I’m told that nobody likes a smugly self-congratulatory “I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so” column. They always read like obnoxious self-praise, and often premature at that. Which is why this morning I’m instead writing an obnoxiously premature, smugly self-congratulatory “I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so” Corner post instead. (Some sins of commentary are more forgivable when compressed to four or five dense paragraphs.)
For the most recent New York Times/Siena national poll of the election is out this Sunday morning, and Donald Trump now leads Kamala Harris nationally among likely voters — not registered voters, likely voters — by a 48–47 margin. (Forty-eight percent, incidentally, would if true represent a higher share of the vote than Trump received at the ballot box in either 2016 or 2020.) To rehearse a series of presumptions that I assume most readers have long internalized, this is a terrible place for Harris to be in a nationwide poll; the margins are expected to be so close in so many swing states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, etc.) that she is thought to need something more like a 3 percent lead in the polls heading into election day for her to triumph.
Maybe this one poll is a blip. But there have been multiple ominous signs in the polling recently for Harris, and I’ve not been alone in noticing and gesturing at them in one endless column after another over the last few weeks. The inexplicably controversial Nate Silver is taking an admirably dignified victory lap on X this morning, running a gentle circle around everyone once again accusing him of pro-Republican (?) hackery by having a model that has persistently suggested a narrow advantage for Trump. That’s nice enough for him, but since relative to Nate I’m a grimy hustler forever on the make, I just want to point out — while this bright fresh breeze of vindication blows — that this has more or less forever been my theory of the case, from July 21 onward. Could media hype sell Kamala Harris forever? Could she truly “hide” her way to the White House? A lot of Democrats sure seemed pleased to try and find out. Even as the unreality of the Harris campaign and media coverage of it hit the height of derangement during the run-up to the DNC — you’ll notice how much “bad drug trip” imagery seeps into my columns from that period, uncoincidentally — I had my ever-persistent doubts, and they have been borne out.
The most interesting number in the poll — the one that may tell the tale in November — came from NYT/Siena’s questions to likely voters: (1) Do you want a “major change” in this election? (2) Between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, which candidate “represented a major change” from Biden? On the first, over 60 percent said yes — a staggering number. And then in answer to question 2, only 25 percent of likely voters said Kamala Harris represented that change. Fifty-three percent said Trump did.
The ruse isn’t working. The media can try to continue selling Harris as a “fresh start,” but voters are smart enough not to buy it for a second — if for no other reason than that she utterly refuses to tell voters what she actually is for in any way they are allowed to query. Voters want change, and if the race remains where it is now, they are about to get it in the strangest way possible: heading back to the future with Donald Trump.