If Kamala Harris manages to win, tens of millions of Americans will never, ever buy it.
I don’t know who’s going to win the presidential election.
If I were forced to make a prediction, I’d say Trump is probably going to win. The polling is close — so close that neither candidate has anything like a consistent lead outside the margin of error nationally. But the high-quality New York Times/Siena poll has the candidates tied at 48–48, and Trump actually leads by one point when the minor-party candidates are included. Trump is even more competitive in the key swing states. And the trend lines favor Trump.
A race that between early August and early October showed a small but consistent one- to two-point Harris lead in the RealClearPolitics average has now demonstrated unmistakable movement in Trump’s direction over the last two weeks or so.
Moreover, it’s clear from the way that the candidates are behaving that both campaigns think that Trump is ahead and that Harris has some catching up to do.
The good vibes of Brat summer and the Campaign of Joy have evaporated.
If Trump pulls this off, it will be the most remarkable political comeback in American history. Left completely for dead in the spring of 2021, Trump would have fairly easily recaptured the nomination of his party and then defeated the sitting vice president in the general election.
All that’s not to say that Kamala Harris can’t win. She can. The race seems to be trending Trump’s way, but it still is very close. Stranger things have happened in American politics, and it’s pretty easy to come up with a just-so story about how she could win. It would go something like: Trump’s coalition is built disproportionately from disaffected and marginal voters while Harris’s is disproportionately made up of very-reliable voters in tony suburbs. Democrats may not love Harris, but they despise Trump and are highly motivated to keep him out of office. The Democratic voters who stayed home on Election Day 2016 out of complacency — they simply couldn’t believe that Trump could win, so what was the need? — will undoubtedly vote this time around. The Democratic Party is playing from behind. There’s no complacency. The prospect of Donald Trump winning the election is simply not impossible to envision. And if the polls miss this time around like they did in 2022 (overestimating the GOP’s support enough to turn the “Red Wave” into a puny red ripple) instead of like they did in 2020 (overestimating Joe Biden’s support enough to turn what looked like it could be a Biden blowout into a very close win), then Harris could be looking at a clear path to the White House.
However, like I said, I don’t necessarily buy all that. I think Trump’s going to win, probably. But I’m not going to be jaw-on-the-floor shocked if Harris ekes this out on the back of a better turnout machine and more reliable voters.
We’ll all know in eleven days, of course.
That said, I think we can safely say now that we already know something else, even before the polls close on November 5. If Kamala Harris manages to win, tens of millions of Americans will never, ever buy it. The “vibe shift” may indicate a truly changed reality, or it may be merely a mirage, but what’s certain is that Trump, Trump’s campaign, and millions of Trump’s voters think the vibe shift is real and that Trump is on his way to a restoration. If Trump loses now, he will have extremely fertile ground to sow discord and calumny by claiming that another election was stolen from him. Many of his strongest supporters and, now, many “normie”-style Republicans will believe him.
There were two scenarios available that could have restored a bit of faith in the American electoral system: a big Harris win, one that showed an unambiguous and sustained decline in Trump’s popularity, or a big Trump win, a win that would have by no means been popular on the left, but could have been explained by, say, the implosion of Joe Biden’s faculties and political standing and Kamala Harris’s bumblings. Either of these results — whatever their downstream prospects for the country — would have at least restored a bit of the sense of legitimacy around our elections in the eyes of many people.
But now, any result that puts Harris in the White House — when combined with the surge of confidence on the right and “vibe shift” narrative of recent weeks — will cause many, many Americans to immediately distrust the results. That’s an unfortunate reality, and one for which the ultimate responsibility falls on Donald Trump.
If he had not disputed the results in 2020, my guess is that he’d be well on his way to a resounding reelection this time around. He would have had a united Republican coalition and many disaffected independents and soft Democrats willing to give him another chance as an alternative to the failed Biden-Harris era.
He may yet win, and like I said, he probably will. But if Trump loses – God help us.