It really doesn’t help Democrats recover from the 2024 election defeat to exaggerate its dimensions. So I issued a few cautionary notes at New York.

As is inevitable in any losing presidential effort, a lot of the fingers being pointed at Democratic culprits are aimed at the Harris-Walz campaign, with a big negative assist from the former Biden-Harris campaign that was terminated in July. Some critics think Kamala Harris failed sufficiently to “pivot to the center” when the Trump campaign was pounding her as “radical communist”; others believe she erred by failing to go hard-core lefty populist. Still others seem to be certain she should have junked her billion-dollar ad blitz and instead appeared on a few dozen podcasts.

The reality is that while the Harris-Walz campaign was national in scope, its efforts (as were those of the Trump-Vance campaign) were concentrated to an extraordinary degree on the seven universally recognized battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that decided the election. So if her campaign had any positive net impact, you should be able to see it there. And as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump calculated a couple of days after Trump was declared the winner, you actually can see it if you compare these states to the country as a whole:

“The Post’s model estimates that, when all of the votes are counted, only one state, Colorado, will have seen its vote margin shift to the left. Every other state and D.C. will have shifted to the right.

“The last time an election saw that uniform a shift was in 1992, when all but one state shifted to the left as Bill Clinton was elected president…..

“On average, states are likely to end up having shifted about 4.6 points to the right since 2020….

“[T]he states where the shift toward Trump was the smallest included many of those that were the closest in 2020 — that is, the swing states. States that had a margin of 3 points or less in 2020 moved to the right by 3.4 points on average. States where the margin in 2020 was larger than that moved to the right by an average of 4.8 points.”

There are three significant implications of these patterns. First, the shift to Trump was indeed a national wave, albeit a limited one in most states (big exceptions being Florida, Texas, and New York, where Trump’s gains were supersize); his national popular vote margin has already fallen to 1.9 percent with votes still out. Second, the Harris campaign appears to have mitigated the swing to Trump precisely where it (and she) had the most intense activity. To the extent the campaign mattered, it was a net positive.

The third implication, which is more implicit than explicit in the numbers, is that the Democratic ticket was battling a national political climate that was fundamentally adverse, making the campaign a painful uphill slog that was disguised by slightly askew polling and the famous Harris “vibes.” As Cook Political Report editor-in-chief Amy Walter told my colleague Benjamin Hart in a post-election interview, for all the initial excitement, Harris began her late-starting campaign at a significant disadvantage:

“Fundamentally, it does come back to Biden and the administration. He’s an unpopular president, and an unpopular president doesn’t win reelection. The only thing possibly preventing the unpopular president from losing is that he’s challenged by a more unpopular candidate. Where Trump fits into this is that, yes, he’s still unpopular. But — and we noted this before Biden dropped out and then it started happening again in October — in retrospect, people think of Trump’s presidency more favorably than they did even when he was president. They may have not liked Trump and what he stands for or what he does, but as they put it in context now, thinking, Well, compared to what we have now, was it better or worse? — they say, ‘Well, at least stuff was less expensive.’

“And the only way you counter that is if you have a candidate on the Democratic side who’s not part of the incumbent party.”

Harris worked hard to depict herself as a “change” candidate, but that was always going to be a tough sell. With a little luck, she might have been able to squeak by in the Electoral College (she lost the three “Blue Wall” states by less than 2 percentage points) even while losing the national popular vote, just as Trump did in 2016. But nobody should blame her for failing to overcome the dead weight of an administration too many voters considered a disappointment if not a failure.

I wrote this insta-reaction to Trump’s victory at New York in the wee hours of the morning, after many hours of staring at numbers and trying to understand them. It’s probably as good an analysis as I can manage days later:

We will be debating the contours of Donald Trump’s comeback presidential victory over Kamala Harris for a good while. Certainly among Democrats, this close but conclusive defeat will be interpreted as flowing from a host of party weaknesses and candidate and campaign mistakes. And Republicans, as winners do, will likely over-interpret their success as representing a watershed victory that will turn into governing coalition that will last for decades.

The simplest explanation, though, may be the most compelling: This was a classic “change” election in which the “out” party had an advantage that the governing party could not overcome. Yes, the outcome was in doubt because Democrats managed to replace a very unpopular incumbent with an interesting if untested successor, and also because the GOP chose a nominee whose constant demonstration of his own unpopular traits threatened to take over the whole contest. In the end Trump normalized his crude and erratic character by endless repetition; reduced scrutiny of his lawless misconduct by denouncing critics and prosecutors alike as politically motivated; and convinced an awful lot of unhappy voters that he hated the same people and institutions they did.

Nobody for a moment doubted that Trump would bring change. And indeed, his signature Make America Great Again slogan and message came to have a double meaning. Yes, for some it meant (as it did in 2016) a return to the allegedly all-American culture of the 20th century, with its traditional hierarchies; moral certainties and (for some) white male leadership. But for others MAGA meant very specifically referred to the perceived peace and prosperity of the pre-pandemic economy and society presided over, however turbulently, Trump. When Republicans gleefully asked swing voters if they were better off before Joe Biden became president, a veritable coalition of voters with recent and long-standing grievances over conditions in the country had as simple an answer as they did when Ronald Reagan used it to depose Jimmy Carter more than a half-century ago.

