Trump is Going to Win the Election

Can Dork Mega save Kamala Harris? It may be her best hope? Photo via Twitter.

I’ve been saying for weeks that in an election this close no one knows whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is going to win the presidential election, now a mere two days away, and there are certainly many pollsters and other insightful “experts” who know a lot more than I do. Hence, I personally wouldn’t make a major wager tied to the accuracy of the headline above this story and wouldn’t recommend anyone else does either. 

That said, I hadn’t been paying close attention to the polls for the past month or so, but after spending a few hours looking things over today, it’s hard to find a scenario that ends with Harris winning the election, despite national polls showing the popular vote is extremely close and the projections about the outcome in the Electoral College are too. Among the serious problems for Harris – and they become extremely clear when you look deeper into the numbers – is,m 1) the overall trend in polls is moving distinctly in the wrong direction for the Democratic nominee and it’s unlikely the momentum will break sharply Harris’s way at this late stage in the game; and 2) the trendlines are particularly grim for Harris in the key swing states whose votes in the Electoral College (EC) will decide the outcome of Tuesday’s balloting.

Before going through the numbers, I’ll add here that my personal view is that Harris and Trump are both abysmal candidates and I’m not voting for either. However, for reasons I’ve explained on previous occasions, if my ballot would determine the outcome of the presidential election and someone put a loaded gun to my head and ordered me into the voting booth, I’d pick Harris, so my view of the pills isn’t skewed because, God forbid, I’m a fan of Trump’s.

Turning to the polls, Trump is currently ahead of Harris in the national popular vote by 48.5 percent to 48.4 percent – all the numbers I’m citing are from RealClearPolitics (RCP), which uses an average derived from a basket of major polls – which is statistically meaningless. However, Harris has led Trump in the popular vote since August and from mid-September to mid-October she was up by roughly 2 percent, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but in that general range.

Since then, the numbers have been steadily running against Harris and for Trump to be effectively tied with her in the popular vote 48 hours from the election is perhaps a tiny bit short of ominous for the Democratic nominee, it’s very bad news. Two days before the 2020 presidential election, Biden was ahead by 7.2 percent and won by a comfortable margin of about 7 million votes, but Trump outperformed pollsters’ expectations – as he invariably does – and ended up losing by 4.5 percent, about one-third less than projected in percentage terms. 

In the end, the only thing that matters in our joke “democracy” is the Electoral College and the situation there is far worse for Harris. To win the election requires 270 votes of the 538 votes in the EC and based on who’s ahead at the moment in each of the 50 states, Trump would win by 287 to 251. RCP rates nine states as tossups, though, and when their EC votes are taken out, Trump’s lead is 219 to 211. 

The totals include one EC vote in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District​​rump is expected to win, and 1 EC vote in Maine’s 1st Congressional District Harris is favored to take. Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District is the only other one in the country with an EC vote and RCP has that as too close to call, but everything else I’ve seen suggests Harris will get it, so I’m going to award that to her, which brings her count to 212.

RCP Electoral College map published today, 48 hours ahead of the election. Screenshot from RCP’s website.

The other 107 EC votes are in states RCP rates as too close to call. In two of the nine toss up states, Harris has healthy leads  – 4.8 percent in Minnesota (10 EC votes) and 3.5 percent in New Hampshire (4 EC votes) – so I’m going to give her their combined 14 EC votes, and RCP also has the two states leaning to her. That puts her ahead of Trump by 226 to 219.

The seven other tossups are in what most pollsters have long said would be the decisive swing states of the 2024 presidential race, all which were closely contested four years ago as well. They are:

Arizona (11 EC votes) 

Georgia (16 EC votes)

Michigan (15 EC votes)

Nevada (6 EC votes)

North Carolina (16 EC votes)

Pennsylvania (19 EC votes) 

Wisconsin (10 votes)

Biden won six of those states in 2020, with Trump prevailing only in North Carolina. The key to Biden’s victory was flipping three Rust Belt states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – that Trump won in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, a stunningly pathetic accomplishment on her part which always seems to slip her mind when she’s trotting out her latest alibi for why she went down in flames eight years ago rather than the truth, which is she’s  extremely unlikeable as a politician or a human being. 

The press often labels Biden’s victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as a rebuilding of the Democratic “Blue Wall” in the Rust Belt. Before Trump mopped the floor with Hillary in the three states in 2016, Democratic presidential candidates had consistently won them during the two decades between 1992 and 2012. 

Which leads to the heart of the problem facing Harris at the moment. Two days before the 2020 vote, polls showed Biden was in front of Trump in all seven states. He won six but the margin of victory was less than had been projected, sometimes by a lot, and in North Carolina, the seventh, Trump won by a bigger margin than expected.

Here’s a nutshell summary of where things stand two days before the 2024 election, where the stood at the same point in 2020, and how things turned out:

Arizona: Trump is currently ahead of Harris up by 2.9 percent. With two days to go ahead of the 2020 election, Biden was ahead of Trump by 1.5 percent, and won the state by 0.3 percent. 

Georgia: Trump’s ahead of Harris by 2.3 percent, Biden was ahead by 0.4 percent in 2020, and won by 0.2 percent. 

