This election remains extremely close, but Donald Trump has been gaining ground. One of my pet peeves is with the idea that this is Kamala Harris’s election to lose. I could articulate some critiques of her campaign, but if you study the factors that have historically determined elections, you’ll see that she’s battling difficult circumstances.
So, today’s newsletter simply aims to provide a laundry list of factors that favor Trump, with many links to evidence in previous Silver Bulletin posts and elsewhere. These are in no particular order.
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Harris is the favorite to win the popular vote, but the Electoral College bias favors Republicans by about 2 percentage points. In an era of intense partisanship and close elections, this is inherently difficult for Democrats to overcome.
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Inflation hit a peak of 9.1 percentage points in June 2022. It has abated now, but prices remain much higher than when Joe Biden took office, and voters are historically highly sensitive to inflation. Democrats can also plausibly be blamed for it given intensive increases in government spending during COVID recovery efforts.
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Though the reasons for this are much debated, voter perceptions about the economy lag substantially behind objective data, and growth in take-home income has been sluggish for many years for the working classamid rising corporate profits.
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Incumbent parties worldwide are doing very poorly, and the historical incumbency advantage has diminished to the point where it may now be an incumbency handicap instead given perpetually negative perceptions about the direction of the country.
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Populism is often a highly effective strategy, and many Trump voters are indeed “deplorable” in the Hillary Clinton sense of the term.
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Illegal/unauthorized immigration increased substantially during the first few years of the Biden/Harris administration amid a rising global backlash to immigration.
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Harris ran far to her left in 2019, adopting many unpopular positions, and doesn’t really have a viable strategy for explaining her changing stances.
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The cultural vibes are shifting to the right, and the left continues to pay a price for the excesses of 2020 on COVID, crime, “wokeness,” and other issues.
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Voters have nostalgia for the relatively strong economic performance in the first three years of Trump’s term and associate the problems of 2020 with Democrats, even though they weren’t in charge at the time.
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Democrats’ dominance among Black voters and other racial and ethnic minority groups is slipping.
Harris has been running on vibes and has failed to articulate a clear vision for the country. It might have been a good strategy if the “fundamentals” favored her, but they don’t.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/24-reasons-that-trump-could-win