One of the perils of being a political scientist is that during campaign season I am constantly asked, “So, who do you think is going to win the election?” There are two problems with this question. First, I like to keep work at work. Frankly, outside of my professional life I’d rather discuss a good novel or NFL football than electoral politics. Also, I am not an election wonk. I suppose I follow elections more closely than most people, but all the information I have is readily available to the general public. You too can consult the RCP average.
Still, one cannot avoid the subject. As I do every presidential election year, I have strategically arranged to be teaching the American Presidency course during the Fall campaign season. Naturally, we are discussing the election, generally starting every other class with what has transpired in the last week. This class keeps me paying closer attention than maybe I would otherwise.
Like most people, I have noticed that when Kamala Harris entered the race, she not only halted Trump’s momentum but eventually reversed it, taking a small but definitive lead. This advantage was punctuated by the one Trump-Harris debate, widely seen as a strong victory by Harris. It seemed to be Harris’s race to lose.
That has changed in the last few weeks. The race has narrowed to what is essentially a tie. Harris maintains a small national lead, while Trump has a razor-thin lead in almost all the battleground states, giving him a slight Electoral College advantage. The betting odds are currently moving in Trump’s favor. Let me offer a theory for why this is so.
We have a third election cycle in a row in which neither candidate is all that popular. Trump’s unpopularity is well known. His favorable ratings tend to be in the mid-40s while his unfavourability is in the low fifties. He’s underwater by about eight points. Harris’s position is not as bad, but not great. Both her favorability and unfavourability ratings are in the high forties, essentially a tie. She’s slightly better liked than Trump and slightly less disliked. Still, nearly half of the population has a negative opinion of her.
Thus, like the past two election cycles, whichever candidate is in the news fares worse. The candidate who is getting the most attention is just reminding the voters how much they dislike that person. Kamala Harris, though, found herself in a bit of a pickle. She was getting heavy criticism that she was ducking all interviews and was essentially hiding from the press. Such criticism appeared to be making a dent in her support. The Harris team decided to put her on a few shows, under very friendly circumstances. For example, she did an event with Oprah Winfrey that was organized by the campaign, with prearranged questions and Harris apparently reading off a teleprompter. She appeared on The View, about as friendly a venue as she can get that isn’t staged. Still, neither event went well. Harris seemed to struggle even with softball questions (“What would you have done differently from Joe Biden?”) and people noticed she continued to give vague, robotic answers.
To make up for these poor performances, the Harris campaign scheduled more appearances, such as on 60 Minutes and the Stephen Colbert show. Again, these interviews caused their own troubles, but my point is that simply being in the public eye has hurt Kamala Harris. This is the pickle. If she doesn’t do media events she gets criticized for ducking scrutiny. If she does these events, she reminds the voters that they don’t like her very much. Recall that Harris essentially bombed her 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination, and during the one Biden term there were various reports about White House frustration with Harris and talk that she might be dumped from the ticket. She is not a good campaigner. The more she appears in public the worse she does. As she has become the news, Trump has receded to the background. That’s good for Trump, bad for Harris.
Trump’s rise in the polls is really a Harris decline. When Trump was ahead of Biden, it wasn’t so much that he was beating Biden as much as the Biden vote was discouraged. Harris’s entry into the race and a successful Democratic convention rekindled the zeal of Democratic voters. This helped her reassemble the coalition that Biden used to beat Trump in 2020. What has happened over the last month isn’t Trump ascending. That’s likely impossible. He is such a known quantity that he has a hard ceiling of support somewhere in the upper-40s. What has happened is Harris’s public persona, exemplified in Saturday Night Live skits mocking her (and Trump), has turned off many of her marginal supporters.
Harris’s enormous funding advantage over Trump may provide her with the turnout infrastructure that can put her over the top in what promises to be a very close election. (Sidenote: mentally prepare for electoral disaster in Pennsylvania). Still, this is an election that may well be won by the candidate who does the least in the last weeks. Keep your head down. Stay out of sight. Don’t remind the voters of what we really think–namely, that we don’t like either one of you.
In the run-up to election day, in “survey after survey [pollsters] agreed that the coming choice was ‘too close to call.’ A few points at most, they said, separated the two major contenders.”
That could have come from any front page of any newspaper in America in October 2024. It could have come from 2012, or 2000, or many other Octobers.
It’s actually from TIME Magazine, December 1, 1980, after Reagan went on to beat Carter by 51% to 41% in the popular vote and sweep the electoral college.
(This led–not for the last time–to a lot of anxious hand-wringing about how the polls could have been so wrong.)
Professor Schaff’s take might be right. My guess is it’s slightly over-analyzed. We don’t actually need an explanation for why the race is so tight–“tight” is normal.
Why that is so is found less with the candidates than with us, the voters. America is very close to being an evenly divided nation, and voters are voting their identities. Who the candidates are, what their policies might be, how well they perform in the spotlight, has little effect.
I found this, from a recent Nick Cattogio article, quite telling: “Last weekend I was chatting with one of my Fox News-watching, Trump-supporting relatives and she asked me what Project 2025 is. Somehow my answer led me to start ranting about Trump’s plans to stock the government with zombie loyalists, which led me to warn her about the likelihood that he’ll abuse state power to harass his political enemies, which in turn sent me off on a tangent about how members of his own party in Congress privately fear what he and his diehard fans are capable of. On and on I went. You know how I am. At the end of it she paused and said, ‘See, I didn’t know any of this.’ True story, scout’s honor….For what it’s worth, after telling me that she ‘didn’t know any of this,’ the relative I mentioned earlier felt obliged to add, ‘I’m not changing my mind.'”