him.  By arnd large, they are the Nikki Haley primary voters....who still find a vote for Biden to be a more unthinkable proposition than voting for a convicted felon who they deem disqualified to run for President.  This is where we are in America in 2024.

This is the sort of thing that will have to be shaken out by the electorate, either shaving or not shaving a few thousand votes away at the margins in a handful of battleground states.  After a fully litigated general election campaign where all of the implications of Trump's felony conviction are broken down, it's possible that enough voters in these key states will decide they have enough of a problem with his rap sheet to cost him the election.  Particularly with as bad as the polls have been in recent cycles, I'm not discounting the possibility that there could be a larger electoral impact from Trump's ever-escalating character issues than is currently apparent.  On the other hand, I also won't be surprised to see that the electoral impact is nonexistent or even beneficial to Trump by initiating his MAGA army even more aggressively and goosing the base vote.

On the other hand, a potentially more salient wild card is the situation in the Middle East.  Polls indicate it rates low on the list of issues that motivate voters, but all one has to do is look at the headlines and see the protests all over the country to confirm that those who are motivated on the issue are extremely motivated.  And while it's likely that the impact will be concentrated at Ivy League campuses and a few communities in suburban Detroit, I'm struck by how many poll respondents with Anglo surnames are speaking up to pollsters to announce that the Israeli/Gaza situation is the most important issue for them.

 

Most problematic for Biden about this development, however widespread it is, is that almost every "Gaza voter" is someone he can expect to be subtracted from his vote column with almost zero upside potential.   Even if most of those Gaza voters don't end up going from Trump (and I suspect a non-zero number will in fact go Trump just out of petulance), Biden needs all of these Muslim Americans and woke college students if he's gonna get to 270 electoral votes.  Considering the 2020 election came down to fewer than 44,000 voters in three combined states, it's not at all difficult to imagine a scenario where the Gaza voters are the difference between victory and defeat.

The November 2024 election will not only give us a snapshot of how many people actually care about the situation in the Middle East enough to base their vote on it, it will also give us a snapshot of how disconnected the general "youth vote" is from the Ivy League college campus "youth vote".  I've been questioning the diminishing utility of polls for the last few cycles, but my radar still went up when recent polls have indicated that young voters side with the Palestinians over the Israelis by a 2-1 margin.  If correct, those numbers point to a seismic generational transformation in American public opinion on this issue in the last 20 years or so.  

 

But given that these same polling samples are showing a double-digit shift toward Trump since 2020 among young voters, it's hard to reconcile.  Sure, Trump is the challenger against an incumbent President whose current alliance with Israel is under scrutiny, but Trump is also vastly more bullish in his support for Israel than Biden, which would be obvious to those with the most basic knowledge of the situation, let alone the young people on the streets protesting and telling pollsters it's the issue that's most important to them.  So either polling is hopelessly broken or young voters are hopelessly broken with an incurable cognitive dissonance.....planning to avenge Biden's coziness with Israel by voting for a challenger promising to be much more cozy yet with Israel.

Ultimately though, I suspect what election night will make most clear is the continuing epic divide between those with college degrees and those without, young and old alike.  This will manifest itself in a multitude of ways, but probably none more than the situation in the Middle East.  A small and shrinking cohort of young people catapulted into foreign policy activism by the college campus culture are allegedly representative of the youth vote, but may in fact represent a microscopic faction of the actual youth vote.  And if this is the case, it could represent a significant demographic flashpoint directly adjacent to collapsing college enrollment numbers nationally, possibly even to the point of becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.  If increasing numbers of young people see their college-age contemporaries decrying the niche crusade for Palestinian liberation as the cause of their lives, it could help persuade even larger numbers of them to forgo higher education as neither the crushing expense nor the activist political culture seems consistent with their values.  Much as the Democrats fancied themselves having a "coalition of the ascendant" during the Obama years, these developments present a very significant problem for them moving forward because voters only seem to become Democrats in the modern era if they go to college.

The Presidential Debate Agreement: Everything That's Wrong With Contemporary American Life

Last week, Joe Biden and Donald Trump came to an agreement to hold two Presidential debates this summer in advance of the November election. That's not a misprint.  Both of the debates are being held in the "summer".  The first debate is scheduled for June 27, a full three months earlier than any previous Presidential debate, and the second debate is scheduled for September 10, still earlier than any previous Presidential debate. What's the hurry?  Well, you see, somewhere along the way it's been decided that voting for a November election needs to begin 7-8 weeks before the actual election day, and now the entire timeline of the debates is expected to shift to indulge this insanity.

