Election Eve thoughts: the case for cautious optimism

Why am I cautiously optimistic about the election, and why should you encourage yourself and everyone you know to vote?

Consider this an open letter to everyone who is either exhausted by the 2024 election, anxious or downcast about what’s about to happen, or has received the conventional wisdom that somehow Trump is the favorite and we should all be resigned to his return to power.

Latest from the New York Times: Prosecutor shakes hands with a convicted felon. Why this could spell trouble for Kamala Harris.

First, let’s dispel some of the despondency. There is ample evidence that what we’re seeing is a combination of successful pro-Trump disinformation, plus playing the mainstream media’s inherent desire for this to be a tight race, a toss-up, with a competitive Donald Trump continuing to do what he’s done for the media for the last 9 years — provoke higher ratings, more clicks, more subscriptions, and more revenue for what is otherwise a dying business model.

• Trump is paying for a slew of polls — he has admitted this, and we generally know which polls these are — and these biased polls then get used for the “polling averages” that everyone has. But as the old saying among coders used to go, “garbage in, garbage out.” If the polls are trash, then the averages will be too.

• Betting sites are too easy to game. This is especially true for, say, Polymarket, which is offshore, unregulated, and uses cryptocurrency. So it’s open to a flood of foreign money, and crypto experts have found that at least one-third of their bets have been “wash trades” with bets on both sides placed rapidly, to create a sense of fake, inflated volume. The theory that betting is predictive relies on the idea that people with real inside information will be the ones placing the bets; that theory falls apart when (a) the money coming in isn’t even from Americans, (b) any “insider” bets are being swamped by a mass crowd and outsider whales, and (c) there are strong incentives to skew the betting odds to create disinformation.

• Why all the fake polls — plus the betting odds showing Trump winning? It’s all so Trump and his allies can claim victory and whine that the election must have been rigged. Look how far ahead we were! Look at all the polls and betting sites that said we were winning! Also, in the meantime, pre-election, the steady IV drip of hopium for the Trumpers has encouraged the base to keep fighting and to turn out to vote.

• Meanwhile, the mainstream media and their aligned pollsters have their own set of incentives. Nate Cohn of the New York Times opened a window into this the other day. Unwittingly, perhaps. He explained that 2016 was an existential moment for pollsters, making them question their methods and their abilities. Most pollsters missed the Trump victory that was brewing. Since then, they have corrected for this, literally ignoring or throwing out results that seemed to be too Democratic-leaning. (We can also extrapolate from his remarks that pollsters are likely over-indexing on likely Republican voters.) In other words, pollsters are in engaging in the very human practice of “fighting the last war.” They were blindsided in 2016, and they’ve been tilting rightward ever since. This explains how they predicted a red wave in 2022 that never materialized, and how they’ve predicted more red-leaning results in special elections and state legislative elections. It also means that they are potentially missing a much stronger groundswell for Harris, because they keep over-indexing on Trump voters and throwing out pro-Harris results.

• I’ll add my own theory into what Cohn admitted. The mainstream media industrial complex is also badly dependent on Donald Trump being a competitive force in US politics. As of 2015, legacy media companies like the Times were in a clear and seemingly inescapable decline. Then Trump came down his fake-gold escalator and entered the presidential race, and everything changed, reviving an industry that was otherwise headed for oblivion or some new evolution. If there were a single person responsible for reviving your business, wouldn’t you maybe, just maybe, have some vested interest and unspoken bias toward keeping that person relevant?

• Ok, you might say. But how do we know that the pro-Trump numbers aren’t right? Maybe he paid for polls, maybe the betting sites have issues, maybe the mainstream media folks want a horserace, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their numbers are wrong! This is akin to saying that a broken clock is right twice a day. The Trump-commissioned polls are bunk, the betting sites are bunk, and the mainstream media and their pollsters have their own issues, but sure, their numbers could still be correct by pure coincidence.

• Except that we’re seeing signs to the contrary. The overall early voting and mail-in voting numbers have been astronomically high, shattering records pretty much everywhere. Higher turnout, all else being equal, favors the Democrats.

• Then there are the newest polls from outside the Washington-NYC media bubble — especially the poll from highly respected pollster Ann Selzer in Iowa, for the Des Moines Register. This is the Iowa poll, and it shows Harris leading by 3 points — in a state Trump carried by 9.5 points in 2016 and 8 points in 2020. Trump was winning this same poll by 10 points at the beginning of the summer and by 4 points in September. And generally, Selzer has a stellar track record: unlike most pollsters, she did see the Trump victory in 2016 coming.

