With no particular pleasure, I predicted Donald Trump’s win, in the week before the election, in print, in the pages of the News Letter (and on their website, here). Then, when everyone got giddy about Harris’ chances after the Selzer Poll that turned out to be a spectacular miss, I doubled down on my predictions on Slugger O’Toole (available here) based on this Twitter thread I posted.
I’ve reproduced the text of both articles below. The polls were clear and the polls were right, but people only see what they want to see in them, which raises wider challenges to the way we think our beliefs about the world are based on hard scientific evidence. But anyway…
Gerry Lynch: The two reasons why Donald Trump will win the US presidential election
Truman Defeats Dewey
Published 1st Nov 2024, 00:01 GMT
Donald Trump is running neck and neck with Kamala Harris in the polls, so if this is an underestimation of his support – as has happened in the past with polls – it looks like Trump will win the popular vote, and win the Electoral College
In his two previous presidential campaigns, the polls significantly understated Trump’s actual result.
This year, for the first time, the polls do not put Trump well behind in the final days, but instead show him running neck and neck with Kamala Harris.
If the past tendency of polls underestimating his support continues, we would expect Trump to win the popular vote for the first time ever, and to win the Electoral College comfortably. I think it is that simple.
The reason why this simple presumption might be wrong is that the polls show this election is not a simple rerun of 2016 and 2020.
In particular, there are many fairly conservative, upscale, white women who’ve voted for Trump twice but will vote for Harris this time, with the overturning of the Roe-v-Wade decision guaranteeing nationwide access to legal abortion being a significant driver of this shift.
At the same time, there are young working-class men of all races who voted for Clinton and Biden but will vote for Trump this time, seemingly alienated by the progressive message in the culture wars.
In this scenario, the Democrats retain some hope as well-off white women are a group who vote reliably in big numbers, while younger working-class men tend on average to be less diligent about casting their ballots.
Yet I think Trump remains the clear favourite, due to the key issues for US voters and the candidates.
Americans have for several years now cited inflation as the most important issue facing their country; in recent months, immigration has surged to second place.
Basic groceries and rent are much more expensive than they were four years ago, while both legal and illegal immigration to the USA has increased significantly.
Democrats, and not just Harris at the top of the ticket, face an election environment in 2024 where the electorate’s top two issues are among those where they are least trusted.
As for candidates, while Trump’s manifest and grievous flaws are the subject of constant comment, they have long ago been “priced in” by voters.
Harris was crowned as heir presumptive for the ailing Biden even though insiders have long known she was a poor campaigner with a weak record as vice president; the electorate have now had the chance to see that every day since July.
That the Democrats anointed her rather than running a competitive process to select a candidate under emergency rules in the four weeks between Joe Biden’s withdrawal and the Democratic National Convention is an error that might haunt the party for years.
All this followed several years of most of the media lying to cover up for Biden’s progressing senility in a way that was laughably obvious.
The Democrats tried to behave like the old East German Information Ministry in a country with a rambunctiously free press and open internet; this was never going to end well.
When voters decry the spiralling prices and immigration and endless official lies of Biden’s America, they are told that Trump is literally Hitler.
No doubt this vindictive, angry, vain, and intolerant man, transparently unfit to hold the most important elective office in the world, has the psychological raw material of a frightening tyrant.
But the USA in 2024 is not Germany in 1933. The state which Hitler took over had barely been a country for 60 years, with political institutions only 14 years old, introduced after catastrophic defeat in war and characterised by repeated economic collapses and incessant street violence between extremist parties.
In contrast, the USA and its political institutions have been in place for almost a quarter of a millennium; despite its supposed current crisis, the country remains the world’s political colossus with unmatched economic dynamism and military might.
Those deeply embedded American political institutions locate much power in states and cities, and most of the most important of these will remain in Democratic hands regardless of the identity of the next President.
It is in these cities and states that the Democrats have the means to rebuild should Trump win.
To do that, however, they will have to address the question they have refused to face honestly for the last eight years: why do so many Americans have so little faith in the post-1960s political and cultural order, a world that the Democrats are the most visible manifestation of, that they will turn to any a vehicle, even one as manifestly horrid as Trump, that promises to truly change the political script?
Yes, I Still Think Trump Will Win
Gerry Lynch on November 4, 2024, 11:23 pm
Despite the Selzer Poll and the general mood of the non-Trumpite world, I am going to double down on my assessment printed in the News Letter last week that Trump is the clear favourite in the US Presidential Election. Believe me, I’ll be glad to be proven wrong. tl:dr—it’s [mostly] the economy, stupid.
Yes, Jan 6 and Dobbs are enormous drags on the GOP. Barely a quarter of Americans think the USA is on the right track and 62% think the economy is getting worse. In any other circumstances that would ensure the incumbent party lost. Abortion, 1/6/21, and Trump’s character generally are why this is even a close race.
Most surveys (e.g. Gallup, YouGov, Siena) show voters think the most important issues facing the USA are the economy including inflation, and immigration, both weak issues for Dems. Abortion, their strongest issue, comes next most of the time, but not all.
Americans view the economy negatively and the New York Times’ extensive focus group work shows many look back on the Trump economy with nostalgia, even if they are appalled by him otherwise. Inflation may have receded but prices haven’t returned to their pre-Covid levels. If you’re one of the many whose pay hasn’t kept up, life is much harder than it was under Trump. Those worst affected tend to be the lowest income women—traditionally strongly Democratic.
There aren’t many undecided voters, but obviously they are key to the outcome of this tight race. They seem to be overwhelmingly motivated by the economy and more likely to think Trump would do a better job on the subject. Harris has made up half of a once large deficit in voters’ minds on the economy, but she hasn’t caught up. Mostly, she seems to have persuaded people sympathetic to her anyway, while there are others who generally disapprove of Trump but think he’s stronger on this issue.
Immigration is an issue with which Harris was specifically tasked as VP and is perhaps the Democrats’ weakest in the electorate’s eyes. The NY Times’ focus groups find the party to be out of touch with an angry electorate open to ‘draconian’ solutions to illegal immigration. Harris and her team clearly knows she has issues on immigration, as she has pivoted sharply to the right on the issue during the campaign. But Trump’s focus on it has been relentless.
Enthusiasm gap? GOP voters have been coming out in very healthy numbers in early voting. It may be that they are just cannibalising what would otherwise have been safe election day votes, but there’s certainly no sign of lack of enthusiasm. E.g. in Nevada the GOP has an early vote lead unprecedented in recent times, according to John Ralston a brilliant analyst, the undisputed expert on Nevada election and certainly no GOP-er. Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, tell similar tales. Even in Pennsylvania, the Dem firewall of 410k votes is towards the bottom end of what they’d hope for. Women have always made somewhat more use of early voting, and across the USA and in key states, the gender gap in early voting is if anything slightly less than it was in 2020.
The shifts in voter registration in key states since the 2020 election also tend not to favour Democrats. Some of this may reflect ancestral Democrats officially registering with the party they’ve voted for for years: but I doubt that’s more than part of it. The electoral environment is really NOT how most of the media are reporting it.
The current mood reminds me of the days before the Brexit referendum when we wildly over-interpreted a genuine but ultimately insufficient late shift of undecided voters towards the Remain camp, forgetting that other hitherto undecideds were also going into the other camp. And Harris reminds me of Hubert H Humphrey, the progressive Vice President given far too little time by an unpopular President in rapid personal decline to climb out from his shadow and establish his own brand before election day.
