The vice president has had a good start as the Democrat’s nominee. But her numbers, while better than President Biden’s in his post-debate days, still put her chances on a knife-edge. And as we enter September, it appears the Harris campaign is stalling.
With reports that Donald Trump’s campaign is in a state of free fall, it feels as though both sides – weighed down by ineptitude and inhibition – are hobbling along to the finish line, shoe laces tied together and only barely staying upright. Some momentum… Some election.
We need to properly understand probabilities right now. Our model gives Harris a mathematical edge. And granted, a 54 per cent chance of winning the presidency is odds-on. But in reality, is this as strong as it initially appears? Barely. This is a fine line. And it has been this close for the past few weeks.
In Michigan, my model rates Kamala’s chances as just that: “barely” (a new categorisation that I hope illustrates these narrow probabilities.) She has a 1.2 point margin in the polls, but factoring for drag and historic margin for error in the state, she could be within with a 59 per cent chance of winning the race there. Wisconsin meanwhile seems a little more certain, at a 69 per cent chance for Kamala. But I would note that was the same chance FiveThirtyEight gave to Hillary Clinton winning the White House in 2016. And then there’s Pennsylvania, tipped as the centre-piece state of the Trump strategy. Polls give neither side the advantage, but my model has Harris with a 52 per cent chance - an effective tossup.
Allocate all other states but PA in the Trump/Harris column and you get Harris 257, Trump 262. You need 270 to win. Pennsylvania is the be-all and end-all right now.
There’s only so much an effective incumbent can do in the face of an irate electorate. Few Americans feel the benefits of the so-called recovery trumpeted by the Biden administration. The cost of living crisis isn’t just a British phenomenon. More voters trust Trump on issues like inflation and the wider economic narrative than Biden or Harris - though I note Harris has narrowed that gap significantly. Whether that narrowing will hold in the face of pending economic turmoil is yet to be seen. In 2008, John McCain saw his approvals worsen in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse. What’s to say it wouldn’t be worse for an actual occupant of the White House?
Not once since LBJ have white Americans plumped for a Democratic presidential candidate over a Republican. White working class Americans are disproportionately concentrated in traditional red states but also those midwest battlegrounds we just looked at. Trump turned those voters out in a big way in 2016, upending the expectations and model forecasts.
The Democrat campaign should aspire to pull in 30-40 percent of these voters. Right now, noisy polls suggest that’s doable but not guaranteed. In 2010 Democrats went up from 21 per cent among white voters in Georgia to 30 per cent. It’s what won them the state. In North Carolina, meanwhile, Democrats went up from 32 per cent to 33 per cent. Obama won North Carolina with around 37 per cent of the white vote in the state. One more heave might do it for Kamala.
And now, with news of a possible US recession this year (something white voters in rustbelt states are more vexed about than the median voter), nothing can be guaranteed for the Harris campaign.
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