So, I keep seeing people online reading the tea leaves and coming up with fantastical narratives of why they think the election is gonna go either to harris or trump. I find many of these narratives naive, so as an experienced election predictor, let me try to make some sense of where we're at in 2024.
History
So, I started predicting elections in 2008 when I was in college. I was learning stats at the time and the political science department had a contest of who could make the best predictions. I spent a lot of time researching, trying to figure out what I was doing, and applied statistics as well as some basic idea of fundamentals to my prediction. I got 49/50 states right. North Carolina being wrong. I actually beat out the RCP prediction I posted somehow, although I was pissed at missing that last state since it cost me the contest.
2008 was a pretty easy election to predict. You could feel the energy along side the polling. The GOP was deflated after 8 years of bush, he was deeply unpopular and even a lot of conservatives were turning on him. McCain was talking 100 year wars, and he was a RINO no one really liked, and there was talk of returning to true form for conservatism. On the flip side the dems were MEGA hyped. HOPE CHANGE YES WE CAN! This dude had energy. I thought Obama was full of crap and a "communist" at the time, but I couldnt deny that he had some serious appeal. And it seemed obvious who would win. Statistically obama was up so much he was polling outside of the margin of error, meaning by my crude methodology at the time (basically similar to now, but with a 3 point MOE) I had obama winning with over a 95% confidence level. It was over. And as a young republican, I was dooming hard. But then again, I liked ron paul at the time so even i wasnt feeling mccain and could easily understand why he lost.
2010. The republicans were fired up. They DID return to form. They had the tea party. And they were energized and voted in huge numbers. Democrats, they kinda lost their hope and change. The new car smell with obama wore off and people realized he was just gonna be a standard democrat for better or for worse. And that kinda sucked the energy out of the room, while the republicans were fired up.
It was said, in more retroactive studies of the obama administration, that the crowd that came out in 2008 and 2010 were two different crowds. And in one scenario, the dems came out and the GOP stayed home. In the other, the GOP came out and the dems stayed home. Ultimately, the side that won was the side that mobilized their coalition of voters to the polls. And then you had some independents who swing one way or another. But ultimately. Elections are won by enthusiasm, and which side has more of it. They get out their own base. They win independents, and if the other side is depressed and deflated, they stay home and lose.
In 2012. The tea party....went too far right. Let's just say it. They decided to engage in the real rough and tumble politics that's normal of them now of sabotaging obama at every turn, holding the government hostage to get concessions, pushing insane bills on abortion on the state level, etc. And the people reacted poorly to them. I lost my faith entirely in conservatism after actually seeing it in practice and radically shifted my ideals around this time (hence the blog name). And Obama got a bit of a second wind. The GOP was kinda fired up, but so were the democrats. And if anything, independents like me at the time came over to the democrats, because we rejected the extremeness of the modern GOP, and because we kinda liked having extended unemployment in the middle of a recession. Romney was another out of touch candidate and the GOP just couldnt seem to generate enthusiasm to their side. Ultimately, Obama won, by margins smaller than his original 2008 victory.
Much like 2008, I found this easy to predict. I see some people disputing it now, but I found 2012 easy to predict, and using a same methodology as 2008, I got 49/50 states right again. Virginia I got wrong, thinking it would go red. It was a tossup, really. But I still got annoyed I couldnt get it completely correct again. I never do, btw. After that, I decided to go all polls only, leading to the methodologies i developed on this blog by 2016.
But yeah, I did find Obama to be a pretty easy win in 2012. The GOP was kinda deflated and democrats were fairly energized, even if on the defensive.
2014. The dems got deflated again though, with the exception of PA. In PA, we wanted to vote out our tea party governor we voted in in 2010 and who was too far to the right for the state in general. So we did good in PA, nice blue wave here, but the rest of the country went red. I understood what happened immediately. The GOP was fired up again...and dems were deflated. We were bogged down, the democrats werent doing anything, werent even fighting the GOP, kept talking of compromise, and we lost. And I realized even then we needed, as lefties, to fight as hard as the GOP did, in the opposite direction. Which informed my politics and is why i liked bernie's in your face style of politics.
In 2016....well...we know what happened. Clinton started out with a seemingly insurmountable lead. She was rocking the obama coalition, and there was talk that despite GOP doing good in mid terms, the dems were the majority since 2008, and that except for years with depressed turnout, the GOP is kinda DOA. The only thing holding them together were gerrymandered house districts and the like and voter suppression. If dems came out, we would win. And it made sense, to get them out, we needed a strong candidate who could energize people. Like Bernie. And his progressive agenda.