Nevada: Trump’s ahead of Harris by 1 percent, Biden was ahead by 3.6 percent, and Biden won by 2.5 percent. 

North Carolina: Trump’s ahead of Harris by 1.5 percent, Biden was ahead by 0.4 percent in 2020, and Trump won the state by 1.3 percent. 

If Trump wins those four states – and the momentum has been moving in his direction – it would give him another 49 EC votes. That would take him up to 268 EC votes, two short of the 270 he needs to win. 

If that scenario unfolds, Harris has to win the three Rust Belt states, which have 44 combined EC votes, or it will be game, set, match. If she sweeps them, she hits 270 ECs and wins the presidency by two ECs, Trump congratulates her on her victory, tells his supporters to do the same, and that’s that. Maybe.

But let’s assume that’s what happens for now, and turn to the current polls in the three Rust Belt states, which show:

Michigan: Harris is ahead of Trump by 0.6 percent, Biden was ahead by 5.1 percent two days ahead of the 2020 election, and won the state by 2.8 percent. The momentum had been moving in Trump’s direction until a few days ago when it seems to have reversed course.

Wisconsin: Harris is ahead of Trump by 0.4 percent in 2020, Biden was ahead by 6.6 percent in 2020, and won the state by 0.6 percent. As in Michigan, the momentum had been moving in Trump’s direction until recently seems to have reversed course recently.

Pennsylvania: Trump is ahead of Harris by 0.3 percent, Biden was ahead by 4.3 percent in 2020, and won the state by 1.2 percent. Harris has modest momentum heading into the final days, but RCP predicts the state will go to Trump, which is how he ends up with 287 EC votes to her 251 in the RCP’s Electoral College final projection when it awards states to whoever is ahead today.

So to sum up:

• The poll numbers are still very close, but Trump has more momentum nationally and in most of the swing states. Furthermore, the trend in his direction is stronger in the swing states where he’s ahead than they are to Harris in Michigan and Wisconsin where she’s currently in the lead or in Pennsylvania where she’s just behind. 

• Harris’s numbers in the seven 2024 key swing states two days before the election are distinctly worse than Biden’s were at this point in 2020.

• When the final 2020 results came in, Biden underperformed in all seven swing states versus what the polls showed two days earlier, especially in the trio of Rust Belt states Harris desperately needs to win. Biden underperformed by well more than Harris’s current lead in Michigan and Wisconsin, where she’s ahead by less than 1 percent in each, and by about 3 percent in Pennsylvania where she’s just behind.

• Trump and Harris both need to thread a needle to win, but the eye of the needle for Harris is a lot smaller. She can’t lose any of the Rust Belt states; he just needs one of them.

I’m aware the New York Times came out with a poll today that has better numbers for Harris and I’ve also seen she’s pulled ahead in Iowa in one new poll, while RCP has the state’s six EV votes in Trump’s column, and I’ve also heard speculation that Trump’s freak show rally at Madison Square Garden may prove to have a bigger impact on the outcome than is reflected in the polls. 

Perhaps all of that’s correct, or maybe Democrats will get an unexpected break elsewhere. Maybe a snowstorm blankets exclusively GOP districts in Georgia on Election Day and gives Harris its EC votes or perhaps Benjamin Netanyahu spots a Palestinian flag on a lawn in rural Pennsylvania at the heart of a Republican stronghold, which the Mossad tells him 30 minutes later was merely a small rooting banner for the local high school football squad that shared the same colors, but by then Netanyahu has ordered airstrikes that  wiped 500,000 Trump voters from the rolls, thereby delivering the state’s critical 19 EC votes and the presidency to Harris.

Another possibility – and this is the most realistic one I’ve heard that could turn the tide for Harris, which several GOP sources have told me – Democrats generally have a far stronger get out the vote operation, backed by strong union help in the Rust Belt. That’s especially important in close races and could benefit Harris more than usual this year because the GOP has squandered vast sums of money on pro-Trump GOTV efforts coordinated by the twin clown show acts of Elon “Dork MAGA” Musk’s Super PAC and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA.

Furthermore, a Yahoo News/YouGov poll of registered voters released over the weekend shows 50 percent of Harris supporters are “extremely enthusiastic” about casting their ballots for her versus 46 percent of Trump backers who say the same thing, in contrast to the former president’s edge over Biden by seven percent in 2020. That could be another factor in her favor with GOTV because more enthusiastic voters are more motivated to go to the polls on Election Day. (Unsurprisingly, only 45 percent of total voters are “extremely enthusiastic about voting in the 2024 presidential election.)

But there are other indicators that favor Trump: 63.1 percent of voters believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, a margin of 36.4 percent, and Biden’s job approval rating is underwater by 56.7 percent to 40.6 percent. Unhappy voters are highly prone to want to “throw the bums out” no matter what bums will be brought in, and if that holds true Harris is going to get punished. She’s also running behind every Democratic senate candidate in swing states.

An intangible factor that could also be an indicator is that based on everything I’ve seen and heard, Republican insiders feel a lot more confident at the moment than their Democratic counterparts, and the numbers disclosed by RCP today should make them feel better.