Note to readers

    New posts have been delayed while I am reading a long, detailed, and remarkable relatiovely new work of history.  This will lead to a long post, maybe more than one, which should appear later this week. Stay tuned!

           

Some thoughts about the election

 One might argue that I should wait until after Tuesday's debate to post these thoughts, but I am going to go ahead now.  Things could happen in the debate that would change the race, but the vast majority of voters are so entrenched that they may very well not.  Meanwhile, thanks to Nate Silver, whose forecasts I check every day, I have some thoughts that I want to share.

Since August 23, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race, Trump's chances of winning have been steadily increasing.  He passed Harris (who had leapt over Trump almost as soon as Biden dropped out) on about August 28, his rate of growth has increased this month, and Silver now gives him a 61.5 percent chance of winning the electoral college.  That does not mean, of course, that he's going to win 61.5 percent of the popular or electoral votes, and it hardly guarantees him victory.  Any gambler will tell you that 38.5 percent chances happen all the time.  But it means that if you wanted to bet on the outcome of the election today you would be better advised to bet on Trump, and that it's Harris who has to gain ground now.

The second thing that jumps out from Silver's figures is that this will be one of the very closest elections in the electoral college in our history.  Leaving out the disputed 1876 election, the closest was 2000, when George W. Bush won 271 electoral votes to Al Gore's 267 (one of whom abstained in the actual voting.)  Not only Florida, but also New Hampshire would have swung the election to Gore that year.  Silver now estimates that Trump is likely to win 278 electoral votes to 260 for Harris.  And his projections for three critical swing states--Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania--are almost exactly 50 percent.

And thirdly, it's highly possible that we may repeat the experience of 2000 and 2016, when the Republican candidate lost the popular vote but prevailed in the electoral college.  That will happen in Silver's most likely scenario right now, and he finds that Harris has to win the popular vote by more than 2 percent to have a better than even chance of winning in the electoral college.  That leads me to my first point.

If in fact Harris wins the popular vote but loses the election, Democrats will denounce the outcome as illegitimate.  Because the Republicans have already won twice despite losing the popular vote, leftist Americans now reject the electoral college as undemocratic.  I too would favor replacing it with a two-round popular vote requiring a majority to be elected and eliminating all but two candidates in the second round, as in France, but I would like to push back against the idea that our electoral map gives the Republicans an advantage that they would not otherwise have.  We actually have no idea who would win presidential elections decided by the popular vote, because under that very new rule, the campaigns would be entirely different.  Today the voters in all but about seven states know that their individual vote is essentially meaningless, because one candidate or the other will surely win their state overwhelmingly.   The parties, who know that, don't bother to campaign or run ads in the vast majority of states either.  Perhaps the strongest argument for changing to a popular vote system is that all our votes would suddenly count.  That, it seems to me, would encourage, or even compel, candidates to compete for a much broader spectrum of voters.  It could easily increase the turnout of Texas Democrats and California Republicans in presidential elections.  It would certainly once again force candidates to campaign all over the country.  But we do not know how it would affect the balance between Democratic and Republican votes, and we shouldn't pretend that we do.  And on the debit side, in our current climate, the problem of controversies over voter fraud would get even worse.  Voter fraud could be a hot issue in every state of the union, instead of only in the handful of states that are genuinely in play.  

Because Democrats regard a Trump victory as illegitimate on its face--not because of voter fraud or complaints about voter fraud, but because they reject everything Trump stands for--they have been desperate since 2016 to find some reason that would invalidate it.  I agree that a victory would be catastrophic, but I am trying to be realistic about how it might come about.  The six key swing states--Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania--are an interesting mix.  The first three are sun belt states with increasing populations, while the last three are declining Rust Belt states. Many voters in the first three, one might hypothesize, don't feel they need a Democrat in the White House, and it is well documented that many voters in the last three don't think Democrats in the White House have done them any good.  Many in all of them reject a lot of the cultural positions that Democrats increasingly take. That, I would argue, is why Harris at this moment is in grave danger of losing the election.

If she wins the status quo will continue.  The Democrats are likely to emerge from the election without at least one house of Congress in their hands, and that will make passing any significant legislation impossible. They will not be able to codify Roe v. Wade in federal law--although I am hopeful that the democratic process will secure abortion rights in most of the states of the next few years, which would be a very good outcome.  Harris is rapidly emerging as a neoliberal in the Clinton-Obama mode, which means that inequality will continue to grow.  Her foreign policy is therefore likely to remain conventional as well--even as the American public becomes less and less interested in its world role.  Harris is not the problem, but it's unlikely that she will be the solution.  I'm voting for  her.