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The presidential election remains a coin toss, which in and of itself isn’t unusual. Most presidential elections since 2000 have been very close. Even 2008, the lone blowout, was a nail-biter until the very end of the campaign.
What makes this election so nerve-wracking are the stakes: Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist and a convicted felon. He’s currently free on bail after being convicted of 34 felonies and under indictment in multiple jurisdictions. An embittered, increasingly radical, and obviously decompensating Trump openly campaigns on racial scapegoating and retribution against his political enemies. He makes no effort to hide his authoritarian and dystopian vision for a second term.
Trump is also unraveling before our eyes. His rally speeches are increasingly meandering and incoherent even by their previous low standards. His race his redder and his makeup worse than ever. During a Pennsylvania rally last weekend, Trump rambled for more than 10 minutes about the late golfer Arnold Palmer, with a bizarre focus on his penis size. Meanwhile, on social media, Trump rants like an online troll you’d immediately block.
Yet the race remains more or less tied because about 46 percent of voters think Trump is a canny businessman and masterful negotiator who’ll revitalize the economy and stand up to Vladimir Putin. Or something. Maybe they just believe they have nothing to lose and want to make the libs cry. In any event, Trump’s enduring appeal to a large swath of the electorate is evidence something is deeply wrong in our politics.
But before we get to that brokenness, we should note that there are still reasons for hope.
As previously mentioned, past elections have seemed just as razor tight as this one before a clear victor emerged on Election Day.
Democrats who later went on to win commanding Electoral College victories often performed worse in the polls than Kamala Harris has. During the summer of 1992, Bill Clinton trailed both President George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot. Even Barack Obama’s 2008 election was not a certainty — at one point, John McCain had a five-point national lead. In August of that year, Politico declared that Obama had “hit a ceiling in public opinion polling” because he’d consistently failed to cross the 50 percent threshold of support. (He’d eventually win 53 percent of the popular vote.)
Politico argued that Obama should’ve been running away with the election because of the fundamentals: Incumbent President George W. Bush had about 30 percent approval at the time. Eight in 10 Americans believed the country was on the wrong track. The economy was in free fall with unemployment at six percent and rising.
“If everything is so good for Barack Obama, why isn’t everything so good for Barack Obama?” asked ABC News’s Gary Langer. Fast forward 16 years, and New York Times columnist David Brooks raised a similar question last week about Harris in his op-ed headlined, “Why the heck isn’t she running away with this?”
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But the fundamentals are far different for Harris than they were for Obama. She’s the sitting vice president to an unpopular incumbent president. Joe Biden’s current approval rating is 39 percent. According to a recent Gallup survey, a majority of Americans (52 percent) claim that they and their family are worse off today than they were four years ago compared to 39 percent who say they’re doing better. An AP/NORC poll shows that just 32 percent of registered voters believe the nation is headed in the right direction.
Notably, Harris has maintained relatively high approval ratings despite all that. After the pandemic, most incumbent governments across the globe have gotten clobbered, so it’s notable that she could potentially buck that trend. And it’s not at all implausible that polling is underestimating her support and she ends up winning the Electoral College with a state or two to spare, as Biden did four years ago.
Even elections that we think of as landslides didn’t necessarily seem like that at the time. Back in 1980, for instance, the US economy was in recession and unemployment peaked at 7.9 percent. Nonetheless, the polls didn’t show Ronald Reagan “running away” with the election. Few polls accurately predicted Reagan’s landslide victory over Jimmy Carter.
Of course, Brooks and others who are despondent over the tight race this year believe voters should overwhelmingly reject someone as clearly unfit as Trump, despite conditions on the ground. That’s an understandable sentiment. But Trump’s maddening endurance as a candidate coincides with the GOP’s descent into a shabby cult of personality.
Biden assumed the presidency during a period of social and economic upheaval, most of which was entirely Trump’s fault. But within months of his taking office, Americans were able to resume living mostly normal lives. The Biden administration quickly made vaccines readily available even after Trump sabotaged the presidential transition and vaccine rollout.
Biden accelerated a stagnant economy with the American Rescue Plan. With a razor-thin majority in Congress, he delivered the bipartisan “infrastructure week” that never materialized under Trump and passed historic climate legislation. He repeatedly outmaneuvered a hostile Congress, preventing needless government shutdowns and a devastating debt default. He led a Western coalition against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His presidency was successful by any objective measure. But objective measures aren’t what American politics is about in the era of Trump.