Just as Democrats will wonder whether a candidate different from Harris would have won this election, Republicans ought to wonder whether anyone other than Trump would have won more easily without the collateral damage to their principles, their sensibilities, and their long-term prospects. It’s true that their craven surrender to Trump made it possible for his campaign to present a unified front that took him far along to road to victory in a polarized electorate, despite all sorts of private grumbling over his countless conspiracy theories and insults to opponents. But it’s not clear at all Trump can bring the kind of change he came to represent to his voters. Indeed, the millions of people for whom inflation became not only an economic handicap but a symbol of government fecklessness could easily and quickly become disillusioned with Trump’s strange mix of protectionism and tax cuts if, as economists warn, it will rekindle inflation and spark global economic warfare. It’s a particularly troubling sign for the GOP that so many potential Trump hirelings and allies have wildly conflicting expectations of what he will actually do.

But for now, Trump’s unlikely comeback coincided almost entirely with an election in which voters wanted change enough to ignore or embrace the dark side of his legacy and agenda. It’s his luck and probably this country’s misfortune, but there’s nothing for it but to move ahead with fear and trembling.

Democrats are in mourning after the November 5 defeat, but it’s not a bad time to appreciate what the party’s presidential nominee accomplished, even though she fell short of victory, and I wrote about how far she came at New York:

On March 12, the presidential contest was locked into place. On that day, Donald Trump clinched his third presidential nomination and Joe Biden clinched the Democratic nomination. Biden’s accomplishment had been in somewhat greater doubt than Trump’s owing to his party’s deep concerns about his advanced age and unpopularity. Despite that, he had put aside some of his own and his party’s anxiety about his running for reelection in part because of fears that if Vice-President Kamala Harris were the nominee, she would be  incapable of beating Trump. Indeed, there had earlier been talk of Biden dumping Harris from the ticket to find a more appealing vice-president.

Suffice it to say that almost no one at the beginning of 2024 had Harris as the Democratic nominee on their bingo cards. Yet she seamlessly took over the party when Biden withdrew from the race following a catastrophic debate performance against Trump on June 27. She subsequently united Democrats, made big gains in the polls against Trump, and produced an incredibly close race that fell just short.

This sudden leap to the threshold of the White House represented a distinct contrast with the slow and steady progress Harris made earlier in her career. While Trump’s first successful run for office in 2016 was something of a lateral transfer from the heights of popular culture he had long commanded as a reality-TV star and a fixture of New York high society, Harris was then only just entering Washington. She had spent the previous quarter-century as a state and local prosecutor, rising through the ranks of California law enforcement and politics. Within three years, this junior senator was running for president, and the next year she was elected vice-president. During her years as a prosecutor, she was known as much for her interpersonal as for her professional accomplishments, becoming a staple of California’s more rarefied circles despite her own modest background as a child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. Harris’s views and interests fit her comfortably into the pragmatic-progressive wing of her state’s Democratic Party. But she showed some real toughness in winning her first statewide race in the tea-party year of 2010, narrowly defeating the popular Los Angeles district attorney to become California attorney general. By then, she was known as an ally of President Barack Obama, whom she had backed early in his 2008 candidacy when he was an underdog running against Hillary Clinton. Her 2020 presidential campaign was very much modeled on Obama’s historic effort, after a period of senatorial tempering when she was a notably effective member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But seeking a “lane” to the presidential nomination in a crowded field led Harris to take some notably left-bent positions that would later help Trump label her as an extremist, including support for single-payer health care, total commitment to LGBTQ rights, and criminal-justice reforms that extended to decriminalization of illegal border crossings. When her candidacy failed (after a brief moment of ascendence in 2019 when she scored major points against early front-runner Joe Biden over his one-time opposition to busing) amid signs of disorganization and strategic mistakes, her reputation as a rising political superstar took a hit. But her many assets were enough to make her a logical choice as Biden’s running-mate in 2020, and she did a fine job as a vice-presidential candidate, never upstaging her boss but not submerging her identity in his either.

While she will be eternally grateful to Biden for lifting her to the vice-presidency when other options were entirely available, the 46th president did her few favors once they were in office. Even as it became apparent that the new administration’s handling of migrants and asylum petitions was controversial and quickly unpopular, he placed Harris in the highly visible position of representing the new administration in Latin America, where she was sent on a hopeless journey to persuade refugees from poverty and violence to stay home. No, she was not “border czar,” but her association with the issue was indelible. She was also charged with being the public face of another administration initiative that wasn’t unpopular but was doomed: a drive to enact a national voting-rights measure over a Republican filibuster in the Senate. She finally got the chance to do something distinctive and in her wheelhouse when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Biden’s reluctance to talk about abortion in the frank language the wave of state bans and restrictions demanded soon led Harris to become the administration’s — and to a considerable extent, the Democratic Party’s — chief advocate for the restoration of reproductive rights.

