The Kamala Harris-Tim Waltz ticket ended the Democratic National Convention with renewed hope of clinging on to the White House in November. But at this juncture, confidence in a Kamala victory might be better read as complacency.
But this feeling of momentum is not entirely unjustified. Kamala Harris has already transformed the election. Just before he pulled out, the incumbent president Joe Biden was rated as having only a one-in-three chance of beating Donald Trump on 5th November. Now Harris has rallied the Democratic base. And enthusiasm from 2020 blue-backing voters for their new, younger presidential candidate has shot up from one-in-five to four-in-five. Harris has enthused once-apathetic voters to come back out for the autumn election.
But it isn’t enough to secure the race. The New Statesman’s model – now live – gives the Vice President a 54 per cent chance of winning this Presidential race, an effective coin toss. There are some swing states that we cannot write up with confidence for either side, famed for poor quality polling through inaccurate sampling. Michigan and Wisconsin, states that defied polls by swinging 6 points more than forecast to Donald Trump in 2016, right now sit as dead heats. If the same polling error that happened in 2016 happened now, Trump would be very safe. Pollsters, however, claim to have corrected for their errors. And in the 2022 Midterms they did do remarkably well.
But there is no margin for error here, no room for manoeuvre for the Harris-Walz Campaign. Harris leads Trump by 3 points nationally. And that would amount to a five-to-seven million vote lead once all ballots have been cast (turnout dependent). But reliance on the Electoral College as a means to electing Presidents means that leading the popular vote can count for very little. What matters is where you’re leading, and among who.
Not only that, Harris’s 3 point lead is offset by another metric – trust on the economy. Trump leads Harris by 3 points on the subject. And in May he was beating Biden by 12 points. In Rust Belt states, where white voters rate the economy as their number one issue, that lead could be decisive.
Now Harris has narrowed the gap. But if this were a UK election, I would be writing up the race for Trump. In 1992 John Major’s unpopular Conservative Party defied the pollsters because few trusted Labour on the economy. The same was said in 2015 for Ed Miliband. Despite those Labour leads on party popularity, when the cards were down people voted with their wallets in mind. In America few feel the benefits of the recovery, trumpeted loudly by a White House at odds with the public mood. And despite the coin-flip forecast, the advantage feels to me like Trump’s right now. And so, the Harris Campaign needs to eke out ground on the economy. Going hard on abortion motivates the base. But the base is not enough.
There are seven states where things look likely to come down to the wire: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia - and the wildcard of this race, North Carolina.
Harris is polling better among black voters than Biden did. It puts her in healthier contention in states like North Carolina and Georgia. But the polls there point to slight Trump leads, one to two points. In probabilistic terms, Harris has a one-in-three chance of winning either. And North Carolina, by the way, would represent a sixteen electoral college vote gain. It went Trump in 2020.
In the sun-belt states of Nevada and Arizona, meanwhile (seventeen electoral college votes between them), Trump is finding greater enthusiasm among Latino voters. Socially conservative Latinos in Florida swung for Trump in a big way in 2016 and 2020. And there is some evidence of this trend happening nationally, when compared to 2020. Harris losing these two states would be offset (albeit with a net electoral college loss of one vote) by flipping North Carolina. If Harris can enthuse black voters in a manner akin to the Obama campaigns of 2008-12, then her route to the White House gets more comfortable.
But it’s the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania where things are most uncertain. Here pollsters have performed poorly in general election races. Trump on the ballot enthuses those who would otherwise reject elections. A lot of these types of voters exist among Latino communities, but also among whiter and less-than-affluent areas of Midwest America. It’s here where Trump's lead on the economy could be most killer. Harris picking Walz, the Minnesota Governor, is a clear nod to an anxiety about this. But when the incumbent is this behind on the economy, the election is bound to come down to the wire.
[See also: Jack Schlossberg: America’s vanity heir]
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