The presidential race is boring, close and stable

The more things change, the more they stay the same

We’re less than a month from election day and not much is going on. The presidential race has been very stable ever since Biden dropped out. Harris is slightly ahead in national polling. In state level polling, she’s slightly ahead in some states while Trump is slightly ahead in others. In neither national or state level polling do either of them have a lead greater than 2-3 points.

Absent some major event happening between now and election day I don’t expect that to change. Maybe the polls will understate support for Trump like they have before, but maybe not. Trump may enjoy an advantage in the electoral college or he might not. Those are very boring and unsatisfactory answers, but anything else is making stuff up.

Virtually everyone who does election forecasting has the race as being close to 50-50. Harris has an edge, but only a slight one. As long as election forecasting via statistical models has been around, there has never been a presidential election as close as this one.

While the presidential race has not really changed that much, the mood among some political elites has. Harris enjoyed good vibes during August and most of September, but lately the chattering class has gotten more bearish about her prospects. That’s not because anything happened to change the state of the race. It’s because reporters, pundits, columnists and commentators are bored and are looking for something new to talk about. In early August, I wrote about how that was virtually guaranteed to happen.

The most predictable thing to happen, beginning like clockwork on October 1, is Democratic Party strategists, consultants, pundits, columnists and others starting to panic about the race. This piece from Axios is a great example of it. There will be many more like it said and written between now and November 5. It’s completely normal for Democratic Party elites to be panicking and not by itself something to be concerned about. If anything, I would be worried if they weren’t having a collective nervous breakdown.

That doesn’t mean concern is unwarranted, but that crowd is always freaking out no matter what’s going on. It’s not a new phenomenon. Here’s an article from 2008 about Democratic elites fretting that Obama was blowing it. Whether Democrats are crushing it, getting crushed or anything in between, you can take it to the bank that the party’s chattering class will be sweating bullets come October of every even year.

It’s different from the Republican Party chattering class. That crowd has always been much more confident in how their party will fare, whether it’s warranted or not. Plenty of Republican pundits, consultants and writers believed Mitt Romney was going to win. They’re just a very different breed from their Democratic counterparts.

My advice is to ignore all of it. The race is and has been very close and nobody knows who will win or how close it will ultimately be. It could be a nail biter like 2000 or it could be anticlimactic like 2012. It could be close like 2004 and 2016. I highly doubt it will be like 2008, but stranger things have happened. No matters who wins it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Reporters and others in the politics business have to churn stuff out regularly. Even in the most eventful election cycles, there aren’t going to be earth shattering developments every few days. The campaign got a big jolt when Biden dropped out, but since then nothing major has happened. Still, people have deadlines to meet and they have to write something, hence the flaming hot takes about Democrats/Republicans in disarray and Trump/Harris thriving or flailing.

Like the name of this blog says, my takes are cold. My cold take here is what I just wrote. This a boring, stable race and is likely to remain that way absent some drastic event happening. I have no idea what such an event would be and even if it did happen, polarization is so intense I wouldn’t expect it to give either candidate an insurmountable advantage. I could be totally wrong, but that’s my best read of the evidence we have.

Pouring cold water on some hot takes

The key thing to remember about presidential elections this day and age is polarization is very high. It can be different in downballot races, but presidential races are highly competitive. Each candidate is guaranteed a high floor and low ceiling of support. The days of landslide wins like 1936, 1964, 1972 and 1984 are long gone. Polarization is a fixture and is not going away any time soon. Knowing that is indispensable to understanding the nature of presidential elections.

The problem is there are many out there who hold themselves out as authorities on electoral politics who don’t know that. One way you can tell someone doesn’t know that is when they ask why one party’s candidate isn’t crushing the other. In this cycle, that question has been asked repeatedly about Democrats. It usually goes something like, “Trump is so toxic and awful, why is the race even close?” If a normal person who doesn’t follow politics closely asks that, I understand. If someone who claims to be an authority on the matter asks that, we have a problem.

It's bad enough that a supposed authority is asking that question. It’s even worse when they try to answer it because it’s completely predictable. “The only way Harris can win is by saying and doing everything I want her to say and do anyway.” An example of that can be found here. I agree with some of the article, but it’s so patently self-serving and the writer really needs to get out of DC.

Over the summer, I wrote about why it is that Trump isn’t getting crushed and Republicans downballot remain mostly competitive. Anyone who asks that question is doing it wrong. They should be asking why Democrats aren’t getting crushed. It’s Democrats who are the incumbent party when inflation has, until recently, been high. Incumbent parties around the world have been voted out and sometimes decisively. Democrats should be losing badly, but they aren’t. I gave four main reasons for why I think that is.