But even as her public profile improved (along with her job-approval ratings), Harris had to negotiate without a hint of disloyalty the seas of Democratic unhappiness about Biden’s age, unpopularity, and signs of unfitness for another four years as president. When the crisis of his candidacy erupted after his disastrous performance in the June debate with Trump, Harris was ready. As steady pressure from Capitol Hill and around the country confronted Biden with his eroding support, she was even steadier in her support for her boss. And when Biden finally came to grips with the necessity of his self-sequestration as Democratic nominee, the moment came and went when the president and party might have seriously entertained the idea of choosing someone other than Harris as a successor via a “blitz primary” or some other gimmick for starting the nomination process all over again just before or even at the Democratic Convention in August. Biden, determined to control the nomination even as he abandoned it, never wavered in harnessing his withdrawal to a firm endorsement of his vice-president as his replacement, and after just a few days of uncertainty, the party, including every potential alternative to Harris, fell into line.

It was this all but miraculous switchover, which angry and confused Republicans called a “coup,” that in turn produced the sense of relief and excitement that made the DNC a lovefest and gave Harris the kind of almost-immediate lead over Trump (in fundraising, enthusiasm, and the polls) that Biden could never achieve.

Harris’s struggle against Trump was a tempestuous contest that steadily tightened as the former president hammered away at her on one level as a progressive (or as he calls her, a “Marxist”) extremist and at a much lower, personal level as a “low-IQ” diversity queen as unfit as Biden to serve and sharing the responsibility for his alleged policy failures. Her own campaign combined old-school Democratic base mobilization with a clear focus on converting anti-Trump Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, even as she continued her demands for the restoration of abortion rights and laid down an economic and immigration platform differing just enough from Biden’s to make her credible as a “change” candidate. As the race entered its final phase, Harris stepped up media appearances and began to stress her own version of the threat to democracy posed by Trump, focusing on his dangerous unpredictability and hinting at an age-based unfitness reminiscent of what Republicans said of Biden. Despite what happened on November 5, Harris almost certainly doing better than any Democrat could have anticipated in the doldrums of June.

In a crazy-close presidential race that may come down to Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris is getting some late help, and not just from the racist comedian at Trump’s New York City rally, as I explained at New York:

As you probably know, we’re in the final week of a dead-even presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, with Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes being the most desperately sought prize by both campaigns. Team Trump is already having a difficult week in the Keystone State thanks to a crude racist joke about Puerto Rico that one of Trump’s comedian buddies told at his wild Madison Square Garden rally, which is not going over well among the pivotal bloc of Puerto Rican voters in northeastern Pennsylvania. Now, Harris has gotten a helping hand in the same vicinity from none other than House Speaker Mike Johnson, as NBC News reports:

“House Speaker Mike Johnson took a dig at Obamacare during an event in Pennsylvania on Monday, telling a crowd there will be ‘massive’ health care changes in America if Donald Trump wins the election.

“’Health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda. When I say we’re going to have a very aggressive first 100 days agenda, we got a lot of things still on the table,’ Johnson, R-La., said in Bethlehem while campaigning for GOP House candidate Ryan Mackenzie, according to video footage obtained by NBC News.

“’No Obamacare?’ one attendee asked Johnson, referring to the law Democrats passed in 2010, also known as the Affordable Care Act.

“’No Obamacare,’ Johnson responded, rolling his eyes. ‘The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.’”

The Harris campaign immediately jumped on his comments, noting that Johnson had promised “one of Trump’s top priorities will be to repeal the Affordable Care Act and rip away health care from tens of millions of Americans.”

Health care is not at all an issue Trump wants Republicans talking about. The effort to repeal Obamacare was one of the less popular initiatives of his presidency and, not coincidentally, one of his biggest failures. It’s also one of the areas where Harris has outpolled him. He added to his problems during the September debate with his rival when he could cite only “the concepts of a plan” for replacing Obamacare despite having allegedly spent many years on his own yet-to-be-revealed proposal.

Worse yet, Johnson’s remarks very strongly suggest two things that are potentially dangerous to Trump in the eyes of swing voters: (1) He plans to make repealing Obamacare an immediate priority if Trump wins and Republicans control Congress, which likely means it would be rolled into a gigantic budget-reconciliation bill and steamrolled through to passage if possible, and (2) his party’s designs on health-care policy are radical, meant to replace the regulations central to Obamacare’s coverage guarantees with “free market” provisions almost certain to return the health-care system to the days when insurers aggressively discriminated against anyone old, sick, or poor. Johnson’s rhetoric will also give Democrats an opportunity to remind voters that the last “repeal Obamacare” package aimed to decimate Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for poor people and a key part of the country’s social safety net. Beyond that, Johnson seemed to to be telling Pennsylvanians a reelected Trump wouldn’t care if his health-care plans made Americans unhappy, per NBC:

“”We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people, it’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors and we need this across the board,’ Johnson said. ‘And Trump’s going to go big. I mean, he’s only going to have one more term. Can’t run for re-election. And so he’s going to be thinking about legacy and we’re going to fix these things.’”

