The Fast Moving Election

 The Democratic Party was on death ground in July after the disastrous presidential debate, and the party leadership rose to the occasion.  Led once again by Nancy Pelosi, they forced Joe Biden, who had a less than 30 percent chance of defeating Donald Trump according to Nate Silver, to withdraw.  Kamala Harris, as I think I made clear, was not my favorite candidate, but the party instantly coalesced around her and she has risen to the occasion.  Her delivery of her acceptance speech was oustanding, and as Nate Silver (of whom more later) has pointed out, she almost entirely omitted gender or race from her presentation and said nothing about sexual orientation or gender identity.   I personally see a certain appropriateness to her nomination.   Indian-Americans are now the most successful ethnic group in the United States per capita, and her Indian-American mother, she made clear, was by far the biggest influence on her young life, and taught her the lesson that earlier generations of immigrants took to heart: don't complain, just achieve.  I have noticed Indian-Americans popping up in all sorts of powerful positions in recent years and Kamala Harris is now the most distinguished of those.

The problem that she still faces, however, emerges from an op-ed in today's New York Times by James Pogue, based upon conversations that Pogue has been having with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.  Since at least 2016 the Democrats have presented themselves as the party of the status quo threatened by Donald Trump and a Republican revolution.  The status quo has been very good to the professional classes that dominate the Democratic Party, but it has been much less good for ordinary Americans regardless of race, gender, and sexual orientation, and they know it.  Harris is now talking vaguely about recreating an "opportunity society," but that strikes me as another way to emphasize education as the road to advancement, even though education is getting worse, not better, while continuing to saddle young people with large debts.  Trump now seems to be self-destructing and becoming even shriller and more bitter, and it could be that the nation is sufficiently sick of that part of our policies to abandon him in significant numbers.  That, however, is not happening yet.

I now subscribe to Nate Silver's substack and get his daily election forecast.  Yesterday's forecast gives Harris only a very marginal edge--a 53.2 percent chance of winning the electoral college, compared to 46.6 percent for Trump.  That means that out of 100 simulations of the election based on all the data at Silver's command, Harris won 53--and that is only a tiny bit better than your chance of winning a coin flip.  Among battleground states, Trump has a more than 60 percent chance of winning Georgia and North Carolina--which, to repeat, doesn't mean he will win 60 percent of the votes there, and certainly doesn't rule out a Harris win in those states--while Harris has a better than 60 percent chance in Wisconsin and Michigan, despite her problems with Arab-American voters there.  Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania are virtual tossups, with Trump barely ahead in Arizona and Harris barely leading in the other two.  This projects overall to a 281-257 electoral vote majority for Harris, which would shift to 276-262 for Trump were he to win Pennsylvania, as he easily could.  That's why Silver still regrets the choice of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro  All these figures could change a great deal ten or eleven weeks, but as it stands now, Trump certainly might still win, and any Harris victory would be close enough to set off another round of post-election disputes for which Trump supporters have been carefully preparing.

The Pogue article encouraged me because Chris Murphy, now only 51, sounds like he might turn out to be the younger successor to Bernie Sanders that we definitely need.  Apparently such Democratic skeptics can only be elected in very small states, which is one reason we are lucky to have some (and they are by no means all Republican, including Vermont, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire.)  Essentially he is recognizing the fundamental point that Thomas Piketty stressed a decade ago:  that under unregulated capitalism, capital grows faster than the economy as a whole, thereby making the rich richer while most of the rest of us stand still.  Harris knows that inflation and housing shortages are hurting ordinary Americans but is only putting forward vague, potentially palliative solutions to these problems.  We appear to lack both the intellectual and political requirements to build the several million new houses that we need in the way that we did after the Second World War, and we have trusted the Fed to control inflation since the mid-1970s.  Our current era, as many have noted, resembles the Gilded Age, and it took more than half a century for the values of the Gilded Age to give way to those of the New Deal. It could take that long again.  If Harris can defeate Trump, however, it may mean that our politics have at last hit bottom.