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An election day author's note.

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Author

Chris Sick
05 Nov

Hi gang, so I’ve been silent for a week or two while I try to work myself out of a tricky bit of narrative like the (animated) Grinch in a Whoville chimney. Thanks for hanging in, and given the nature of this whole deal I didn’t want to let election day go by without comment. Recent adventures into mixed company (basically me and normal liberals) really struck me with how much ambient fear and anxiety is coursing through folks about today. I don’t fault anyone for that; any election with Trump on the ballot is only ever a chance to lose more faith in people as a writ large sort of concept. But I’m optimistic today, and generally, and wanted to share with folks why, hopefully offering a little bit of comfort if you’re worrying about outcomes.

First things first, my prediction is that Harris will win by a fairly large margin, probably exceeding +5 percentage points in the popular vote, and 310+ electoral votes. House and Senate races are always trickier, but generally speaking I think Democrats can take the House, lose the Senate by a hair, and probably continue the post-Dobbs trend of picking up state houses and governorships, and abortion rights will be a big winner across the ten or so ballots its up on one way or another. Basically enough will break against Republicans to slow down their march of theocratic nationalism, but not so bad that they’ll be forced to reckon with how unpopular they are and moderate.

There’s worse longterm outcomes, I think we’re approaching some inflection point where thinking about what a post-Trump Republican Party looks like isn’t just idle fantasy. Trump would be 82 by the next Presidential election; he’s already said he doesn’t want to run again, and even for an obvious liar always hungry for power, it’s hard to imagine him auditioning for a four year term that he would be almost 90 at the end of. It seems more likely to me he’ll sulk off, and some combination of focusing on his legal defense, withdrawing from public life, and real health concerns will mute his influence.

Before I let myself tumble too far down longterm outcomes, let me first do a little digging into why I’m optimistic, despite a media narrative that insists we’re facing a basic coin-flip of outcomes. To me, even that narrative points to one of the failings that suggests we’ll see a stronger-than-expected performance from Democratic candidates and Harris, in particular. My basic argument for this is that..

  1. Harris is more popular than believed and Trump—and Republicans—are deeply unpopular, which would be more apparent if...

  2. Institutions, most notably media, polling, and punditry, hadn’t stumbled into a number of world-historical failures in the face of Trump’s rise leading to…

  3. Widespread misunderstanding of Trump’s appeal that somehow render him both more threatening (by normalizing his behavior) and less (by artificially inflating perceptions of his support and competence).

I’ll try to make the case in that order with as little rambling and swearing as possible, which still means a sizable amount of rambling and swearing headed towards you. You could make the case that Trump will lose just on the strength of his supposed popularity being wildly out of line with his results in elections. In 2016 Trump lost by 2.1 points or a little under 3 million votes; in 2020 he lost by twice that, about 4.5 points and over 7 million votes. We shouldn’t extrapolate too much from a small sample, but just consider that if that trend repeated itself this cycle Trump would lose by 9 points and over 14 million votes. That’s not a likely outcome, and not a prediction, but damn it sure was fun to type.

It’s hard to imagine that the last four years have featured anything that makes people more likely to vote for Trump, beginning with his attempted coup, status as an adjudicated rapist, all the way up to and including his racist rally at Madison Square Garden. The longer Trump has been on the political scene as a viable candidate, the worse he’s performed, and everything from organic social media trends to early voter demographics suggest a massive groundswell for Harris.

At this point it even seems, based just on the MSG rally alone, that Trump is doing much more to set-up his justifications for calling the election into question later while also trying to rile up his fans to be ready for violence based on a false hope. Which is, of course, terrifying and dangerous, but also an entirely different order and type of threat than him winning some kind of popular mandate that’s so far eluded him is. He’s never won a popular vote, what in god’s name makes people think this is finally his chance?

