I LIKE THE VIBE SHIFT, BUT I DON'T TRUST IT

The polls are still close, but it feels as if pundits and self-proclaimed Knowers Of Things have begun to believe, maybe just in the past day, that Kamala Harris will win this election. The vibe shift started with the release of Ann Selzer's Des Moines Register poll of Iowa, which showed Harris leading by 3 in a state she's always been expected to lose. In the past, Selzer's polls have been extraordinarily accurate, so many Knowers believe she might have detected shifts in the electorate that other pollsters have discounted or missed altogether. If so, this could have positive implications for Harris in nearby states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and possibly even in Texas, which has a draconian abortion ban similar to the one that just took effect in Iowa.

But there have been bad polls for Harris, too, and they're not dampening the sense that Harris is on track to win. Jim Cramer of CNBC says Wall Street expects Harris to win. Journalist Tim Alberta made the rounds of cable news to talk about his conversations with Trump campaign insiders, many of whom are apparently fed up with the campaign and with Trump, with some hints that they don't think they're winning.

Tim Alberta reports that people close to Trump are becoming increasingly pessimistic : “I think that there is a real fear that the bottom has started to fall out here…that they are closing in about as weak a fashion as you possibly could.”
pic.twitter.com/1n2BAa7tju

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 5, 2024

Re: my comments on CNN and MSNBC this evening... yes, there are Trump staffers who no longer much care whether he wins or loses. Not exactly breaking news. Hard to overstate how terrible morale is inside of this campaign—and how much anger/resentment is felt toward the candidate.

— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) November 5, 2024

A couple of reporters from Britain's Independent think Harris is finishing strong. Andrew Feinberg writes:

Harris ... is surging thanks to a series of late-game missteps by Trump and his allies. Those missteps include the disastrous decision to include a comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of floating garbage” in the lineup at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally late last month....

Privately, Democratic sources who spoke to The Independent are projecting confidence, with one swing-state party chair noting what they described as “a serious crossover vote among Republicans” and “explosive” turnout in early voting among key constituencies, including Latinos....

One Republican operative who has worked with the ex-president’s campaign in the past said it’s clear that Trump is “decompensating” in response to the late Harris surge.

“He’s realizing that he could lose the election, go to prison, and maybe die there,” they said.

The paper's Eric Garcia writes:

... I ... spent much of Saturday following both presidential candidates around North Carolina on the final weekend of the campaign and it had become clear to me that Harris had all the momentum, while Trump was grasping for straws.

This appears under the headline "I Followed Harris and Trump Round North Carolina. It’s Clear to Me Who’s Going to Win."

I know that Jon Ralston, whose reputation as a political seer in Nevada matches Ann Selzer's in Iowa, believes Harris will eke out a win in Nevada, despite a poor showing in the state's early vote. I know that the final New York Times swing-state polls showed Harris with leads in enough states to win the Electoral College. I know that Harris has more money and a far more experienced and professional get-out-the-vote operation. I know that her rallies are bigger and her crowds are more enthusiastic.

It's very, very plausible that all this will add up to a Harris win, maybe even a big win. But the race still feels like a coin flip to me. Trump was outspent in 2016 and won anyway. Trump's voters were far more enthusiastic about their candidate than Joe Biden's voters were in 2020, but Biden won.

In the polling averages from FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver, and Real Clear Polling, Harris leads in only two swing states, Michigan and Wisconsin. I know I'm supposed to believe that pollsters are overcorrecting for their botched predictions of a Hillary Clinton win in 2016 and a Biden blowout in 2020, so they're probably underestimating Democratic voters, especially women angry at the Dobbs decision, the way they did in 2022. But I think it's possible that they're underestimating those voters and underestimating the Trump fanboys and fangirls who vote only when he's on the ballot, and that the two misses could cancel each other out. I know it's the least likely outcome, but what if the polls are very accurate? If they are, Trump could win.

My head tells me that Harris isn't Hillary Clinton and there's no James Comey or email pseudo-scandal. It tells me that Trump's ground game has been outsourced to grifters. It tells me that women are furious. It tells me that young boy-men won't leave the house and go vote.

But I'm bracing for impact in spite of all that, just in case.

I'm also bracing for the fact that we won't be rid of Trump tomorrow even if he loses a blowout. He'll declare victory in about fourteen hours no matter what the voters did -- Harris could be on course to trounce Trump with Obama-in-'08-level numbers, she could be winning all the swing states plus Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Iowa, and he'll still say he won. If he doesn't win, he'll fight to get the results overturned right up to Inauguration Day. So if you're sick of him, sick of his voice and his bronzer and his bigotry and the disgusting way he pronounces his L's when he's trying to be contemptuous and sarcastic, calm yourself, because he muight be more of a presence in the next two and a half months than he is even now.

But I don't think the Supreme Court will help him steal an election he legitimately lost. Lower-court judges, yes -- he'll file a bunch of lawsuits in Amarillo, Texas, regardless of where they ought to be filed, so Matthew Kacsmaryk can give him some wins he doesn't deserve. But the Supreme Court still believes it has most of the country bamboozled into believing that it operates within guardrails. I think the Supreme Court still isn't ready to overturn an election that everyone in America will have seen called by CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, AP, and, yes, Fox. (It's good news that Aaron Mishkin, the data nerd who runs Fox's election-night number-crunching operation, is returning this year. He's a straight shooter and he's the guy whose numbers led Fox to call Arizona for Biden first, so Fox is likely to report on the results in a straightforward way this year, too.)

Here's one pleasant surprise so far, though it's in the "dog that hasn't barked" category: The GOP hasn't made a concerted effort to offer trumped-up evidence that the vote is massively rigged by the Democrats. There have been voter-roll purges and there are Republican officials preparing not to certify, and all that is bad enough, but I thought by now the message of the Republican Party would be that the voting process in blue areas was hopelessly corrupted. I thought polling places in Democratic areas would be shut down or occupied by National Guard troops by now. I thought governors and state attorneys general would be making headlines identifying alleged massive breaches of election integrity. I also thought there might be shootings, bombings, or fires at early voting sites.

I assumed that Republicans knew Trump's 2020 steal attempt looked implausible because he seemed to make up all his evidence after the fact, so this year they'd try to lay the groundwork for a steal early. That hasn't happened, either because they don't want their own people to give up on voting, because they don't really care if Trump wins, or because, like the Supreme Court, they're still not ready to go full mask-off post-democratic. We'll see what happens today, but we still have democracy now, more or less, even in red states. And Harris really might be on her way to a win.