Taking a “blowtorch” to health-care regulations that ensure coverage for preexisting conditions and limit price discrimination probably isn’t what swing voters hope for in a Trump administration billing itself as offering a return to American greatness. And the Harris campaign is surely grateful that Trump’s loyal congressional ally is making it known. Could that be the “little secret” Trump cryptically said he and Johnson would reveal after the election? If so, the Speaker spilled the beans at the wrong place and the wrong time.

 

Sometimes we need to shake assumptions based on past elections, and I offered a possible example at New York:

Despite some small recent trends favoring Donald Trump, 2024 presidential polls remain stubbornly very close, both nationally (where Kamala Harris leads by 1.7 percent according to the FiveThirtyEight averages) and in the seven battleground states. Trump currently leads in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, while Harris leads in Michigan and Wisconsin, per FiveThirtyEight, but no one leads in any battleground state by more than 2 percent.

Polls are not, of course, perfect by any means. So the big question right now is whether they are “off” in some systemic way that conceals the fact that one of the two candidates is really on track for a decisive win. As it happens, two iconic political-media gurus have weighed in on this question all but simultaneously, with neither professing to have a definitive answer.

Polling and forecast wizard Nate Silver (founder of FiveThirtyEight but now out on his own) has a New York Times op-ed that expresses a “gut” view that Trump has a small advantage, but nestles it in arguments that polling errors could go in either direction. He reminds us that state polls in 2016 and both national and state polls in 2020 underestimated Trump’s vote, and also notes an explanation that could again show an underestimation of that same vote:

“[T]he likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias. It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them.

“Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve. Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization. Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.”

But Silver concedes it could work so well that polls are actually overestimating Trump’s vote:

“[T]he new techniques that pollsters are applying could be overkill. One problem with using one of those — “weighting on recalled vote,” or trying to account for how voters report their pick in the last election — is that people often misremember or misstate whom they voted for and are more likely to say they voted for the winner (in 2020, Mr. Biden).

“That could plausibly bias the polls against Ms. Harris because people who say they voted for Mr. Biden but actually voted for Mr. Trump will get flagged as new Trump voters when they aren’t.”

Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki drills down into some comparisons of 2024 polls and the actual 2020 vote in key demographic categories and suggests there are signs the Trump vote is now being captured fully. In Michigan and Wisconsin, ground zero for 2020 polling errors based on underestimation of white working-class voters, Trump’s lead in that demographic is actually higher than his 2020 performance. So maybe the pollsters have successfully adjusted for past polling errors. Meanwhile, the Harris camp has grounds for suspecting her ultimate vote could be poorly reflected in the polls:

“From Harris’ standpoint, part of the hope now is that polling is undercounting her support with what have long been core Democratic constituencies: Black, Hispanic and young voters …

“The concern for Harris, obviously, is that her Hispanic support is far lower than Biden’s was, both in the 2020 polls and the final election results. But much of Trump’s new Hispanic support comes from younger voters who have not participated at high levels in past elections. If these voters end up sitting on the sidelines in this election, Harris could end up faring much better with Hispanics than the polling now shows. It’s also somewhat encouraging for her that Biden performed better in the election with Black voters than polling had suggested. Harris will need this to happen again.”

There’s a reason Team Trump is devoting much of its get-out-the-vote strategy to low-propensity voters. If he doesn’t reach and motivate them, he could underperform compared to polls showing him making gains among Black, Hispanic, and first-time voters.

If the polls are wrong, it could again be good news for Trump or instead good news for Harris. We just don’t know right now, even though many fearful Democrats and triumphalist Republicans share Nate Silver’s “gut” feeling that the 45th president wins all ties.

I figured this was as good a time as any to come clean about reasons Democrats are fretting the 2024 election results despite some quite positive signs for Kamala Harris, so I wrote them up at New York:

One of the most enduring of recent political trends is a sharp partisan divergence in confidence about each party’s electoral future. Democrats are forever “fretting” or even “bed-wetting;” they are in “disarray” and pointing fingers at each other over disasters yet to come. Republicans, reflecting the incessant bravado of their three-time presidential nominee, tend to project total, overwhelming victory in every election, future and sometimes even past. When you say, as Donald Trump often does, that “the only way we lose is if they cheat,” you are expressing the belief that you never ever actually lose.

The contrast between the fretting donkey and the trumpeting elephant is sometimes interpreted as a matter of character. Dating back to the early days of the progressive blogosphere, many activists have claimed that Democrats (particularly centrists) simply lack “spine,” or the remorseless willingness put aside doubts or any other compunctions in order to fight for victory in contests large and small. In this Nietzschean view of politics, as determined by sheer will-to-power (rather than the quality of ideas or the impact of real-world conditions), Democrats are forever bringing a knife to a gun fight or a gun to a nuclear war.

Those of us who are offended by this anti-intellectual view of political competition, much less its implicit suggestion that Democrats become as vicious and demagogic as the opposition often is, have an obligation to offer an alternative explanation for this asymmetric warfare of partisan self-confidence. I won’t offer a general theory dating back to past elections, but in 2024, the most important reasons for inordinate Democratic fear are past painful experience and a disproportionate understanding of the stakes of this election.