Of course it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Trump “wins” in the same way he did in 2016, that is an incredibly lucky trick shot that no one should ever believe was pulled off with strategic forethought and tactical brilliance. He lucked into winning in 2016, and ever since has been trying to convince us (and himself) that he represents some silent majority that simply doesn’t exist. He gained over 11 million votes from 2016 to 2022, true, but still not enough to make up for how well Biden performed (adding 15 million votes to Clinton’s total). Basically new voters broke against Trump, with Pew data showing that voters who were too young or skipped 2016 but voted in the 2018 Midterms went for Biden by +26 points.1

So, given the above, why are we back in a horserace narrative, with the election a 50/50 chance to go either way based on polling and the media? Well, because the same basic errors that empowered Trump at all are still being carried forward. Nate Cohn at The New York Times recently authored a piece asking if we can trust the polls; he made a number of predictions and explored a lot of causes, with loads of possible caveats, but in the middle of all that he noted that:

It’s hard to overstate how traumatic the 2016 and 2020 elections were for many pollsters. For some, another underestimate of Mr. Trump could be a major threat to their business and their livelihood. For the rest, their status and reputations are on the line. If they underestimate Mr. Trump a third straight time, how can their polls be trusted again? It is much safer, whether in terms of literal self-interest or purely psychologically, to find a close race than to gamble on a clear Harris victory.

At the same time, the 2016 and 2020 polling misfires shattered many pollsters’ confidence in their own methods and data. When their results come in very blue, they don’t believe it. And frankly, I share that same feeling: If our final Pennsylvania poll comes in at Harris +7, why would I believe it? As a result, pollsters are more willing to take steps to produce more Republican-leaning results. (We don’t take such steps.)

Nate Cohn, “So, Can We Trust the Polls?” New York Times, published 1 Nov. 20242

Hoserace polling is one of those things that only really hurts voters’ understanding of the wider electorate and electoral outcomes. You will have likely heard about internal polling, if only because both the Harris and Trump campaigns have been citing it to reporters anonymously to advance their respective narratives. This, in and of itself, kinda reveals the problems with the practice being used external to campaigns, insofar as data can drive narratives, which ultimately shapes our realities, regardless of whether the underlying data is sound or not.

Trump has made quite a bit of issues around crime and immigration, even the best evidence suggests crime is falling at an incredibly rapid pace3 and the supposed costs of immigration’s impact on prices, jobs, crime, and government services that the right complains about are entirely false.4 Most polling is nowhere near as accurate as crime or migration statistics, but it’s deferred to by pundits and journalists as a reliable source, even when there’s serious questions about whether the polling is accurate or not (which Cohn walks through in his piece).

There’s way too many people who want to explain (either in-depth or simply away) polling results, their likely accuracy, or their impact on the race, and if you want to dive into that there’s an entire internet out there for it. My concern is less the underlying methodology that drives Trump to look more popular than he is, it’s to recognize that as part of the same institutional failing that lead reporters to sane-wash his incoherence5 or, even further back, believe the Bush Administration’s bullshit justification for a war.

Lots of smart folks have floated various explanations for why they think the press has been so bad on Trump, including that media ownership is concentrated into the oligarchical hands of billionaires who got significantly richer under Trump and don’t like paying taxes. I don’t think most of the institutional failures specific to media are that craven, though two billionaires recently quashing planned Harris endorsements at two different newspapers certainly seems like a great contender for craven actions of naked self-interest.6

More likely, based on my experience, is that people inside powerful institutions aren’t scheming or maneuvering for any preferred outcome, at any level of these systems. Most people—across business, media, and politics—can’t effectively run a Zoom meeting on their first try, nevermind manipulate journalists into a preferred narrative.

The answer is, as it often is, the simplest explanation—people empowered by systems and institutions assume those systems and institutions are good and just, which then extends to the base assumption that the outcomes these systems—like our politics—produce are fair and meaningful. Such a worldview helps explain why so many resources at the New York Times after Trump’s initial “win” were devoted to diner conversations with retirees and admitted racists, rather than exploring and explaining the arcane and, frankly remarkably stupid, reasons why we still have an Electoral College and if there’s any good reason to not have a straight popular vote.

