WHAT IF A POPULAR VOTE/ELECTORAL VOTE SPLIT WENT THE OTHER WAY?

The New York Times has just published the results of a new presidential poll, which shows Kamala Harris and Donald Trump tied at 47% each among likely voters. An accompanying poll of Pennsylvania shows Harris leading by 4 points, 50% to 46%.

This combined result is unexpected, and I suspect it happened because the Times/Siena polling operation is tying itself in knots in an attempt to avoid underestimating Trump's strength in November. Maybe the raw numbers have been adjusted to match a turnout model that's more Republican than the models of other pollsters, which means weighting for white people, and maybe that led to an unanticipated result in Pennsylvania. The Times tells us:

... in 2024, Democrats — first with Mr. Biden and now Ms. Harris — have showed relative strength with white voters, and the Pennsylvania electorate is whiter than the nation overall.

Ms. Harris was winning 46 percent of white voters in Pennsylvania in the new set of polls. In 2020, Mr. Biden won 43 percent of white voters nationally; Hillary Clinton received just 39 percent support from the group in 2016.

I don't think Harris will really do better in Pennsylvania than she does nationwide, but Times poll analyst Nate Cohn says the polls, or at least the "high-quality" polls, are trending this way:

Yes, our poll average shows Ms. Harris doing better nationally than in Pennsylvania, but if you focus only on higher-quality polls (which we call “select pollsters” in our table), the story is a bit different. Over the last month, a lot of these polls show Ms. Harris doing relatively poorly nationwide, but doing well in the Northern battleground states.

When Cohn says that Harris is doing "relatively poorly nationwide" in these polls, he mostly means that she's leading by 1 or 2 points, so I'm not too worried. Her leads range from 3 to 6 points in the majority of the polls in the Rust Belt swing states -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

But these results lead me to consider an unlikely scenario: Despite all the warnings from Nate Silver and others that this election could end in yet another popular vote win for the Democrat and an Electoral College win for the Republican, what if the opposite were to happen? What if Harris were to lose the popular vote and win all the Rust Belt swing states, and therefore win the Electoral College? How would the country handle that?

We know how Donald Trump and MAGA Nation will handle this or any other kind of Harris win, including a landslide in both the popular and electoral vote: by claiming fraud and by trying to encourage officials in tight states not to certify a Harris win, mostly through intimidation. They'll say the Electoral College vote should go to Trump because they see clear evidence of fraud -- and I think they'll be joined by "respectable" Republicans who argue that Trump should get the win because, in their view, there seems to be evidence of fraud. They'll also say that Trump was handicapped during the campaign -- by his civil and criminal cases, by attempts to remove him from state primary ballots, by assassination attempts, and by anti-Trump media bias. (There was clear media bias against Al Gore and Hillary Clinton when they ran, but no one ever suggested that we should hand them the presidency for that reason, even though they both won the popular vote.)

And in the "liberal" media, there will undoubtedly be pundits who say the Electoral College should give us a "unity government," making Trump president and Tim Walz (or even Kamala Harris) vice president -- or maybe they'll recommend a Harris/Vance administration instead. Either way, it's a preposterous idea, which won't prevent it from being proposed by Pamela Paul, Kathleen Parker, Nicholas Kristof, and/or Van Jones.

Assuming none of this works and Harris and Walz take office in January, the GOP, right-wing media, and much of the mainstream media will never stop questioning the new president and vice president's legitimacy, even though the subject was largely dropped when George W. Bush took office in 2001 and when Trump took office in 2017. The mainstream media will demand that Harris "govern from the center," and perhaps choose a Cabinet that's half GOP. It'll be exhausting.

This is where I remind you that there was speculation in 2000 about a Gore Electoral College win accompanied by a Bush popular vote win. On November 1, 2000, six days before Election Day, the New York Daily News published a story in which Republicans promised an all-out effort to prevent Gore from taking office under those circumstances:

“The one thing we don’t do is roll over,” says a Bush aide. “We fight.”

How? The core of the emerging Bush strategy assumes a popular uprising, stoked by the Bushies themselves, of course.

In league with the campaign – which is preparing talking points about the Electoral College’s essential unfairness – a massive talk-radio operation would be encouraged. “We’d have ads, too,” says a Bush aide, “and I think you can count on the media to fuel the thing big-time. Even papers that supported Gore might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted.”

Local business leaders will be urged to lobby their customers, the clergy will be asked to speak up for the popular will and Team Bush will enlist as many Democrats as possible to scream as loud as they can. “You think ‘Democrats for Democracy’ would be a catchy term for them?” asks a Bush adviser.

Democrats never did that when the opposite scenario occurred, partly because Gore concentrated on fighting for a Florida recount. Republicans fought harder (and dirtier). And now Americans largely accept these splits. But we'll see what happens in the unlikely event that we have a split favoring Democrats.