Kamala Harris has had a good start as the Democrats’ nominee. But the vice-president’s numbers, while better than President Biden’s after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, still put her chances of victory in the presidential election on a knife-edge. As we enter September, it appears the Harris campaign is stalling.
With reports that Trump’s campaign is in a state of free fall, it feels as though both sides – weighed down by ineptitude and inhibition – are hobbling to the finish line.
We need to understand the probabilities. Our model gives Harris a mathematical edge – she has a 54 per cent chance of winning the presidency. But is this as strong as it appears? Barely. And it has been very close for weeks.
In Michigan, my model rates Harris’s chances as just that: “barely” (a categorisation I hope illustrates these narrow probabilities). She has a 1.2-point margin in the polls, but after 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 likely: Harris has a 69 per cent chance of victory. But I would note that was the same probability the US pollsters FiveThirtyEight gave Hillary Clinton winning the White House in 2016. And then there’s Pennsylvania, tipped as the centrepiece state in the Trump strategy. Polls give neither party the advantage, but my model has Harris with a 52 per cent chance – in effect, a toss-up.
If we allocate the electoral college votes of all states except Pennsylvania we get: Harris 257, Trump 262. Candidates need 270 to win. Pennsylvania is the key.
There’s only so much that someone who is effectively an incumbent can do to retain the support 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 Harris has narrowed that gap significantly.
Whether that will continue to narrow if there is further economic turmoil is another question. In 2008, the Republican John McCain saw his approval ratings worsen after the Lehman Brothers collapse. What’s to say economic ratings wouldn’t decrease for an actual occupant of the White House?
Not since Lyndon B Johnson have white Americans plumped for a Democratic presidential candidate over a Republican. White working-class Americans are disproportionately concentrated in traditional Republican states, but also those Midwest battlegrounds we looked at above. 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 per cent of these voters. Right now, polls suggest that this is doable. In 2020, Democrats went up from 21 per cent among white voters in Georgia to 30 per cent. That’s why the party won the state.
In North Carolina, meanwhile, Democrats went up from 32 per cent to 33 per cent. Obama won there with around 37 per cent of the white vote. One more heave might do it for Harris.
With news of a possible US recession this year (something white voters in rust-belt states are more vexed about than the median voter), however, nothing can be guaranteed for the Harris campaign.
[See also: Donald Trump’s identity crisis]
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