If Kamala Harris Wins, Here are Three Reasons Why

The polls can't tell us who is going to win, but there are other measures to look at

With only a few days to go, plenty of people — particularly those on the Right — are making bold predictions with faux certainty about what is going to happen on Tuesday.

Here’s a good rule of thumb — anyone who claims they know what will happen is ipso facto full of shit.

No one knows anything right now. It’s all noise. Public polling presents a conflicting picture of who’s ahead and who has momentum. The early vote data tells us much less than we think. A fair-minded person can look at the polling, the demographics, and the map and make a rational, reasonable case that either candidate has the slightest edge.

Like everyone else, I don’t know what’s going to happen. My analysis is simple: this is essentially a tied race, and either candidate can win it. If you look only at the fundamentals of the political environment, Trump should win. The incumbent President has an approval rating in the low 40s, three-quarters of the voters think the country is on the wrong track, and two-thirds are unhappy about the economy. The race being so close speaks to Harris’s strengths and Trump’s weaknesses.

I am not ignoring the movement towards Trump in the polling averages over the last couple of weeks. That shift is very real. I am also not ignoring the early voting trends in Nevada, which Jon Ralston says don’t portend well for Harris.

The polls are close to meaningless at this point. And I say that as someone who obsesses over the polls, hosts a podcast about polling, and will almost certainly write about the last batch of New York Times/Siena polls expected in the next few days. To make a case for either candidate as being the slight favorite depends on factors other than the polling.

Of course, Trump could win. He could outperform his polls as he did in 2016 and 2020. No one would be shocked. All of the major electoral models rate Trump as a slight favorite. I wrote last week about the case for optimism regarding Harris’s chances of winning. I still believe she is the slight favorite in this incredibly close race.

I know spouting optimism is very off-brand for me, but there is enough doom and panic happening among Democrats. Therefore, here are a few more reasons to hope:

1. Dems Are More Enthusiastic

The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump is a cult leader for whom his supporters will crawl across broken glass to vote. That narrative ignores the reality that Democrats are much more enthusiastic about Harris than Republicans are about Trump. According to new data from Gallup, Democrats have a 10-point advantage on enthusiasm.