We have days before the most consequential American presidential election since the last one and a nervous calm has fallen over the world’s capitols as everyone awaits the result of the most epic contest of this year's elections. This eerie quiet derives not from any confidence about who will win, but rather from the comfort of knowing that there is nothing anyone can do about it. More precisely, two somewhat unexpected facts have emerged in the last few months of the campaign to promote this nervous calm.
The first is the essential stability of the race. In the last six months, the world has witnessed a deluge of events, all with the potential to impact the election’s outcome. But despite war in the Middle East, two assassination attempts against Donald Trump, and an entirely new candidate in Kamala Harris, the actual dynamics of the race have changed remarkably little.
Line graphs of the evolution of polling averages over time look like the economic growth of most industrialized countries: suspiciously flat, both before and after incumbent Joe Biden announced his intention to stand down as the Democratic presidential candidate. On 1st August, shortly after Harris entered the race, she led Trump in national poll averages by 1.2 points. By 18th October, this had risen to 2.1 points, hardly landslide territory, and given the conventional wisdom (for whatever it’s worth) that a Democratic standard bearer needs at least 5 percentage points’ advantage in the national polls over the GOP nominee to have sufficient space to tilt the electoral college their way this race is essentially too close to call. And the situation is similar in the seven key swing states. In this environment, no one was too worried about an October surprise: we’ve already had several such which had seemingly no impact at all.
Historically, this level of stability is anomalous. The polls moved over 30 percentage points in the 1976 election between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford; in August 1988, Michael Dukakis led the election by 17 points before losing the presidency to George H.W. Bush by 8. Even the razor-thin 2000 election, where George W. Bush eventually won the narrowest of victories against Al Gore, saw frequent and significant shifts in the polling at state and national levels. But in today’s highly polarized and strangely ossified environment, it seems that public opinion is no longer so malleable. Swing voters are increasingly as mythic as unicorns or Elvis, for with every progressive election, the polls seem to remain more stable. In 2024, it is now only a slight exaggeration to say we know how everyone in America will vote – we just don’t know who will show up (and whose votes will be counted, but more on that later). Presidential elections have become mostly exercises in turnout, rather than persuasion.
The second fact is that the polls show a tighter race than ever before. Nearly all national and swing-state polls show Trump and Harris in a statistical tie; their leads are well within the margin of error. Headlines commonly proclaim that Harris is “up by one point over Trump in Pennsylvania” – but from a statistical perspective, this is as meaningless as any candidate running on a platform of world peace if the cited poll has a margin of error of four points. It is scientifically impossible to measure something as vast and varied as the American electorate with this level of precision.
Since the advent of modern polling in the mid-20th century, the presidential polls have nearly always projected a winner by this point in the electoral cycle, with the important exception of the 2000 election. Of course, they have not always been correct, although they usually are. But more importantly, the sense of an expected winner would by now be shaping the conversation in Washington as the favored party wandered government offices with measuring tapes, figuring out where to put their furniture. It is frustrating for today’s commentariat and office-seekers, but there are simply no analytical measures to show who will win on 5th November.
These two facts combined mean that this election outcome is nothing short than a pure toss-up; and this will almost certainly remain the case throughout election day. Until then, there is no hope of knowing who will win and little hope of changing the dynamic. So, if persuasion is passé and events are irrelevant, what can still influence the election? For the armchair strategists among us – which, at this point in the electoral cycle, probably happens to be everyone – only two avenues remain.
The first is to get the vote out. US elections have comparatively lower participation rates relative to many other countries, indicating that there is the opportunity to pull either in the more apathetic or the (still) undecided voters. The polls are all based on so-called turnout models which predict not just how people will vote, but also who will likely vote. The latter prediction has recently proven fickle: voter participation hit record highs in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. But Trump is a turnout machine for both parties and much of the campaigns’ heated rhetoric, for example the accusation that Trump is a fascist or that Harris is a communist, seem more aimed at scaring people to the polls than changing their votes. The campaigns are also investing heavily in “turn-out operations” that seek to drive their voters -- often literally -- to the polls. The Harris campaign in particular has 2,500 staff members located in 353 offices across the seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) who are directing an army of volunteers to knock on doors and help people get to the ballot box.
A subcategory of voters – and these are the ones which give the Harris folks the most anxiety – are the “stealth Trumpers.” This is the group which has, as evidenced in 2016 and 2020, refused to voice in surveys whom they prefer but who pull the metaphorical lever for Trump when they enter the privacy of the voting booth. They have consistently confounded pollsters, with the distinct possibility they might add another percentage or two to the popular vote counts both nationally ad in the critical states to give him just enough of an edge to win in the electoral college.
The second and more novel channel of influence is to affect whose votes are counted. The only certainty in American electoral politics today is that Trump will challenge the election results if he loses. Indeed, he will probably challenge them even if he wins. And in anticipation, the GOP is preparing a sophisticated legal strategy. The party’s 2020 effort in this regard was ad-hoc, broadly incompetent, and led by a team of lawyers as eclectic as the cast of 'The Usual Suspects': the courts rejected it wholesale, with the Trump team losing 60 lawsuits in a row. Even the Republican-dominated Supreme Court saw so little merit in their creative, if occasionally slightly deranged, efforts that its judges refused to even hear the cases. This year, it's different. Just like its much better organized campaign, the 2024 Trump organization have worked with the Republican party machine to plan a more nuanced strategy to challenge state results, already proactively filing more than 130 lawsuits contesting various voting rules and procedures to use as a basis for further post-election suits. The Democrats have similarly prepared new defenses; the lawfare phase of the election promises to be a wholly different battleground than in 2020. So this contest could also end the same way as that of 2000's: in a tsunami of legal filings and seemingly interminable recounts.
It’s a good time to be either be a lawyer or canvasser, especially in the swing states. But the rest of us in our armchairs can do our best to remain calm. The only problem is that everyone keeps bombarding us through all forms of media with polls, analyses and predictions in an effort to predict the outcome. So, for the last time, there is no analytical or fact-based way to easily make that prediction, and anyone who says they have a “system” is at best making an educated guess.
Is there the slightest chance of a 1980 'Reagan Wave' where the polls kept predicting a tight race until scores of voters decided when they were in a voting booth to switch to the GOP candidate, thus washing away Jimmy Carter's hopes of re-election at almost the last moment? Sure. Anything in politics is possible. There could be a last minute swing decisively in any direction. In this scenario is an electoral landslide possible? Perhaps. Either Trump or Harris could even end up with losing the popular vote yet still prevail convincingly in the electoral college.
But, based solely on perceived momentum, domination of the media cycle through his most recent publicity stunts, helped by the surprisingly strong showing among African Americans and Hispanics, not to mention those leaning his way outraged by Joe Biden’s intemperate “garbage” comments and frustrated by Harris’s inability to tell us what she would do, Trump has the advantage.
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