With just days to go until the U.S. 2024 presidential election, former President Donald Trump appears well positioned to reclaim the office he lost four years ago by a much narrower margin than the polls predicted. Granted, the future is always difficult to predict, especially in the fickle world of American politics, but all the evidence available right now indicate that while Trump may not have what George H.W. Bush called “Big Mo,” there are small but not insignificant indications that he is ever so slightly ahead where it counts.
Trump has a lead of varying sizes in all the major swing states, according to most major polls. The polls could be wrong, of course. They often are (witness 2016 and the aforementioned 2020 races). But a closer inspection reveals underlying problems for Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump’s lead in Arizona and Georgia are substantial — between 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 when Barack Obama was elected. It would be anomalous 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 state to be “slipping away” with early voting 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.
Furthermore, after floundering in the wake of President Joe Biden’s dropping out of the race in favour of Harris, Trump seems to have regained his propensity for seizing the spotlight. His McDonald’s stint serving up fries in Pennsylvania seemed omnipresent on YouTube, not to mention garnering segments internationally on channels as disparate as the BBC and Wion. His recent visits to storm-devastated areas have delivered important local visuals at a time when the vice president, who does not have his flair for seemingly ‘spontaneous’ acts, seems confined to television studios and increasing resorting to shrill warnings about the imminent destruction of American democracy should he win.
If Harris loses all three of these states – North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona, her paths to the presidency are reduced to a single lane: sweeping Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This is a precarious proposition. Again, Trump is leading in the polls in all three states in some polls. 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.
There’s nothing really new in Trump’s strategy: rather than chase a disparate collation or trying to reconstitute one like Obama’s, he is concentrating on maximizing turnout in is base. Add to this higher-than-average percentages of African-American Hispanic support and it’s enough to take him over the top in the one area that counts: the electoral college.
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 the same confidence he had when Biden was the Democratic Party’s standard bearer. Harris seems fearful, tentative and tongue-tied. From the McDonald’s photo op when his hokey charm was on full display 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 fewer campaign events. Indeed, some days, she has been totally inactive. Of course, campaign rallies do not substantially move the needle, 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. She seems lost, and increasingly bereft of substantial talking points or most importantly, a coherent policy message. Indeed, at times she seems to be defaulting to the shallow platitude-spouting and word salads of her previous self. In a war to project substance, she appears to be less coherent than her opponent with his few but clear-cut positions. Irrespective of whether one agrees with him or not, Trump projects standing for something whereas one would be hard-pressed to see Harris as anything but either “I’m not Donald Trump” or "Donald Trump is a bad man who will wreck our democracy."
The latter is indeed a profoundly serious issue and is part of the reason why the race, in an otherwise turbulent year for Democrats, remains very competitive. But reams of voting results and research indicate those warnings long ago pushed so many people away from Trump’s GOP. They are not what animates that relatively small number of people who remain undecided. What new voters are being won with denunciations of Donald Trump’s character?
The discussion is in short, all about yesterday and him rather than tomorrow and her.
Merely condemning the former president and celebrating what unites Americans isn’t enough. Yet Harris just can’t seem to go beyond that, to sketch out what her version of Washington in 2025 would look like.
That reluctance is worrying Democrats, who hear the all-too-familiar echoes of Hillary Clinton’s deeply flawed campaign in Harris’ focus on Trump’s character. 2016 vibes all over again. The onus is on the vice president to reassure voters. And, remarkably, even at this late date, she remains reluctant to tell fence-sitters what they want to hear: not that Trump is a bad man, but that she’s not going to steer America to the left. So the GOP hammers her in ads over it.
And while Trump has been willing to talk to almost anybody about anything (however incoherently), 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? And Barack Obama’s powerful, electrifying appearances on her behalf just underline how little aptitude she has for delivering a hopey-changey message. To do so requires gravitas, heft, and real substance..
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, Beyonce 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 – indeed much of the world -- is displeased with the state of the union, partly explaining why so many incumbent parties and their leaders (i.e. Trudeau, Macron, Starmer ) are in trouble. Every poll indicates that by a wide margin. In 1980 Ronald posed the killer question for regimes at the wrong end of popular disaffection: “Are you better off that you were four years ago?” Many voters today believe they were better off four years ago than they are now.
And therein lies the rub. This is a virtually impossible situation for an incumbent party to find itself in, especially when it is running against the guy who was in charge four years ago. Moreover, the Biden-Harris administration has governed amid widely-televised failures, 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 Obama-level skilled. While she is an improvement as a campaigner over Biden, she is has proven unable to withstand closer scrutiny from anybody other than the most die-hard supporter.
The Harris campaign’s best hope, even now at this late hour, remains “Anyone 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.
And that, may be enough to see Donald trump repeat what was only done once before (by Grover Cleveland in 1892) – reclaim the presidential throne.
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