The faith in the system, coupled with multiple and repeated shocks to the system over the past 20+ years (NB, Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of the Elites is helpful, here), have broken many of the brains who lead these organizations. They’ve been repeatedly coned, tricked, and fooled by Republicans and the rightwing, but so throughly and effectively that they see polling results (per Cohn) that shows Trump losing and can’t trust it.

These people see Trump and don’t think “stupid grifter with improbable luck” but rather former President. While we’re on that point, am I the only one increasingly weirded out by how effectively Trump managed to make his former title synonymous with his name to a degree I don’t recall any other past President doing? Per our weird power-fetish culture he’s entitled to be addressed as President in perpetuity, but he’s so effectively gotten everyone to do it always strikes me like Facebook’s rebranding to Meta… no change happens that fast, that thoroughly, and that effectively without, I dunno, strong corporal punishment.

But Trump holds onto the title and insists on it because of precisely the sort of institutional legitimacy it confers on him. Which, as I said above, makes him both more and less threatening. Using his title, conflating his EC win with a popular vote win (which he and his supporters do extensively), even the recent rush by Trump supporters to claim a mumbling Biden gaffe likened “half the country” to garbage all serve to falsely inflate his support and make him appear more popular, suggesting those opposed to him are in some isolated minority, not a broad majority.

And in doing so, because of the feedback loop of accepting institutionally sanctioned outcomes, it also makes him more dangerous. Because if Trump does have a popular mandate than many of his most horrific ideas, from mass deportation to broad deregulation to supporting police violence against citizens are also perceived as having popular support, therefore normalizing the extremes and bringing them into acceptable discourse.

While the media is the primary driver of the above cycle of legitimization and normalization, they’re not alone. Immediately after the 2016 election, House Democrats vowed to work with Trump7 rather than prosecute the case to the American people that reforms were badly needed to ensure Presidents aren’t able to win office without popular support. I’m not sure how effective they would’ve been able to do that assuming none of the media abandoned their faith in institutions, but it would’ve been a damn sight more honest than all the naval-gazing introspection the media and liberal politicians were expected to do after Trump’s surprise 2016 win.

Regardless of any counterfactuals, the lack of recognition of how unpopular Trump is, with the misplaced faith in rickety institutions like the Electoral College, all combined to misunderstand the backlash he rode to power. Because it is a backlash, against social progress, expansive personal rights, and haltering, faltering stabs at a true pluralistic and equalitarian democracy, and that in of itself tells you that on a long enough timeline it’s a movement of losers—because they’ve already lost, that’s what they’re fighting against.

The failure, over and over and over again, of leaders and influential people in media and politics, has lead to this weird bubble where a deeply unpopular and increasingly incoherent wanna-be-strongman is seen as having a viable chance at the Presidency. And that’s why, ultimately, I think that he’s going to loss—because all of the fallacies and illusions are just that, and they don’t reflect how much voters want Trump and his band of weirdos to just shut up and go the fuck away.

It’s after 6p on the East Coast now, there will soon be many tweets, Xs, news stories and whatever else that adds to the chaos. Whatever I think about what the vote will look like, I have no doubt that Trump will try to claim victory, many of his supporters—minority that they are—will no doubt work the courts and even commit or threaten political violence in the hopes of manifesting victory. I don’t think it will work, because these people are simply not that bright, but also because they’ve already lost. But a painful win that, despite chaos, violence, and deaths, would repudiate the nascent fascists (again) is preferable to the longer-term horrors and damage a second Trump term would visit on us all. I think I’m right, I certainly hope I am.

As always, thanks for reading, take care of yourselves in recognition that we’re not likely to have easy and definitive answers in the results by midnight tonight, or maybe even over the next few days. But I’m pretty sure I know how this story ends, the real one if not necessarily the fictional one we’ll get back into shortly. Take care, y’all.