The state of the race

The question I’ve been getting from readers more than any other is the same question I’ve been asking my friends: Who is going to win this election? The answer is that none of us know — at least none of us who reside in the reality-based community, as it used to be called. We’re all just swimming in the same sea of anxiety for the next eight days (at best)¹ , looking for anything in reach to hold onto.

The one thing we can say for certain is that all the things that professional forecasters and horserace journalists use to drive their coverage in election years are useless. The polls are essentially tied: the big aggregators have Kamala Harris and Donald Trump deadlocked across the seven preordained swing states² and close nationally. (Most show Harris with the slightest of edges in the national popular vote, which as we all know too well doesn’t determine the winner.) But there is a ton of junk — partisan and otherwise — mixed in with the surveys this year,³ which is why honest polling analysts keep saying that the least likely outcome is that all of these razor-thin polling averages will be right. Rather, pollsters keep saying that either a relatively big Harris or a sizable Trump victory in the Electoral College is more likely than a squeaker. Useful, right?⁴  

So while horserace journalists keep staring at the deadlocked polls, I’m keeping my eye on a different factor. This is of course the first presidential election since Donald Trump’s aborted coup — which, as Racket readers know, began on election night 2020 and merely ended two months later with the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol. And while Trump is not currently president — and thus, thankfully, does not have the power of the Justice Department or the military to weaponize in his favor — his supporters are very clearly planning to intervene in a close election, and, if they can, seize power by any means necessary.

This reality has been clear for weeks. State election officers are installing panic buttons, bulletproof glass, and armed security at polling places and vote tabulation centers in swing states across the country in preparation for attacks or attempts to disrupt the election. A 60-year-old Arizona man was arrested in connection with three shootings that forced a Democratic Party office in crucial Maricopa County to close; police found more than 120 guns, 250,000 rounds of ammunition, and a grenade launcher at his home. Another man pleaded guilty this week to threatening to kill Democratic elections officials in Colorado and Arizona. Ballot drop boxes in Arizona, Oregon, and Washington state have been set on fire. While officials are again on the lookout for foreign interference — from Russia and elsewhere — in the election, the FBI and Homeland Security Department are warning that domestic extremists, motivated by a belief in unfounded “narratives about the election process,” could stage attacks in the coming weeks.

And it isn’t just outside actors who are involved: Election deniers have moved inside the vote-counting apparatus. A report from the long-respected watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington identified at least 35 county officials in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, who “previously refused to certify elections in apparent violation of state and federal law, and who may be in a position to do so again in this year’s general election.”

Republicans are meanwhile filing dozens of frivolous lawsuits alleging falsely that state rolls are filled with undocumented immigrants or other ineligible voters. The New York Times reported this week on a pro-Trump astroturf campaign calling itself the “Election Integrity Network.” Led by Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, and advised by Trump January 6 co-conspirator John Eastman — the architect of the fake electors scheme — its thirty state chapters are devoted to finding voters they imagine are ineligible, often using ethnic profiling to identify them, then stalking them to collect evidence to try to disqualify them after the fact (up to and including this coming January 6). Here in Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin tried to illegally purge 1,600 voters from the rolls on grounds that they were “suspected noncitizens” despite the expiration of a deadline. The attempt was squashed by a federal appeals court, which found that at least some of those purged were in fact eligible voters; Youngkin has appealed to the Supreme Court to reverse the decision.

As the makeup of Cleta Mitchell’s group indicates, the support for these schemes is coming straight from the top of the Trump campaign. In yesterday’s hate-filled rally at Madison Square Garden, Tucker Carlson and Trump’s newest megadonor Elon Musk both tried to rile up the thousands of election deniers in the crowd and the millions watching clips at home. Musk said: “Make the margin of victory so large that you know what can’t happen.” Carlson heaped on some old-fashioned white-nationalist eugenics on top of the incitement, saying:

But the most unhinged high-level Trumpist take I’ve seen dropped today at the American Mind, the house publication of the Claremont Institute, the right-wing think tank that, as Elizabeth Zerofsky wrote in 2022, has become a “nerve center of the American right.” This post was by Brian T. Kennedy, a former president of the Claremont Institute and now president of its in-house strategy group. And it is insane. After claiming, without the least bit of evidence, that “over the past two decades we have been living through a slow-motion Communist revolution” in America, Kennedy proposes that there are only two possibilities for November 5: either “President Trump” wins a “blowout,” or the election will have been stolen by “the American Communists and their allies in the Democratic Party (and the Communist world abroad).”⁵

He bases this explosive (and again, sorry, insane) claim on three pieces of evidence: Trump is “either up or tied” in the RealClearPolitics weighted average of the seven swing states, the 2016 and 2020 polls undercounted Trump’s support, and low percentages of Americans tell pollsters that America is on the “right track.” Maybe this doesn’t need to be said, but citing a blatantly pro-Trump outlet like RCP (which gives weight to numerous garbage polls like InsiderAdvantage and the Trafalgar Group), and still only being able to say that he is still tied in several of those states is not very compelling evidence of a certain blowout. Pollsters believe they have corrected (some say overcorrected) for their Trump-related misses in the past. And while the right track/wrong track numbers are what they are, according to the Gallup poll at least, a majority of Americans haven’t thought this country was on the “right track” in over 20 years (during which time a president was reelected), and the abysmal numbers now are still higher than the 11% who liked how things were going when Trump got booted out of office four years ago.

