By Dave Andrusko
I’m composing this post late on Labor Day, but the information is so interesting I didn’t want to wait.
Bear in mind that while pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris may (or may not) be ahead in the national popular vote, pro-life former President Donald Trump is still narrowly ahead in the all-important electoral college.
Politico’s Steven Shepard may have over-dramatized the race but the essential point he is making is quite true:
Because of Republicans’ advantage in the Electoral College, a race that Harris leads nationally by between 2 and 4 percentage points, on average, is the equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth, and it’s set to be decided in a smaller-than-usual number of states.
Adam Turner agrees. “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.
Long-time Democrat strategist James Carville also agrees. As he told Bill Maher
[M]ost say we have to win by three in the popular vote to win the Electoral College. So when you see a poll that says we two up. Well, that’s actually, you’re one down.
What else?
Heading into the home stretch, much of the attention is focused on the battleground states, and particularly on Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. “The three so-called ‘Blue Wall’ states were Democratic bulwarks for decades until Trump won them in 2016 on his way to winning the presidency,” according to USA Today’s Francesca Chambers and Zac Anderson:
Biden got them back in 2020, and now the Trump and Harris campaigns are engaged in a struggle. The states represent the easiest pathway to victory for Harris, even as her campaign touts another route through a group of western and southern states that includes Georgia and North Carolina and is known as the Sun Belt.
Harris has a slight lead in all three Rust Belt states, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average, but is trailing slightly or tied in the southern battlegrounds. …
Politico’s Steven Shepard added
In short: Harris is narrowly ahead in the Rust Belt — which would be enough to win — but Trump is breathing down her neck. And those are also the states where the polling has been least accurate and specifically underestimated Trump in the past two elections. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led Trump in all three states in 2016, only to lose them. And now-President Joe Biden’s prospects looked like a slam dunk going into the 2020 election, but he barely escaped with victories in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Two final points. First, there is Henry Olsen who examines the linchpin of Democrat victories: black voters.
Harris’ current margins with black voters are cause for worry in her campaign: The Cook Political Report’s polling average shows her leading Trump 75% to 19% with blacks.
That 56-point margin would be magnificent with most demographics, but if replicated at the ballot box this November it would be the lowest margin recorded by a Democratic nominee among black voters since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Such an historically poor showing by Harris would be especially damaging in the swing states.
Second, there is the lengthy memo [https://mailchi.mp/press/
Most accounts attribute its cautionary analysis [“we’re behind”] to fear of over-confidence. For example,
However, make no mistake: we head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs. Donald Trump has a motivated base of support, with more support and higher favorability than he has had at any point since 2020. In just a few short days, Vice President Harris will face Trump on the debate stage, where we expect him to be a formidable opponent. In 2020, the election came down to about 40,000 votes across the battleground states. This November, we anticipate margins to be similarly razor-thin.
The New York Times’s Reid J. Epstein certainly drew the same conclusion: “Harris’s Team, With a Wink, Insists She’s an Underdog”.
Won’t they be surprised come November 5!