• So what happened? The biggest news in Iowa this summer was a 6-week abortion ban that took effect there in July, effectively prohibiting almost all abortions, despite the fact that a majority of Iowans support reproductive rights. And lo and behold, what shifted in the Selzer poll was that independents and women over 65 shifted heavily toward Harris. The theory here from other commentators is that women over 65 remember a world before Roe v. Wade, when women not only could not control their reproductive health but could not open bank accounts or have their own credit cards. The bigger problem for Trump here is that seniors are the voting cohort with the highest rates of turnout by far — senior women are the gold standard for who actually shows up for an election. Iowa is also 84.5% white. So if Kamala Harris is winning Iowa women over 65 by a margin of 63% to 28% — according to one of the most respected and accurate pollsters in the US today — then perhaps it’s a harbinger that Trump is in deep trouble with white women over 65, a demo he carried in both 2016 and 2020.

• And it’s not just Iowa. Another highly respected poll from Kansas shows Trump up only 5 points there, in a state where he won by 20 in 2016 and 15 in 2020. One from Ohio shows Trump leading by only 3, where he won by 8 points in both 2016 and 2020. Another from Alaska shows Trump leading by only 4, where he won by 14 points in 2016 and 10 points in 2020.

• Take all of this together, and there is a case to be made that Trump’s support in otherwise red states has eroded badly — so much so that he might run 5-10 points behind his results in 2020. If this is true, then any state Trump carried by single digits in 2020 is now potentially in play — and that includes North Carolina (1.3 point victory), Florida (2.3),¹ and, wait for it, Texas (5.6). Followed by Ohio (8.1) and Iowa (8.2). Needless to say, in such a scenario, many if not all of the states that Biden carried could be out of reach for Trump.

• In other words, the Iowa poll and the other polls from outside the mainstream media world paint a very different picture — one in which this election, far from being a toss-up, could in fact be a very solid Harris victory, more akin to 2008 than 2020.

How could this be happening? And how could so many people be missing it?

How do I have such cautious optimism? And what’s my closing argument for why you should have cautious optimism — and, much more importantly — why you should spread that cautious optimism to everyone else you know and make sure everyone is voting?

I can sum it up in one word. Dobbs.

Or two words. Brett Kavanaugh.

The Dobbs decision — ultimately engineered by Donald Trump, who now boasts about it — is the single biggest driver of many of these otherwise surprising election results. And pollsters may be missing this because women may be quietly diverging from their husbands and boyfriends in this regard. The Harris campaign has cleverly made campaign ads along these lines, but I think the phenomenon is even bigger than this. People have reported canvassing and having men answer the door and declare loudly that the household is supporting Trump, while women either shake their heads in the background or quietly whisper they’re in fact voting for Harris.

Or imagine a pollster calling a home. A woman answers the phone. Her husband or boyfriend is watching TV nearby, within earshot. If she quietly supports Harris, while her husband loudly supports Trump, what do you think she’s going to say to the pollster?

Then there’s Kavanaugh. And I think he’s the single most compelling closing argument one can make for Harris.

The Kavanaugh confirmation was the single most crucial microcosm of the consequences of Trump’s 2016 victory. It left Trump able to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by the moderate Anthony Kennedy. Trump’s coattails had ensured a Republican majority in the Senate at that point. Even with all the successful efforts of the Resistance to slow or stop Trump — and even with all the efforts of the Biden-Harris administration to reverse what Trump did — we are left with the irreducible fact of Brett Kavanaugh’s presence on the Court.

Trump buried the 4,500 tips the FBI received on Kavanaugh and kiboshed a more fulsome investigation into the allegations against him regarding sexual assault and other sexual misconduct. We simply did not have the votes to stop the confirmation, which passed on a 51-49 vote. Kavanaugh took his place on the Court — and he delivered the fifth and deciding vote to overturn Roe. And even with Biden and office and hopefully Harris to follow, Kavanaugh isn’t going anywhere.

Yet while the right wing may have won the Kavanaugh battle and the Dobbs decision with it, the reactions and reverberations are still ongoing — and, I believe, are still being underestimated.

Remember how powerless and defeated we all felt when Kavanaugh was confirmed?

Remember how devastated and outraged we all felt when Roe was overturned?

That is the energy to channel — not only for the presidency, but for the Senate as well, where the same dynamics described above might lead to surprise defeats for Republican incumbents like Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, or Josh Hawley.

It is why we all should keep fighting, and why, in spite of all the disinformation and biased coverage, we might find ourselves about to win.²

1. And this is to say nothing about the Puerto Rico “floating island of garbage” scandal, which may have a pivotal impact in Florida among other places, given that Florida has the largest Puerto Rican community in the 50 states — 1.1 million people. We think of Florida as a lost cause, but this is not accurate. Trump only won by 2.3 points last time. And you know what other demo is rather large in Florida? Women over 65. Ruh roh.

2. Knock on wood. Fingers crossed. Etc., etc., etc.