Another common hot take you’ve probably heard is that a Republican other than Trump would be winning in a rout. Counterfactuals are by definition unknowable, but people who say that confidently are talking out of their asses. In a world where Trump didn’t run, the Republican primary most likely would have elevated some of the party’s most unpopular ideas.

For all his awfulness, Trump has better political instincts than most other Republicans do. He was smart, for example, to jettison Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan. He’s also smart to try to position himself as a moderate on abortion. Unlike most other Republican elected officials, Trump has no history of voting for far-right economic legislation nor does he have a long history of opposing abortion.

A Republican primary without Trump would almost certainly have been much more anti-abortion. Had Ron DeSantis been the frontrunner, his signing a six week ban would have gotten plenty of attention and he probably would have touted it. The other candidates who ran this year, and others who would have run absent Trump running, all have a long history of opposition to abortion. Most of them also have a long history of advocating for cutting popular spending programs. Because everyone knew Trump was the frontrunner, those ideas got little attention, but had he not been there it likely would have been different.

A nominee other than Trump may have come out of a primary too far to the right for college educated voters while driving away the non-college educated voters Trump has brought in. Alternatively, maybe he/she would have threaded the needle perfectly and been a juggernaut. We just don’t know, but I have a hard time seeing DeSantis as a major electoral force. I think he would have been easier to beat than Trump.

The flipside of the hot take that a non-Trump Republican would be winning in a landslide is that a non-Biden and non-Harris Democrat would beat Trump easily. Maybe, but I doubt it. In the best case scenario, another Democrat might be doing a few points better than Harris is now. That would make him/her a favorite to win, but not a shoo-in.

I don’t care how good a candidate looks on paper, nobody defies gravity. The second someone enters a presidential race, every single liability of theirs gets exposed. Everyone has skeletons in their closet and they will be found out. It may be something small, but they will have to address it. Some will handle it well and others will implode, but there is no way to know in advance whether a candidate will be the former or the latter.

Even if some other Democrat had run, successfully addressed their liabilities and made all the right decisions, there is only so much they control. Aside from polarization, the biggest factor is that Democrats are the incumbent party and the country has gone through a period of high inflation. A Democrat who is not part of the Biden Administration could avoid blame for it happening, but would still be weighed down by it.

What’s so frustrating is Trump enjoying an advantage on the economy despite his plans to make inflation worse and interest rates higher. I wish voters understood economics, but they don’t. Very few people have a good understanding of economics, including people who are highly educated. There is a widely held perception that because Trump was president when the economy was good and inflation was low, it must have been because of him and he can do it again. That’s completely wrong, but few voters get that.

Trump can claim it was because of him that the 2019 economy was good and many will believe it. It doesn’t matter that the 2019 economy is long gone and macroeconomic conditions are very different now. Trying to explain that to voters is a fool’s errand. Any Democrat running would have to deal with that and would likely be at a disadvantage on the economy.

A less common hot take is that Democrats would have been better served by having a primary and not immediately giving the nomination to Harris. That would have been a more plausible argument if Biden had announced he wasn’t running a year or more ago. Given that he only dropped out a month before the convention, a primary wasn’t an option and a fight at the convention almost certainly would have been a mess.

Had Biden announced he wasn’t running after the midterms, there would have been a primary, but Harris may have prevailed anyway. I think it’s good that she didn’t go through a primary because she didn’t need to spend any time placating left-wing advocacy groups. A primary with multiple candidates running would have given those groups a chance to pressure candidates into taking their unpopular positions on a whole host of issues. I don’t think it would’ve been as bad as 2019-20, but it would not have been helpful to achieving the most important goal: keeping Trump away from the White House.

All things considered, I think things have gone as well as they could have. Harris had a great convention and a great debate. She has raised $1 billion in less than three months. Her favorable rating has gone from substantially underwater to slightly positive. The major decisions she has made so far have been good.

Obama threw everyone off their game

The first presidential election in my adult life where a Democrat won was in 2008. I was at an election night party and was ecstatic when the networks called it. That was the happiest I have ever been after an election and I still feel that way. Looking back, I think Obama was a very good and underrated president. Beyond his presidency, his overall approach to politics was the right way to go. Harris’ approach to campaigning has been much closer to his than to Biden and Hillary Clinton’s.

The one regret I have with Obama is he gave many people, particularly those in my age group, a distorted sense of what presidential candidates are like. For those of us who were young then, many of us thought everyone who runs for president must be like that. In reality, he was a phenom and the kind of candidate that shows up maybe every 100 years.

It wasn’t just the historic nature of his presidency and his electrifying personality. He was an electoral juggernaut. He didn’t just do well with non-white and young voters, he did well with non-college educated white voters, too. He managed to convinced a large number of non-college educated white people to not only vote for a black candidate,¹ but to vote for one whose middle name is Hussein. That’s a talent very few people have.