Arguably even more indefensible, President Biden dismantled the Commission on Presidential Debates that has organized these debates for nearly a half century, instead wheeling and dealing broadcast rights to specific news outlets.  Why was Biden so motivated to upend the tradition of nonpartisan, nationally broadcast debates?  Presumably there were a few backroom deals he was able to work out favorable terms for, but the most compelling was likely the negotiation to ensure Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s exclusion from the debate and deny him any opportunity to elevate his stature.  Trump's abrupt agreement to the terms Biden laid out highlights their mutual interest in locking in their major-party advantages even if it comes at the exclusion of a debate that is timely and accessible enough to be in any way meaningful toward the intended purpose of an informed electorate.

There's a lot of disgusting stuff to unpack here, but let's start with the delusion of a general election debate held in June and available only on CNN.  Cable subscriptions are at generational lows in the streaming service era, so giving a cable news outlet exclusive access is almost comically reductive in providing voters an informed snapshot of the candidates. I'm sure there will be a streaming option on the CNN website, provided the website doesn't crash as it usually does on election night, but let's be real and acknowledge that the only people who are gonna do that are political junkies who already know who they're gonna vote for.

The second debate, held in September, is at least gonna be on a broadcast station rather than on cable, but only one broadcast station (ABC), disincentivizing civic engagement and putting into question why we pay taxes for public airwaves if an event as unmistakably a public service as a Presidential debate is forced to compete with "NCIS" reruns on another broadcast station.  The predictable result will be the lowest-ever ratings for both Presidential debates, and exposure for the overwhelming majority of Americans being limited to whatever cliff-note version finds its way to their Facebook feed the next day, exacerbating already poisonous trend lines for our democratic experiment.

And in a textbook example of losing the storyline, the primary reason cited for holding these debates so ridiculously early is to service the malignant cancer of early voting.  Recall that the original motivation for introducing early voting was that partisan dirty tricks campaigns were disenfranchising certain voters with, among other things, intentionally long lines at polling stations.  There was definitely some truth to that, but out of the multiple remedies that could have been exercised to diminish this concern, the option we decided upon was opening up voting multiple weeks before the election.  The trend expanded during the pandemic and locked in place an indefensible new normal where millions of people will have already cast ballots in September for an election ostensibly being held on November 5.

The irony here, of course, is that in the name of combating voter disenfranchisement, bowing to early voting as the bedrock principle of our democracy is now forcing a scenario where debate viewership is likely to decline by 80% or more, with the low-information voter demographic most in need of watching the debate being less likely to participate than most given its scheduling.  By pandering to those all keyed up to vote in September, we're less likely to reach the voters who need motivating to get engaged in the process for November.  

Furthermore, as someone who grew up in a state where a Senate candidate was killed in a plane crash 11 days before the election, I can predict with unwavering certitude that it won't end well when an inevitable black swan event occurs throwing an election into chaos.  As chaotic as these situations are generally, imagine the legal Wild West we'd be in if a black swan event occurred before election day but after millions of early votes had already been banked.  Specific to this race, we certainly increase the odds of a black swan event when our political parties insist on nominating octogenarians.

As for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., I'm not a fan, but I'm less of a fan of changing long-established rules in the ninth inning to exclude a candidate who spooks the partisan duopoly.  If RFK Jr. is polling in double-digits, it's hard to make a case why he shouldn't be included in the debate just as John Anderson was in 1980 and Ross Perot was in 1992 when they hit similar metrics.  At the very least, it should have been the Commission on Presidential Debates that made that call, not the backroom dealings of the Biden and Trump campaigns with select media barons standing to cash in from RFK's exclusion.

One of the biggest problems our republic is facing is the lack of any shared civic or cultural experiences.  Everything about the 2024 debate scheduling leans into the toxic trends tearing the country apart. Whether it be limiting broadcasting rights for the debate to the highest bidder, making Presidential debates a pay-per-view proposition, or further normalizing a voting scheme where ballots are cast in September and counted in December, the choices made by our governing class and corporate media seem intent on exacerbating our divisions and disunity even more.