Trump starts off his rallies these days by getting his fans to boo in response to the question, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” — an absolutely absurd question if you can think clearly. Four years ago, the unemployment rate was 6.9 percent. The weekly covid death rate was in the thousands, and Americans planned to spend the holidays with their extended families over Zoom. Every year of the Biden administration was superior to 2020, but Biden receives no credit for it.
Republicans would have us believe that a return to normalcy in 2021 was a given and Biden made it worse with inflationary economic policies. That’s demonstrably untrue. The Economist reports that the US economy “has grown by 10 percent since 2020, three times the pace of the rest of the g7.” Germany, by contrast, didn’t invest in a “supersized stimulus” like the American Rescue Plan and is entering its second year of a recession, which the US avoided.
Meanwhile, average wages have risen higher than the rate of inflation. The unemployment rate is 4.1 percent, far better than 1984 (7.5 percent), 2004 (5.5 percent), or 2012 (7.9 percent) — cycles in which incumbent presidents won reelection. It’s become a running joke that Fox News anchors struggle to put a negative spin on increasingly positive economic news.
Right-wing media hasn’t created this Orwellian reality by themselves — the mainstream media willingly advanced the GOP smear that Biden is senile. Worse, the age concerns all but vanished once Biden withdrew from the race. Never mind that at 78, Trump would be the oldest person ever elected president and he’s as transparent about his health as he is about his tax returns. Meanwhile, his running mate JD Vance is less qualified for the presidency than Sarah Palin was in 2008.
Legacy media “sanewashes” Trump’s deranged rhetoric and treats him like a normal Republican candidate. A recent example is the coverage of last week’s Al Smith dinner. The Times specifically questioned Harris’s decision not to attend the Catholic charity event in person, as if she’d rejected longstanding political norms. But the article didn’t mention that Trump made history when he blocked the peaceful transfer of power and refused to attend his successor’s inauguration — factors that likely played a role in Harris’s reluctance to normalize him by yukking it up.
The Times then ran an article on Sunday about Trump’s contrived stunt where he pretended to work at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. There was no mention of the fact that McDonald’s probably wouldn’t hire someone who’s currently free on bail pending sentencing for their felony convictions. Compare this to how often the Times found any excuse to remind its readers that Biden was old.
Pollster Nate Silver wrote recently in his newsletter that “Harris has been running on ‘vibes’ and has failed to articulate a clear vision for the country.” But “I’m not the convicted criminal who tried to overturn the last election” is a pretty clear vision. And Harris has articulated actual policy positions too.
Conversely, Trump just rambles incoherently during his rallies and softball interviews on right-wing TV and podcasts. He promises to magically fix everything, and while that con artist bluster might’ve fooled the gullible in 2016, he was actually president and has a record of failure beyond passing unpopular tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. His defiantly ignorant and petty choices while in office left the country unprepared for the one true crisis of his presidency — the covid pandemic, which he failed spectacularly.
Trump’s record in office was not good even before covid and became historically terrible from there, leading to his defeat in 2020. His subsequent coup attempt only deepened his unpopularity. But white voters — and in particular Republican men — just won’t quit him.
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A major reason that Harris isn’t “running away with this” is because an overwhelming majority of white voters don’t find Trump’s malicious nature and fundamental unfitness disqualifying.
An Emerson College poll from last Friday has Harris with a slim one-point lead over Trump, but the demographic breakdown is telling: Harris leads with Hispanic voters 61 to 35 percent and Black voters 81 to 12 percent. However, Trump carries white voters 60 to 38 percent. For context, Mike Dukakis had better numbers among white voters against George H.W. Bush in 1988. (The white electorate was smaller then.)
Obama’s white voter support dropped from 43 percent against McCain to 39 percent against Romney. If Trump lost comparable ground among white voters, this nightmare would be over.
This goes beyond rigid partisanship — Republicans just flat out love Trump. Consider that his primary challengers earlier this year were major players, not the Republican equivalents to Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson. And those challengers had fully embraced almost all the MAGA positions except perhaps for Trump’s obsession with the big lie.
Still, Trump, while under criminal indictment, soundly defeated Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, once lauded as Trump without the baggage. In fact, primary exit polls in New Hampshire and South Carolina revealed that GOP voters actually like his baggage. The majority claimed Trump “shared their values,” and it wasn’t as if they were uninformed about his criminal charges. They just didn’t care, with an overwhelming majority in both states saying they still considered him fit to serve even if convicted of a crime.
If Harris wins, it’s because just enough voters accept the rule of law and reality itself. That’s probably why we remain so nervous about the outcome. The election won’t merely determine the next president. It’ll define who we are as a nation.
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