As I keep saying, I feel like americans have this anomie, this unsatiable will going on with them, where they know something is wrong with the current system, but dont know what it is. They are a people begging for a vision. And the democrats are the ones best able to provide it for them. if we want a new era of prosperity, we need to go left, and I beleived by this point that our time had come. We had to push left with a bold new economic vision.
As we know, in 2016, Bernie was strong in the general election polling and would've won in a landslide. Yet the democratic party had this mentality that it wanted hillary. We needed to have hillary. She was more electable, more pragmatic. Me. I understood just energetically, that hillary was garbage. She wasnt what we needed. But could she win? Well...yeah....any candidate could, really? But if we wanted a decisive win that did the knock out blow for the GOP. We needed bernie and his new new deal style vision.
But the democrats went hillary, which greatly deflated democratic numbers, and the GOP went for Trump. And the GOP kinda lucked into trump. The GOP were kinda DOA. Jeb bush, please clap. Blah blah blah, paul ryan no thanks. Kasich no thanks. Like, it seemed like we were stuck at the tail end of a realignment with both sides not being happy with their candidates. But then trump came along. And he promised to make america great again. He was a blowhard, and a demagogue, but he had great energy. And while it seemed like an uphill battle for trump, and i thought clinton would win just given the electoral math and the fundamentals, something happened at the end of october, around this time of year. The polls suddenly shifted from clinton...to it being a tossup. And then trump won.
I had clinton down to win. But I could tell, going into that last day, that things were shifting. I kept amending my final prediction several times, even recalling predictions like florida because the polling margins flipped at the last moment. I spent all day monday doing predictions just to keep revising them and then finalized them on tuesday. And Trump won.
Why did trump win? Because the democrats were deflated, and the GOP got inflated, and then independents swung trump. I attribute the last minute shift in poll numbers to the country shifting as the people who make their decision last minute all swung toward trump. I believed it was anger over the economy, and clinton being a complete garbage candidate. Sure sure, it was racism too, but racists always voted for the GOP post 1960s, so not sure what point people were trying to make there, although trump did activate those guys.
2018...the GOP stayed home, and the resist libs came out in great numbers. And we finally did see some fruits from clinton's suburban realignment strategy as the dems were fawning over flipping orange county california, the home of reagan and doing their insufferable CENTRISM WINS thing. I mean, sure, you cobbled together a coalition to resist trump, but I'm not sure that's stable or anywhere near as powerful as the obama coalition used to be until the centrist dems broke it in 2016.
Either way i didnt do election predictions that year, but I did note the results. Which brings me to 2020.
In 2020, I wanted bernie, I still believed he could win, despite biden's better numbers, but in retrospect i kinda admit that we missed the boat because of clinton in 2016. By 2020 the dem coalition did morph to be more reliant on suburban moderates with most progressives just "voting blue no matter who", and people wanted trump out. The energy was massive, but it was more like defensive energy, like more anti trump than pro anything. The republicans were ALSO fired up, although it didn't appear that way in the polls at the time. I thought it would be a layup for biden. I believed the republican poll bombing narrative, which was common at the time, and even tried to correct for it.
Election night was more of a shock than 2016. I was certain trump was a flash in the pan. He has his moment in 2016 and i believed the obama coalition was still viable. I thought that it really took us running a stinker of a candidate and the GOP running a populist candidate who resonated JUST to break the fundamentals of the map in 2020. I thought no matter who ran in 2020, including bernie, that it would be a layup. I thought it would be called early for biden and we'd go to bed.
But then everything went SEVERAL points redder than expected. And I watched in horror as it really did come down to the rust belt. Wisconsin and michigan were states i thought were "safe", they were rendered to near tossup territory. And it really did come down to PA. AZ, GA, and NV also took days to call, and it really was a nail biter. Biden almost lost. Holy crap. He almost lost. You can see my reaction back in my 2020 "wtf happened" article. I was like...i thought trump was a one and done-er. I didnt think he had it in him to win it again. But he had REAL energy. We ALMOST lost. This was almost 2016 again. Trump EXCEEDED his 2016 vote totals massively, and only lost because...so did Biden. It was a high energy high participation election on BOTH sides. And while the dems came out on top, they barely did.
