Dem
49
GOP
51
Stu Rothenberg, founder of Inside Elections, has been writing about politics for a very long time, and while not every prediction he's made has come to pass, he's also not someone who shoots from the hip. He wrote a column for Roll Call yesterday that echoes something we've written a number of times.
Rothenberg starts by noting that, if you go by the polls, it's going to be a close election in November. And the polls might very well be right. However, there are indicators that Kamala Harris is driving up enthusiasm among some key demographics, most obviously younger voters and voters of color. Pollster models of the 2024 electorate are based, more or less, on what the 2020 electorate looked like. That means that if the 2024 electorate is substantively different, the polls could be off, perhaps by a lot. The conclusion is that you shouldn't be too terribly surprised if, in the end, Harris wins fairly comfortably. Rothenberg is not saying that WILL happen, merely that it's within the realm of possibility.
Leading up to the election, the Harris campaign doesn't want to get within a country mile of talk like this. Its messaging is hammering home the notion that the election is going to be extremely close, and that every vote counts. The more that Democratic voters believe this, the more likely they are to donate money, the more likely they are to actually make sure to vote, and the less likely they are to make a "statement" vote by casting their ballots for a third-party candidate.
Once Election Day comes, however, Harris and her team will be praying the prayer of the election administrator: "Dear Lord, let it be a landslide." If she does win, then the bigger the margin of victory, the less room Donald Trump has for shenanigans. Oh, he can try, but if she wins the popular vote by 5% and the Electoral College by 60 or 70 EVs, relatively few people will take Trump seriously. Also, his would-be enablers will be less likely to stick their necks out, if they think it is a Lost Cause. In particular, as we learned in 2000, it would be very helpful if the networks are able to declare a winner on the night of the election. It's none too easy to persuade the American people that such a declaration is fake news. (Z)