When Nate Silver Acknowledges the Obvious – Trump Is Still The Favorite
The bloom seems to be off the Kamala Harris rose, according to the most prominent left-wing “number’s nerd,” Nate Silver. His election model now has Donald Trump back ahead of Harris, as my colleague Bob Hoge has discussed. And the blowback from the lefties, as they say, is just glorious.
But while you should certainly enjoy this spectacle, I still implore you to ignore Silver’s model, and all the other models as well. Pretty please. Decades ago, I decided not to pursue a Ph.D. in “political science” because I didn’t like the attempt by “political scientists” to make American politics into a “science.” Simply put, it isn’t. You can crunch all your fake numbers and all of your fake equations, but nothing is guaranteed in the upcoming election, as people are not logical Vulcans who will inevitably do what is predicted of them. Basically, these models are nothing more than educated guesses that inevitably get caught up by the “numbers nerd’s” bias.
For example, in 2016, Nate Silver still had Hillary Clinton the yuge favorite to win the presidency, despite all the flack he took from other lefties for giving Trump an actual chance to win the election (it just wasn’t a big chance).
If you are going to make an educated guess anyway, then you would be better off doing what I do – looking at the RCP average, and then reasoning from there. RCP has Harris up 1.8 percentage points over Donald Trump today. In the battleground states, Trump is still up in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina, and Harris is barely up by .5 percentage points in Pennsylvania, my home state, which I believe will be the Key(stone) state for the 2024 election.
Being ahead in the national polling average is good, but it is still not enough for Harris. Based on the 2020 election, it is likely that she needs to win the national popular vote by at least 3 points to be guaranteed the necessary electoral votes to win the presidency.
And that doesn’t even take into account the likely underestimation of Donald Trump’s support. In 2016 and 2020, Trump ended up vastly overperforming his public polling numbers. The RCP average was better than most, but it still underestimated him. (Nate Silver’s average was even worse).
I know there has been speculation that this year, the public pollsters are doing their best to get the numbers right. However, in my experience, public pollsters are people too, who don’t like to learn from their mistakes, often have their own biases that they can’t recognize, and sometimes are actually interested in pushing an agenda as well. Plus, in this situation, there are some other reasons why there might be a significant problem – see the response bias problem that public polls won’t spend the money to fix.
The campaign polling is much, much better (than public polling) because their livelihood depends on it, and as a result, the campaigns both know that it is a much tougher race for Kamala Harris to win. We know this because prominent Democrat consultants David Axelrod and James Carville, who have access to the Harris campaign numbers, have told Democrats to be cautious in their irrational exuberance.
Further, it is important to remember that polling is not the end all or be all of the 2024 presidential race. The underlying situation must also be considered. As I have belabored: the economy is bad, especially the inflation; the border is open, and illegal aliens are murdering Americans; and the world is in chaos because of Biden-Harris weakness, with rioting on U.S streets and an American recently being executed by Hamas terrorists. Further, there is one other thing to consider – Kamala Harris was, until recently, an unabashed leftist, who has/had taken many crazy/potentially unpopular political positions, including being soft on crime, being opposed to fracking, and wanting to put an end to private health insurance.
You can see that the Biden-Harris administration is not popular, based on the advertisements that Harris, and before her, Biden, has (had) been promoting, which all act as if Harris isn’t the incumbent vice president, and that Trump is the incumbent president (and that he is the devil as well). These ads are, as a result, very weak fluff that can be easily deflected and debunked by the Trump campaign. And indeed, as I see in Pennsylvania, they are being deflected and debunked with extreme prejudice. (But please remember, this will still take time; only MSM talking heads expect things to change overnight.)
Another important thing to remember is Kamala Harris is not a particularly competent, hardworking, or good candidate. She keeps making mistakes. Her interview with CNN, which was supposed to be an in-kind contribution by Democrat-loving CNN, was still embarrassing, despite the fact that CNN probably edited the interview down substantially and (presumably) excised the worst parts. She stupidly chose Tim Walz as her running mate instead of the Jewish governor who might have helped her in Pennsylvania despite Walz’ “stolen valor” problem, which should have easily disqualified him. She helpfully – for Trump – listed some of the recent Biden-Harris inflationary examples, which the Trump campaign then made into an effective advertisement, discussed by my colleague Nick Arama. And now she is arguing with Gold Star families that despise her for being “the last person in the room” with Biden when he made the choice to abandon Afghanistan in such a panic that it led to the deaths of their relatives (the 13 American soldiers).
And then there are the events that will be sure to come up, and may impact the race. There is the big debate, which Kamala Harris seems determined to wimp out of (perhaps because she is a weak candidate). There is the fact that the Biden-Harris administration is so weak that malignant foreign actors are lining up to take advantage of the U.S. See Russia, Iran, Hamas, etc. There is the little debate – the vice-presidential debate – where JD Vance will have a yuge and dumb target to take some whacks at. And the economy still seems likely to get worse.
Once again, as Trump frequently says, “We’ll see what happens,” but if I were a Democrat, I would not be optimistic.
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