Around this time, I made a prediction. I predicted that 2022 and 2024 would be a BLOODBATH for the democrats. Why? Because the pendulum would swing the other way. If Trump had this much energy and biden BARELY won, what happens when the dems lose enthusiasm? They're gonna lose again, that's what. And Biden? The centrist democrat? he never had it in him to maintain the coalition that thrust him into power. They came out to get rid of trump, nothing more. And without that, i figured the democratic coalition would implode.
Going into 2022, it looked like I was right. Polling up until June/july was abysmal. I was predicting a MASSIVE red wave. But then the supreme court struck down roe v wade. And suddenly, it was like the democrats went all end of season 2 in AOT when eren started being able to throw titans around at people. It was like HOLY CRAP WHAT JUST HAPPENED?! All of the sudden they were pissed, they were energized, and they started to win. The polls did deflate a little in october, but it was still pretty close where it seemed like the dems would be able to actually blunt the red wave...and they did.
Basically, people act like 2022 was a huge democratic victory. I see it more as damage control. We still lost the house but maintained and even expanded the senate. It was the best outcome we could've hoped for, but really, this WAS an election the GOP were supposed to win. Normally dems are deflated with their side going into mid terms with a dem president in office. I really do attribute the supreme court actively pissing half the country off as giving them that last bump of adrenaline.
Which brings us to 2024...
So...2024....started out much like 2022 did. The democrats were deflated AGAIN. Polling was abysmal. To put it simply, we were facing what seemed to be an unstoppable red wave. The map was horrid. I mean, I did the predictions last year, and early this year, and I just kept having trump winning every time. it was close, and we kept telling ourselves there was still time to turn this around, and it seemed like people were expecting a miracle to happen by July...
...and it didn't. if anything, Biden ended up imploding in the debate, and we kinda realized, nothing was coming to save us, we gotta save ourselves.
This was the map that Biden ended his run with in 2024.
And I really do wanna discuss this map. Because this map, despite people acting like it couldn't have been that bad, yeah...it probably was. It was literally what the 2020 map would've been if the dems lost 6 points across the board. Like in the past 4 years, the attitude of the country shifted toward trump by 6 points.
Is that so unbelievable? i know democrats like to act like it couldn't have happened, but it can, and I even predicted it would post 2020. Why did I know this? because look at Obama's 2008 map and then his 2012 one. Look at Trump in 2016 and then in 2020. Look at well...every political movement. You basically see the same trends. Eventually, all political movements run out of energy. And the dems were out of gas. They didn't have much to begin with. Keep in mind, the map 6 points better than this...barely beat Donald Trump last time. Biden didn't exactly have any room to lose more support vs his 2020 high mark. Even a loss of a point or two would flip the whole election to trump. And with people frustrated over democratic inaction, and inflation, and immigration, and biden being literally 82 and not being able to string sentences together properly, yeah, that's exactly what I'd expect the 2024 map to look like if Biden lost around 6 points vs his 2020 performance. And this scares me, because this map is the worst map a democrat has had since 1988. This is a repudiation of the democratic party, and its current track. Since 2008, and arguably since 1992 even, the map has favored democrats. Bush won in 2000 narrowly, he won in 2004 narrowly, trump won in 2016 narrowly, and the GOP hasnt had a good election win since 1988. This would be the BIGGEST republican victory in decades, and would've marked the end of the obama era maps. We would've lost any electoral college edge we had, and we'd have to start over, gg no re.
Even ignoring the fascist threat of trump, this is a massive repudiation, and given the state of the country, I'm having jimmy carter vibes from this. You dont wanna be redoing THAT election. Or 1968, which this election cycle also reminds me of with the anti war freaks screaming about palestine. And it does feel like 2016 again too, with trump coming back. I mean, basically, all the bad years for democrats since the 1960s rolled into one. So yeah. This was BAD.
But then...the dems effectively forced biden out. Let's face it, i dont think he stepped down willingly, I think the dems really pulled him aside and leveraged him to get out. And then the party coalesced around Harris and she became the nominee.
Almost immediately, she jumped up in the polls. It was the end of season 2 from AOT again. All of the sudden the democratic party just screamed NO! WE'RE NOT GONNA GO DOWN LIKE THIS and Harris shot up in the polls. But...let's face it. She never quite met Biden's high mark. Let me show you the data.
This is the polling trend line. Yes, Harris did even up the odds, which in itself was impossible, but the highest she ever got was around 59.9% on 9/19.
