Kamala Harris will win the 2024 presidential election, with a four- to five-point margin in the popular vote, and a 300-plus-vote tally in the Electoral College.
Spoiler alert: that much will be obvious as early as the early-morning hours overnight tonight, but the 2024 election will continue to be a contentious battle into the holidays, because Republicans are ready to fight, and as much as we can all hope it isn’t a literal physical fight, don’t rule that out.
I’m getting ahead of myself there.
First, to where we are now: what you have been told has been a 50/50, too-close-to-call race has actually been anything but that, because the pollsters who have been selling you on a tight race have been making their polling numbers fit what they learned from the 2016 election, and not the 2020 or, more importantly, 2024 realities.
The 2024 reality is shaped by women’s reproductive freedoms post-Dobbs.
Republicans, dating back to the Reagan era, straddled the line on abortion because they wanted the energy of anti-choice advocates at the polls, but they knew that actually doing anything to undermine the rights regime put in place post-Roe would be a disaster at the ballot box.
We’re seeing that now, post-Dobbs.
The “red wave” didn’t materialize, as predicted, in the 2022 midterms, precisely as a reaction to Dobbs, with Democrats making unprecedented gains in the House for the party of an incumbent president in a midterm cycle.
We saw the trend continue in the 2023 off-year elections, including here in Virginia, where Democrats won control of both houses of the Virginia General Assembly.
There’s been a “gender gap” in voting preferences for decades now, but what stands out in the post-Dobbs era is the increasing number of independent women and Republican women who have been casting their lots with Democratic candidates up and down the ticket the past couple of election years.
Pollsters looking back at the 2016 electorate for guidance on how to interpret their own raw data weren’t able to pick up on those shifts.
It took the shock poll from Iowa to get the public writ large to see that what we sensed was going on this year had actually taken hold in the 2024 cycle.
Neither presidential campaign was actively contesting Iowa, which Donald Trump won by eight points in 2020, meaning, Iowa was the perfect control group for how the issues of this campaign relative to women’s rights are playing out.
Since the release of the Iowa Poll over the weekend, we’ve seen a few pollsters who had been herding toward a 50/50 rendering breaking away from the herd, with national firms like Zogby, Marist and Ipsos showing Harris opening up a comfortable lead in their national surveys, and showing that Harris has a clear path to win all seven of the so-called battlegrounds.
Republicans have been girding for this eventuality.
Here in Virginia, we’re seeing an effort led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin to create a paper trail that could be used to justify holding off on the certification of the state’s 13 electoral votes, which will go to Harris; in neighboring North Carolina, Republican state legislators have floated a plan to have the legislature override the state’s popular vote if it goes to Harris, which would put those 16 electoral votes into contest.
All told, Republicans hold governorships or state legislative majorities in states that are poised to go to Harris that account for a cumulative 40 electoral votes.
Translated, Harris would need to get past the 310-vote mark to avoid Republican shenanigans from being a factor between now and Dec. 17, when the Electoral College meets, and then on Jan. 6, when the vote is finally certified by Congress.
My sense is, she won’t quite get there.
Getting there would mean Harris would have to sweep the battlegrounds, or sneak a win in Iowa, which most pollsters still have as leans-R.
I think the holdup is going to be Georgia, which I see as the one state that went D in 2020 that will probably flip back to the Trump side this cycle, by a narrow margin.
If things trend in the direction that I’m expecting, we’re likely going to know who the president should be by the weekend, at the latest, but Republicans, who have been preparing for this for the past three and a half years, aren’t going to go down without a fight, and as I said above, I hope I don’t mean that literally, but it’s going to be a contentious next several weeks.
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Chris Graham