Democrats remember 2016 and 2020

It’s very safe to say very few Democrats expected Hillary Clinton to lose to Donald Trump in 2016, or that Joe Biden would come so close to losing to Donald Trump in 2020. No lead in the polls looks safe because in previous elections involving Trump, they weren’t.

To be clear, the national polls weren’t far off in 2016; the problem was that sparse public polling of key states didn’t alert Democrats to the possibility Trump might pull an Electoral College inside straight by winning three states that hadn’t gone Republican in many years (since 1984 in Wisconsin, and since 1988 in Michigan and Pennsylvania). 2020 was just a bad year for pollsters. In both cases, it was Trump who benefitted from polling errors. So of course Democrats don’t view any polling lead as safe. Yes, the pollsters claim they’ve compensated for the problems that affect their accuracy in 2016 and 2020, and it’s even possible they over-compensated, meaning that Harris could do better than expected. But the painful memories remain fresh.

Democrats fear Trump 2.0 more than Republicans fear Harris

If you believe the maximum Trump ‘24 message about Kamala Harris’s intentions as president, it’s a scary prospect: she’s a Marxist (or Communist) who wants to replace white American citizens with the scum of the earth, which her administration is eagerly inviting across open borders with government benefits to illegally vote Democratic. It’s true that polls show a hard kernel — perhaps close to half — of self-identified Republicans believe some version of the Great Replacement Theory that has migrated from the right-wing fringes to the heart of the Trump campaign’s messaging, and that’s terrifying since there’s no evidence whatsoever for it. But best we can tell, the Trump voting base is a more-or-less equally divided coalition of people who actually believe some if not all of what their candidate says about the consequences of defeat, and people who just think Trump offers better economic and tougher immigration policies. While the election may be an existential crisis for Trump himself, since his own personal liberty could depend on the outcome, there’s not much evidence that all-or-nothing attitude is shared beyond the MAGA core of his coalition.

By contrast, Democrats don’t have to exercise a lurid sense of imagination to feel fear about Trump 2.0. They have Trump 1.0 as a precedent, with the added consideration that the disorganization and poor planning that curbed many of the 45th president’s authoritarian tendencies will almost certainly be reduced in 2025. Then there’s the escalation in his extremist rhetoric. In 2016 he promised a Muslim travel ban and a southern border wall. Now he’s talking about mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants and overt ideological vetting of legal immigrants. In 2016 he inveighed against the “deep state” and accused Democrats of actively working against the interests of the country. Now he’s pledging to carry out a virtual suspension of civil service protections and promising to unleash the machinery of law enforcement on his political enemies, including the press. As the furor over Project 2025 suggests, there’s a general sense that the scarier elements in Trump’s circle of advisors are planning to hit the ground running with radical changes in policies and personnel that can’t be reversed.

Only one party is threatening to challenge the election results

An important psychological factor feeding Democratic fears of a close election is the unavoidable fact that Trump has virtually promised to repeat or even surpass his 2020 effort to overturn the results if he loses. So anything other than a landslide victory for Harris will be fragile and potentially reversible. This is a deeply demoralizing prospect. It’s one thing to keep people focused on maximum engagement with politics through November 5. It’s another thing altogether to plan for a long frantic slog that won’t be completed until January 20.

Trump has been working hard to perfect the flaws in his 2020 post-election campaign that led to the failed January 6 insurrection, devoting a lot of resources to pre-election litigation and the compilation of post-election fraud allegations.

Though if you look hard you can find scattered examples of Democrats talking about denying a victorious Trump re-inauguration on January 20, none of that chatter is coming from the Democratic Party, the Harris-Walz campaign, or a critical mass of the many, many players who would be necessary to challenge an election defeat. Election denial in 2024 is strictly a Republican show.

If Harris wins, she’ll oversee a divided government; if Trump wins, he’ll have a shot at total power

As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently explained, the odds of Republicans winning control of the Senate in November are extremely high. That means that barring a political miracle, a President Harris would be constrained both legislatively and administratively, in terms of the vast number of executive-branch and judicial appointments the Senate has the power to confirm, reject, or simply ignore.

If Trump wins, however, he will have a better-than-even chance at a governing trifecta. This would not only open up the floodgates for extremist appointments aimed at remaking the federal government and adding to the Trumpification of the judiciary, but would unlock the budget reconciliation process whereby the trifecta party can make massive policy changes on up-or-down party-line votes without having to worry about a Senate filibuster.

Overall, Democrats have more reason to fear this election, and putting on some fake bravado and braying like MAGA folk won’t change the underlying reasons for that fear. The only thing that can is a second Trump defeat which sticks.