She also was at 58.9% on 9/26.
Biden, in my corrected 2020, had a 62% chance, and that map ended up being relatively accurate.
I dont have the same map I have now for my september data, but this was the data on 9/20 at her peak.
Let's look at these two side by side. All things considered, I had Harris winning 277-261. In reality, I had that weird D+5 poll from Maine CD2, so let's say it's 276-262. That's narrower than the 202 win. We were still down a whole point or two in georgia, about 3 in arizona, Florida is barely on the board. North carolina is about where it was in 2020, and we lost that. Wisconsin and Michigan are a lot of tenuous, Pennsylvania is a hair worse.
But yeah, this is generally...worse than the 2020 Biden map. We were BARELY winning. Even at Harris's best map.
And then through October, I watched her decline...and decline...and decline....and I recalled even as I made these maps, for the previous elections, that harris's map looks marked worse than Biden's. ANd she's declined since.
This is the map as it is now.
And this is better than it was. A week ago, the rust belt was way pinker. So Harris is possibly on her way to recovery just in time for election day. But it's going to be close.
How I view 2024 in light of all of this
Well...I view this primarily like a 2020 style election. The GOP is fired up. The democrats, post Harris are also fired up. But....the dems have fallen off a bit in october.
2024 was always an uphill battle for us. The big problem that Biden and Harris have both had is motivating and energizing their base. And even now there are weaknesses that didnt exist in 2020. I know I bernie or busted in 2020, but most progressives didn't. This time, a lot of young people are demotivated over palestine. Independent voters in general are demotivated over the economy and inflation. harris has run an awful campaign that is very demotivating, trying to win over centrists and only driving away a lot of people who would otherwise consider her. She dropped bold plans she had for healthcare in 2020. She abandoned her lift act. She's failed to differentiate herself from biden and comes off as another term of biden. A lot of independent voters are confused about what she stands for, where she stands, and question if she will make their lives better.
And Trump...yes, he's a fascist. Yes, he's openly praising Hitler. That SHOULD end his career. Heck, all of the stuff he's said and done SHOULD be game enders. But it seems like this guy can do anything, and 45% of the coutnry will still support the guy, and independents seem to just be tired of all of the controversies surrounding him, they dont take them seriously, they just know gas was cheaper when he was in office. They get nostalgic of his first term at this point, without him really doing anything to earn it. Obama is right, that WAS his economy, but people don't realize that, or don't care. They just want a different direction.
Based on energy, I do think that it goes against the democrats. The mood of the country is deflated and upset about the economy and inflation. The democrats are forced to do this weird centrist mold of candidates that can't properly motivate people to the polls. I think the democrats are doing a lot of good, but polling shows they're still about 2-3 below Biden's 2020 baseline, and around half way between Joe biden's 2020 map, and his 2024 map as of dropping out. And given that means going from winning by 1.2 to losing by 4.5, we're currently at losing by about 0.6. All 7 swing states are leaning red, although 5 by less than a point, and the other 2 by steeper margins.
I believe that Harris can still win. This election can either turn into 2016, or it can turn into 2022. It all depends on democratic turnout and the direction swing voters go in. We could see the dems manage to pull off another defensive mood and win again, but one thing I've learned, never underestimate trump and maga, and if polling is saying he's winning, he likely is.
So...I'm sorry if I'm just not as optimistic as a lot of dems want me to be, but I'm just following the data, and my own theory of elections tells me that Harris is performing roughly 2 points worse than Biden in 2020, with some states doing far worse. And that puts us as the underdog candidate. We are LOSING. ANd no, denying reality and just thinking this will magically be 2022 again and that I'm stupid for not buying into your insufferable circlejerk will not change anything. We ARE losing. Trump IS winning. And I agree with any democrat or dem leaner who agrees that that's genuinely scary, because trump is an existential threat to this country like we haven't seen before, and I don't like to exaggerate on this. He IS "the enemy from within". He is the boogeyman from rammstein's angst video. He is a legit threat to democracy. And we should treat him as such.
Should harris win, I will breathe a sigh of relief that we manage to get it together enough to narrowly beat this guy. And we should be glad that at his age, he just won't be able to run again probably. Dude is falling apart and acting mentally unstable this time. He's probably gonna be in a home in 4 years at this rate. Or jail. If he's alive at all.
But let's be real, as per my above prediction, there is literally a 56% chance that he becomes president again, and you should accept that as reality, because that's what the data says.
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