Both times he was on the ballot, he enjoyed an electoral college advantage. He killed it in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and won Iowa twice. He easily won Nevada both times and won Florida twice. Virginia is now a blue state, but he was the first Democrat to win it since LBJ in 1964. Nationally, he was the first president since Eisenhower to win a majority of the popular vote both times.

His electoral success, though, was badly misinterpreted. It was not a sign of the Democratic Party becoming the dominant national party for decades to come. Many in Democratic Party elite circles were enthralled with the idea of an emerging Democratic majority back in the 2000s and Obama’s win in 2008 looked like it was the fulfillment of it. Unfortunately, that idea was based on fantasy and wishful thinking. What was really going on was that Democrats had nominated an extraordinarily good candidate who was at the right place at the right time.

2008 could not have been better timing for any Democrat. Republicans were the incumbent party and had been since 2001. That alone makes it harder to win the White House. Making things worse for Republicans was that Bush was very unpopular. The war in Iraq, Katrina, Social Security privatization and corruption in Congress had all taken a toll on him and the Republican brand.

Obama was a new figure then. He was the one everyone wanted to see. Unlike Clinton, he had opposed the war in Iraq and could more credibly argue that he was the candidate of change. As presidential candidates go, he was comparatively young and highly energetic. Despite all those tailwinds, the presidential race was close and McCain had a solid chance of winning. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is what sealed his doom. While Obama was a stronger candidate than Clinton, she would have won had she been nominated.

What I’m getting at here is that in our age of intense polarization, presidential races tend to be very close. 2008 and 2012 were outliers.² When pundits, columnists, commentators and others compare things now to when Obama was on the ballot and say things have moved rightward, what they’re really saying is things are back to normal. For example, it’s common to hear takes about how Nevada should be a Republican pick up. Clinton and Biden barely won it after all. Since Obama was on the ballot, it has moved rightward, closer to where it was before he showed up.

Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are like that, too. Gore, Kerry and Biden won those states, but just barely. Clinton lost them by less than one point each. Like with Nevada, Obama was the outlier. He was an unusually good fit for those places and benefitted from things beyond his control. A collapsing economy in 2008 guaranteed him a bigger than usual win and so did a weak opponent who was a poor fit for those states in 2012.

Those were unique circumstances that didn’t repeat. The 22^nd Amendment made him ineligible to run in 2016. By then, Democrats had been the incumbent party since 2009 and he was no longer the new, cool guy. Like Trump, Obama had an appeal that was unique to him. His coalition didn’t carry over to Clinton or Biden and it won’t carry over to Harris.

There are very few things I’m highly confident of, but one of them is that durable national majorities are all but impossible today. What looks like one party gaining a durable electoral advantage is just an artifact of a particular period. Democrats were not becoming the dominant party after 2008, they just had a whole lot of stars line up that have since unaligned.

Neither party can consistently hold Congress and the White House anymore. The longest recent streak of anyone doing that was from 2003-2007, which was in the aftermath of 9/11. Parties used to have durable national majorities, but that hasn’t been the case for over 50 years.

With polarization today being so high, the incumbent party usually doing poorly in midterms, party coalitions being more stable and changes in party coalitions tending to offset each other, there will be no emerging Democratic or Republican majority any time soon. That could change in the future, but many other things will have to change first, i.e., much less polarization.

The two major parties today are close to parity. With the way current coalitions are playing out, I think it may give Democrats an advantage in non-presidential elections while giving Republicans a slight edge in presidential elections, but that’s hardly determined. As things stand now, non-college educated non-whites are moving towards Republicans, college educated whites are moving towards Democrats and everyone else is largely the same. Maybe those trends will continue or maybe they’re just an artifact of Trump being the center of the political universe.

Because Trump has been around for so long, it’s hard to remember what things were like before him or to envision what a future without him looks like. I remember the former, but I’m not going to speculate on the latter. What a post-Trump Republican Party looks like is anyone’s guess. The same is true for the Democratic Party although I think it’s a little clearer.

What I do know is we have two major parties and always have. We have had the same two since 1860. Neither of them are going away and if one of them did they would be replaced by another party just like them.

1. In states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, plenty of non-college educated whites had voted for Democratic candidates before, but almost all of those Democratic candidates had been white. For many non-college educated whites, Obama was the first black candidate they had voted for. His ability to convince them that it was okay to support him and he wasn’t threatening was remarkable and was not guaranteed to happen.

2. Even in 2012, the popular vote was close. Obama won 51-47, which was slightly less than Biden’s margin in 2020.