I’ve been spending a lot of time mulling the high likelihood of another contested presidential election result, and shared some brief thoughts at New York about Trump’s strategy:

It’s been clear for some time that Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to attempt to deny and challenge an election defeat. But Team Trump is also working to ensure that he won’t have to deny the results — and not just by convincing more voters that his policies are better for America. To put it very simply, the Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and its super-PAC allies are devoting a lot of resources to suppressing the Democratic vote in key states. These strategies include:

1. Insisting on voter-roll purges to eliminate people who don’t respond quickly to official verification inquiries, whether or not they are appropriate. (In the past, overzealous purges have disqualified hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, most notably in Florida in 2000.)
2. Promoting ridiculously strict rules for mail ballots that don’t have anything to do with their integrity (e.g., tossing them out due to extremely minor address or date errors without the possibility of curing them).
3. Flooding the polling places with poll watchers trained to challenge individual ballots that might go to Kamala Harris on a variety of sketchy grounds.
4. An inside-the-tent effort to place MAGA loyalists in key election-administration positions from the precinct to the county to the state level, where they can not only slow down vote counts but increase the odds of Democratic ballots being thrown out.

In addition to reducing the Harris vote (via a combination of ballot-eligibility challenges or heavy-handed intimidation of voters), all these MAGA boots on the ground can help build the post-election case that a Harris win was tainted with fraud. This time, Team Trump’s legal team will be much more organized than Rudy Giuliani’s Keystone Cops ensemble, which tried to capitalize on scattered election-fraud rumors and social-media claims in 2020. With so many campaign operatives working as election administrators or observers, there will be plenty of election-fraud allegations to fuel Trump lawsuits, with or without merit.

All this activity, along with years of Trump claims that Democrats cannot beat him without cheating, will predispose his MAGA base to accept whatever he chooses to claim about the “integrity” of the election. As the initial votes come in on Election Night, he may repeat his premature victory claim from 2020 and demand that vote counting stop with him slightly ahead (if indeed that “red mirage” reappears before it’s dispelled by the “blue shift” of mail ballots). If he does, we could see on-the-ground Trump operatives and volunteers demand that state- and county-election offices “stop the steal.” He will have another moment of truth if the Associated Press and other major media outlets call the race for Harris, which will be deemed conclusive by most people outside MAGA-land.

Trump will ultimately have to decide whether to concede or remain defiant on December 11, the federal deadline for state certifications of the vote. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 was designed to minimize the odds of any challenge to the results after that date.

But whether or not the 45th president has a workable strategy for turning defeat into victory after Election Day, there’s no question his minions are trying hard to twist the system to maximize the possibility that Trump will win without having to stage another insurrection.

What was probably a minor brouhaha this week led me to make a broader observation at New York about online tunnel-vision:

When I saw a viral video of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer placing a Dorito on the tongue of a woman I could not identify (who turned out to be social-media influencer Liz Plank), I was kind of shocked. To many it looked like a parody, or at least an appropriation, of the traditional Roman Catholic form of administering a Communion wafer. The fact that there was adjoining text about the U.S. Chips Act didn’t mitigate the strangeness of the image. Why would an incredibly smart politician like Whitmer do something like this?

When this video came up in a discussion with my work colleagues, I was informed this was a meme, as though that fully explained it. When there was an explosion of protests from Michigan Catholics (some of it, of course, ginned up by MAGA folk and Democrat-hating traditionalist Catholic groups), Plank irritably explained to the “weirdos” that this was all a well-established joke:

I don’t know about you, but when I watch Jeremy Allen White feed a slice of pizza to Stephen Colbert (who is, as it happens, an observant Catholic), I don’t think Communion, I think Colbert’s being fed pizza by someone off-camera. In the Whitmer-Plank video, the size of the chip, the adoring upward glance of the Dorito recipient, and the positioning of the two women makes it very different.

But in any event, this video was circulated to untold millions of people who had never seen the Colbert-White video and probably couldn’t distinguish a meme from a matzo ball. The fact that Whitmer is wearing a Harris-Walz hat during this strange pantomime, and that Plank is a founder of the group Hotties for Harris, is an incredible gift to the reactionaries who claim Democrats are a bunch of Satan-adjacent baby-killing libertine smart-asses who would close down the churches if given the chance. It’s not just Catholics, by the way, who are a little touchy about the Eucharist. My own liberal Disciples of Christ denomination treats Communion as an indispensable symbol of human equality.

To her credit, Whitmer immediately apologized for having given offense, and she fortunately did not just say “It’s a meme, stupid boomers!” Per the Washington Post:

“Over 25 years in public service, I would never do something to denigrate someone’s faith,” the statement said. “I’ve used my platform to stand up for people’s right to hold and practice their personal religious beliefs. My team has spoken to the Michigan Catholic Conference. What was supposed to be a video about the importance of the CHIPS Act to Michigan jobs, has been construed as something it was never intended to be, and I apologize for that.”

But Whitmer’s staff couldn’t let it go with that and insisted the people complaining just didn’t get it, according to the Detroit News:

“’The governor’s social media is well known for infusing her communications with pop culture,’ Helen Hare, a Whitmer spokeswoman, said in a statement. “’This popular trend has been used by countless people, including Billie Eilish, Kylie Jenner, and Stephen Colbert, and the fact that people are paying attention to a video promoting President Biden’s CHIPS Act proves it’s working.’”

Here’s the thing: Unhip people get the same vote as hip people and can’t really be expected to understand the process by which some moment on social media becomes an all-purpose explanation for whatever you want to do.

