Despite all the doom scrolling, Harris has a comfortable lead in the electoral college right now.
The time for vibing is over. It’s too late to change anyone’s opinions (especially because national level events like debates are over). Harris will finish her Media Blitz soon (including a Fox News showing) while Trump retreats into his shell hoping no one notices how damn stupid his mouth is.
This is the time for doing. The focus should be on voter drives and other get out the vote pushes. It’s mid October, and the October surprises are against Trump and in our favor.
It’s not the lead we wanted but it’s a lead nonetheless. Don’t talk yourself out of believing this lead because of a bad poll or two.
Harris doesn’t have a comfortable lead in the EC, what are you talking about? Even your own posted article says she’s within the margin of error nationally, and the race is closer in the swing states than in the national polls. That’s by definition not a “comfortable lead.”
Biden won with 4.5% more of the national vote. Harris currently is polling at about half that. In the EC, Biden won by only 78,000 votes despite his large +4.5% popular vote lead.
Two different polls in the last two days have flipped two swing states over to Trump. Nate Silver’s polling aggregator reflect the many, many polls that have shown Trump gaining in multiple swing states. Silver’s projections reflect this by indicating a six point drop for Harris to win the EC since the end of September.
Optimism is fine, hopium is not. No high quality polling shows Harris with a “comfortable lead” in the electoral college.
These “don’t worry be happy” posts seem like they’re coming straight from the Trump campaign. Harris has a comfortable lead, I guess I don’t have to worry! Even if you say “but you have to vote,” the psychological effect of denying the state of the race with hopium like this is to make people feel less concerned and more complacent about voting.
The magic of the Electoral College. 2024 is expected to get even worse, as states like California and Texas lean harder left than at any point in recent history, but California can’t yield any more EC votes than it already does and Texas Dems will still be a point or two shy of winning the state under the most Dem-leaning models.
Swing states are all that matter. And once they’ve swung far enough (as in the case of Virginia and Colorado and Florida) they stop mattering again.
Be an optimist. Be a pessimist. It doesn’t matter. The folks with the biggest thumbs on the scales are mega-donors, media magnets, and the majorities on various state and federal courts. At some point, you have to realize that your vote matters far less than there’s. It’s a rich man’s country, we just live in it.
I agree with your general view that it’s not actually time to relax.
But I will point out that you can’t just assume the electoral college advantage stays the same from election to election.
In 2020, Biden won by 4.5% in the popular vote, but he won the tipping point state of Wisconsin by 0.6%. In other words, the electoral college was worth roughly a R+3.8% advantage in 2020 (yes, 4.5% minus 0.6% is 3.9% but when you use unrounded numbers it’s closer to 3.8%).
Is 2024 going to be the same? Probably not. The New York Times ran an article about this last month, and the tipping point state in the polling was Wisconsin, where Harris was polling at +1.8%, only 0.7% lower than the national average at the time of 2.6%. The article noted that national polling has Trump shrinking Harris’s lead in non-competitive blue states like California and New York, or expanding his lead in places like the deep south, while not gaining in actual swing states compared to 2020.
Note, however, that as of today, Harris’s lead in Wisconsin has shrunk to just under 1%, so we are seeing a shift towards Trump in the actual electoral college.
Right now, Harris is showing a lead in the national polling averages, by aggregator:
It’s a close race, according to the polls. But whether the polls are actually accurate remains a huge unknown. So everyone should vote, and those with the means should volunteer.
I generally agree with you here, and I think we’re expressing a similar point. And the general sentiment that the electoral landscape can shift from one election to another is true, but I think it’s worth underscoring that the changes you’re discussing haven’t yet led to a significant break in the tightness of the 2024 race. The fact that Harris’s lead in Wisconsin has shrunk from 1.8% to just under 1% recently is exactly the point. This shows momentum shifting toward Trump, not to mention the same trend in other swing states.
You’re correct that the Electoral College advantage may change slightly in 2024, but as of now, the fundamentals we’re looking at are pointing toward a very close contest in the key battleground states. It’s not just the national polling averages that matter here—it’s the state-level dynamics that determine the outcome, and recent polls show the swing states tightening, which is why it’s reckless to assume Harris is in a secure position. Even Nate Silver’s model, which tends to account for some unpredictability, has downgraded Harris’s chances since the end of September.
National polling averages like the ones you cited (538, NYT, etc.) paint a picture of a close race, and while they show a lead for Harris, the recent shifts we’re seeing in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, among others, indicate that Trump is gaining ground. The fact that Harris’s national lead is shrinking in traditionally blue states like New York and California actually emphasizes her vulnerabilities in the swing states, where the race is most critical.
Bottom line: There’s no data right now that suggests a significant shift in the electoral college advantage for 2024. In fact, if anything, Trump’s recent gains are pushing the tipping point states even closer. With polls this tight and the Electoral College looking like a replay of 2020’s knife-edge margins, it’s exactly the wrong time to get complacent. Everyone should be treating this as an all-hands-on-deck situation.
There’s a ton of uncertainty in the data now.
2016 and 2020 polls missed Trump popularity, and about 2/3 of pollsters have decided to use recall vote weighting (that is, making sure that their sample is representative of the vote ratios in the actual 2020 results). Historically, that method has overstated the previous losing party’s support (people are more likely to remember voting for the winner, so reweighing the results the other way ends up favoring the loser), but 2 presidential elections in a row have caused some pollsters to try to make up for past mistakes. Then again, does Trump himself being on the ballot change things?
Throw in the significant migration patterns of the pandemic era where many voters might not be voting in the same state that they were in 2020, and increasing difficulty at actually getting statistically representative poll respondents through spam filters, and there are real concerns about poll quality this year, perhaps more than previous years. Plus ballot access being uneven also might translate to actual voting biases that aren’t captured in the polling methods, either.
I just wouldn’t trust the polls to be accurate. Volunteer and vote.
Yeah. Looks like we read similar things.
My gut tells me Trump is going to win. I don’t think voter suppression, shenanigans, and armed militia members patrolling polling sites can be factored into polling predictions, and with razor-thin margins, that in aggregate might make the difference. Combined with the mild Trump surge… but that’s all feels not reals. And, of course, I hope I’m wrong.
agreed. Trumpers always underreport their support because they know its shameful and dont want to admit it. So the poll numbers are almost certainly worse for Harris than they appear. Harris (and Biden shares the blame) are on track to lose the election and destroy this country and its because she refuses to reverse herself on genocide support. She is doing this to herself.
Gaza consistently polls as one of the least important issues for voters. Among voters 18-29 of 16 issues presented in the Harvard IOP polls of that age group, it consistently comes in last or second to last in ratings of importance.
Seems pretty unrealistic to expect politicians to reverse their positions about things very few people care much about.
Neck and neck race. Shes currently sucking up to the NRA gun nuts trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel there. She clearly is scrambling for every possible voter she can without abandoning those sweet sweet AIPAC bribes. I guess we’ll see if you were right on Nov 3rd, and she just didnt flatly need those votes. But there are votes to be had there.
Very, very few. She’s likely to pick up more votes by going on Rogan than reversing herself on support of Israel. If she’s going to do that, it’s likely to occur after, not before, the election.