Kennedy then heaps on some of his personal negative feelings about Kamala Harris (“her public performances are nothing short of bizarre, ranging from frenetic to what can only be described as addled, probably by drugs or alcohol”). He also interestingly cites the decision of the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, to squash that paper’s planned endorsement of Harris as proof that American oligarchs are against the Democrat’s candidacy. But then he incoherently handwaves this away, saying (with evident sadness) that perhaps some other “nation-state actors or dark money groups” might overrule the billionaires on her behalf.

In fact, his plan to ensure “election integrity” in case of a Harris win depends on an even richer oligarch: “Elon Musk, who has the resources and megaphone to make these a reality.” Kennedy calls on Musk to pay people a “multi-million-dollar reward” — in other words, to pay people for anything that can be used to prove the election was stolen. He then pushes Musk to host an election-night event on X — the zombie social media platform he bought in the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat — in which “Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the like” would “examin[e] the results” — and no doubt, declare Trump the winner. (Bannon is set to be released tomorrow from federal prison, where he spent four months refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena to testify about the January 6 assault on the Capitol.)⁶

The outlines of all of this could not be clearer. Trump supporters and far-right accelerationists are going to try to intimidate, cancel, purge, and in some cases burn the votes of potential Harris supporters in an attempt to grab a winning margin on Election Night. If that doesn’t work, Trump will declare victory anyway. His team will cite the closeness of the pre-election polls, the large numbers of votes that will inevitably be cast for the Republican candidate, and their own stewed-brain, racism-informed images of Kamala Harris to demand she concede the election, or that the presidency be handed to Trump anyway, whether by the Roberts Court, a Republican Congress, or some other means. These claims will be boosted by the large pro-Trump media universe, which now includes the former Twitter. And if recent events are any indication, if they play their cards right, they may have the support of feckless media owners like Soon-Shiong, Jeff Bezos, or CNN’s David Zaslav as well.

What I’m not going to say, pace Kennedy, is that Trump cannot legitimately win this election on his own. The polls are telling us nothing. There are indeed tens of millions of people out there who want to vote for Trump — either because they’re lying to themselves about his authoritarianism and white supremacy, or because they like it. I’m sympathetic to the prognostications of analysts like Josh Cohen of the Ettingermentum Newsletter, who thinks that pollsters have been incentivized to show a race that’s closer than it really is, and specifically are underestimating support for the Democrats. Indeed, both donor data and anecdotal evidence of enthusiasm seem to favor Harris. But I may be seeing what I want to see. And again, even if Harris wins a bare majority of the Electoral College, that will almost certainly not be the end of the story.

In other words, Elon Musk is right about one thing: The only thing that could even potentially secure an unquestioned presidency is a massive margin of victory on, or as close as possible to, Election Night. That is true for Trump. It is triply true for Kamala Harris.⁷ So look up your polling place. Volunteer as a poll watcher or with a local get-out-the-vote organization. Make a plan to cast your ballot, and make sure your friends have plans to do the same.

And, as soon as you possibly can, if you haven’t already: Go vote.

1  I’m going off 11 pm ET on November 5 as the earliest that we’ll be able to say anything concrete, but it could be a few hours earlier than that or a week or two more. Again, who knows?

2  From east to west: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada

3  The biggest complaint I keep hearing from the stats kids is that a lot of pollsters this year are relying on something called “weighting on recalled vote,” in which a poll-taker asks the recipient who they voted for in 2020, then uses those responses to model a 2024 electorate. The problem as I understand it is that people often have a really hard time remembering who they actually voted for four years ago (or if they even voted). This tends to overrepresent the support for the previous winner of the election (call it a retrospective bandwagon effect). This in turn, counterintuitively but stay with me, gives an advantage to the challenger in this election — which is of course, Trump — because the responses of fewer self-reported 2020 Trump voters are then counted for more. If this is confusing, don’t even worry about it, I told you to ignore the polls anyway.

4  No.

5  In case you’re wondering who those purported allies are, Kennedy says: “American Communists, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Pro-Palestinian jihadists, and the 100,000 Chinese Special Forces who may have come over our open borders over the last three and a half years.” Very, very sane stuff.

6  I do appreciate Kennedy putting this in writing, though. Prominent left-wing critics of the so-called “fascism thesis,” such as Daniel Bessner and Corey Robin, have been arguing for years that fascism could not possibly emerge in America in the absence of a mass Communist movement. I’ve been trying to explain for all that time that you don’t really need actual Communists to mobilize against when American fascists think there are millions of American Communists coming out of every hole. I’ll point them to this column the next time anyone asks.

7  I don’t know who needs to hear this but literally no one else has a chance of doing anything but playing spoiler, so pick the one you prefer. (Which, if you care a lick about democracy, is Harris.)