Believe me, I understand that Donald Trump and his conservative Christian backers commit more acts of sacrilege every other minute than anything secular liberals have done on social media, beginning with the idea that the 45th president is divinely ordained to lead America, continuing with his endless displays of religious illiteracy, and concluding with the fundamentally anti-Christian MAGA attitudes toward immigrants, people of color, and the poor. But this incident involving Whitmer offers a good reminder that when you are in politics, you really can become “too online” and forget that large elements of the voting public can look at an image and not get the joke.

After the Democratic National Committee ran an ad warning that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump, I assessed her spoiler potential at New York:

In a presidential contest so close that every one of the seven battleground states could go either way, the major-party campaigns are spending some of their enormous resources trying to ensure that minor-party candidates don’t snag critical votes. This ad from the Democratic National Committee is indicative of these fears:

Not only does this ad convey the simple message that “a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump,” but it includes the reminder that according to the Democratic narrative of the 2016 election, the Green Party candidate was the spoiler who gave Trump his winning margins in the key battleground states whereby he upset Hillary Clinton despite losing the national popular vote.

It’s true that Stein won more votes than Trump’s plurality in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2016. So if all of her voters had instead voted for Clinton, Trump would have not become the 45th president and the hinges of political history would have moved in a very different direction. But even though Stein was running distinctly to Clinton’s left and appealing to disgruntled Bernie Sanders primary voters, it’s not 100 percent clear what would have happened had she not run (the Greens, of course, are a regular presence in presidential elections; it’s not as though they were conjured up by Trump in 2016). Some might have actually voted for Trump, and even more might have stayed at home or skipped the presidential ballot line.

The picture is complicated by the presence of an even larger minor-party candidacy in 2016, that of Libertarian Gary Johnson, who won 3 percent of the national presidential vote compared to Stein’s one percent. One academic analysis utilizing exit polls concluded that Clinton would have probably lost even had neither of these minor-party candidates run.

In 2024, Libertarian Chase Oliver is on more state ballots (47) than Stein (39), including all seven battleground states (Stein is on six of them, all but Nevada). Traditionally Libertarians draw a bit more from Republicans than from Democrats (many of them wouldn’t vote for a major-party candidate in any event). But it’s understandably the Greens who worry Democrats, particularly since Stein is counting on defections from Democratic-leaning voters who are unhappy with the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel in its war on Gaza. As the Times of Israel reported last month, there are signs Stein’s strategy is working to some extent with Muslim voters:

“A Council on American-Islamic Relations poll released this month showed that in Michigan, home to a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed the Green Party’s Stein. Republican candidate Donald Trump got 18% with Harris, who is US President Joe Biden’s vice president, trailing at 12%.

“Stein, a Jewish anti-Israel activist, also leads Harris among Muslims in Arizona and Wisconsin, battleground states with sizable Muslim populations where Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by slim margins.”

It’s also worth noting that Stein chose a Muslim (and Black) running mate in California professor Butch Ware.

Any comparisons of her 2024 campaign with her past spoiler role should come with the important observation that non-major-party voting is likely to be much smaller this year than it was in 2016, when fully 5.7 percent of presidential voters opted for someone other than Trump or Clinton. The non-major-party vote dropped to 1.9 percent — a third of the 2016 percentage — in 2020. Earlier this year it looked like independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would push the non-major-party vote even higher than it was eight years ago. But then Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, which reduced the “double-hater” vote unhappy with both major-party candidates, followed by Kennedy’s withdrawal and endorsement of Trump showed that particular threat evaporating. Despite his efforts to fold his candidacy into Trump’s in the battleground states, Kennedy is still on the ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin, though it’s anybody’s guess how many voters will exercise that zombie option and who will benefit. Another independent candidate, Cornel West, stayed in the race, but he’s struggled with both funding and ballot access; he’s not on the ballot in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, or Pennsylvania, and he’s competing with Stein for left-bent voters unhappy with Kamala Harris. Unsurprisingly, Republican operatives have helped both Stein and West in their ballot-access efforts.

There are some indications that the non-major-party vote will drop even more than it did earlier this year. A new Pew survey shows that only 12 percent of registered voters who express a preference for a minor-party or independent candidate are “extremely motivated to vote,” and only 27 percent of these voters think it “really matters who wins.” These are not people who will be rushing to the polls in a state of excitement.

It’s hard to find a credible recent national poll showing Stein, Oliver, or West with more than one percent of the vote. But a late-September New York Times-Siena poll of Michigan, with its significant Arab-American and Muslim populations, did show Stein with 2 percent of likely voters. In an extremely close race, even small splinter votes can matter, as the experience of 2000 in Florida will eternally remind Democrats. Had that year’s Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, not appeared on the ballot, it’s pretty likely Al Gore would have been the 43rd president. So anything can happen in what amounts to a presidential jump ball, and you can expect Democrats to continue calling Stein a spoiler while Republicans not-so-quietly wish her well.

Recently I got to thinking about the use of defectors from the other party by the Harris and Trump campaigns, and wrote up some implications at New York for how they differed:

For a presidential election characterized by immense partisan polarization, there is a remarkable amount of attention being paid to defectors. Kamala Harris campaigned last week with Liz Cheney, the woman who was the No. 3 House Republican as recently as 2021 and who happens to be the daughter of iconic conservative Dick Cheney, who has also endorsed Harris. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s campaign has blessed a road show by ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard that is showing up in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada.

The obvious reason for this high-profile deployment of apostates is that this is a very close presidential election between two equally matched party bases that can achieve total victory with even a small accretion of additional support. But that doesn’t mean the two campaigns have mirror-image strategies for deploying defectors. A closer look, in fact, suggests very different approaches based on very different ideas of where to find the crucial bloc of persuadable voters.

The Harris-Walz campaign, like the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020, is focusing on a clearly identifiable slice of the electorate: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (some call them anti-Trump Republicans and others Nikki Haley Republicans) who don’t want to vote for Donald Trump but are reassured by the company of like-minded leaders that it’s acceptable to vote for Democrats. Despite the complaints of some progressives that the size of this bloc of voters is perpetually overrated, Pew’s authoritative analysis of validated voters shows the share of moderate/liberal Republicans voting for the Democratic nominee doubled from 8 percent to 16 percent between 2016 and 2020. The value of these voters is enhanced by their demographic characteristics; they are disproportionately college educated and somewhat older and very likely to show up at the polls, all other things being equal. In addition, the Harris campaign can reach out to them without modifying its message significantly, as my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out:

“Harris’s Republican supporters generally don’t claim her policy agenda is better than Trump’s. Their argument is simply that supporting the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power is a threshold issue he fails to clear. Trump ‘tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,’ said [Liz] Cheney, ‘He can never be trusted with power again.’”

So conventionally speaking, Harris is able to use Republican surrogates to reinforce her implicit message that she is much closer to the country’s mainstream — closer to “the center,” in the language of the Beltway — than Trump and a safer option for voters fearful of both left and right extremism. If Harris is indeed a “Marxist,” as Trump likes to say, could Dick Cheney and his daughter really support her? Probably not.

Now the mirror-image strategy for the Trump-Vance campaign would be to identify and deploy relatively conservative Democrats to denounce Harris and Tim Walz as radical leftists who are inadequately patriotic, too “woke,” and in love with open borders and runaway government spending. That is, after all, what the Trump campaign and conservative media are saying around the clock. But there just aren’t any notable Democratic celebrities this year who are willing and able to play the role of centrist defector played by Zell Miller in 2004, Joe Lieberman in 2008, or Artur Davis in 2012. To a remarkable extent, Democratic opinion leaders have lined up behind Harris. That’s one major reason the Trump campaign is going in a different direction in using apostates. The big-name defectors who are available are by no means sensible centrists tut-tutting about her San Francisco liberalism. They are people like Kennedy and Gabbard, who have an entirely different rationale for going MAGA, as the Bulwark’s Marc Caputo explained after taking in their Reclaim America event for Trump in Michigan:

“The message delivered to the thousand people who showed up at a local Detroit area theater that day was hardly typical GOP fare.

“Speakers issued dire warnings about the dangers of illiberalism, corporate power, ‘poison food,’ state surveillance, and the military industrial complex. Former Vice President Dick Cheney and past Ambassador John Bolton were name-dropped and booed as war pigs. Mentions of illegal immigration were scant. Dystopian rhetoric about big city crime was absent.

“This is Blue MAGA.”

If the messengers aren’t the Democratic equivalent of the Cheneys or the host of former GOP administration appointees who have endorsed Harris, neither are the voters Kennedy and Gabbard are targeting typical middle-of-the-roaders. Au contraire, particularly with respect to the former 2024 candidate Kennedy:

“Kennedy’s political value is not in the typical Democrats he can bring to Trump but in the unconventional voters and audiences he can reach. He has received positive attention on influential podcasts, most notably the Joe Rogan Experience, whose host praised Kennedy as ‘the only [presidential candidate] who makes sense to me’ before he quit his campaign in August …

“How big a boost Kennedy and Gabbard provide Trump is ultimately the million-dollar question. A Trump campaign adviser, speaking anonymously, said the campaign’s internal data indicates about 30 percent of the Reclaim America Tour’s audiences are people who ‘are not in our system.’”

What this suggests is that the deployment of these ex-Democrats is part and parcel of a Trump campaign strategy that has eschewed traditional get-out-the-vote methods in favor of a focus on “low-propensity” voters. This controversial approach has its critics and its admirers, but it does seem Team Trump is pursuing it consistently.

It’s probably not a coincidence that prize Trump surrogate Kennedy had a sizable following among low-propensity voters at the peak of his now-abandoned independent presidential campaign: voters hard to classify by conventional ideological categories and often relying on unconventional sources of political information — like, for example, Joe Rogan — while expressing mistrust and even fury toward conventional politics and other Establishment institutions. It’s not surprising that a master of rage and chaos like Trump might have a potential edge among “I hate everybody” voters who believe government and corporations are conspiring to poison their children and then send them off to war.

A lot may depend on which campaign’s theory of the nature of persuadable voters is accurate and how well their surrogates are able to reach out to them. For all we know, the Cheneys could be the key to victory for Harris and Kennedy the key to victory for Trump. In either event, that would blow many minds.