Without apologies to the Bard of Avon – to Trump, or not to Trump, that is the question…
We begin the analysis of the upcoming Presidential Election in the US with two facts that are beyond dispute. One, as with many previous elections, this particular contest will be decided by a relative handful of so-called “battleground states”. The “polls” section of the RealClearPolitics website specifically identifies Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, totaling 93 electoral votes. Excluding these, and assuming no undue surprises in any of the non-battleground states1, before allocating any battleground state electors Harris starts with 226 electoral votes, while Trump has 219 electoral votes.
Incidentally, according to the US Census Bureau, the seven identified battleground states amount to a collective population of approximately 61 million persons, compared with a total US population estimate of 334 million2 . There is not a little irony in fewer than 20% of either states or citizens of a self-proclaimed world’s largest democracy essentially being the ones with the say of who gets to lead it. Paraphrasing Tacitus, “they make it a republic, and call it a democracy…”
Nevertheless. The second fact that must be appreciated, is that polling in these battleground states has been well within the margin of error for weeks. Moreover, many polls do not even add up to 100%; for example, the RealClearPolitics average for the last several polls in Pennsylvania reads Trump 48.3%, Harris 48.0%3, with the remaining 3.7% presumably either still undecided or electing to vote for a third-party candidate. Considering that the individual margins or error within this poll average range from between 2.0% and a whopping 6.0% – that is, plus or minus 2.0%, so that the “real” result for even the most accurate poll “floats” within a 4-percentage point region – we basically know very little, other than the race seems close. This is even if we assume that these opinion polls are accurate to begin with, and are not subject to all sorts of biases and mistakes, starting with how some of them attempt to winnow the total pool of respondents to so-called “likely voters”.
Given these two facts, what can we deduce at all from the proverbial tea leaves?
One possible approach is to build up a so-called “path to victory” for one or the other candidate. Let us suppose, for example, that, as some Democrat-affiliated media seems to suggest, Wisconsin and Michigan ultimately break for Harris. This would get her to exactly 251 electoral votes, needing only Pennsylvania to hit the magic number of 270 electoral votes necessary for victory. Alternatively, either Georgia or North Carolina plus one other battleground state could seal the deal. Without at least one of Georgia, North Carolina or Pennsylvania, however, there would be no mathematical way for Harris to win in this case.
Is this particular path realistic? Perhaps. Certainly, the polls seem to be friendliest to Harris in Wisconsin and Michigan, and assuming that Pennsylvania really is a coin flip at this juncture, Harris just might get lucky, especially with enough of a voter turnout effort. Were she to lose the two Midwestern states with their combined 25 electoral votes, however, too many of the other battlegrounds would have to break a certain way, for my tastes, for her to get anywhere close to the magic number of 270 – unless, of course, the polls have got it completely wrong.
What if Harris loses Michigan? I have been pondering this possibility for some time, given that state’s large Arab-American community, which has been both highly vocal regarding the current Administration’s support for Israeli assaults on Gaza and now Lebanon, and repeatedly, and quite publicly, snubbed by the Harris campaign, with local newspapers like the Detroit Free Press amply covering each incident. A swing of 100-200 thousand disaffected Arab-American votes, which in the past would likely have gone to the Democratic candidate – even if these voters simply stayed home, rather than actively vote for Trump – could be disastrous given the apparently razor-thin margins in the state. And without Michigan and its 15 electoral votes, Harris would need to win three or four of the remaining five battleground states to get to 270, a fairly unlikely seeming feat at the moment.
So if she has the Midwest on her side, she still needs a lucky break here or there, for example in Pennsylvania. If she hasn’t all of the Midwest, she needs to, if not quite run the table, then get fairly close to it. Therefore, is a Harris victory mathematically possible? Of course! But is it likely?..
…at the end of the day, and this is a completely subjective assessment, I would peg the probability of a Harris win at 35%-40%, with Trump at 60%-65%. Unless, and I cannot stress this point enough, unless the polls are wrong, in which the proverbial apple cart is sent stumbling, bumbling and tumbling down the nearest four-lane road. If they are not all that far off from the ultimate result, however, it just seems like a very high mountain for the Harris campaign to climb. Which is another way of predicting a probable, though not at all inevitable, Trump victory, and what that might mean for the country as a whole is a subject for another post altogether…
To be sure, Trump will most likely declare himself the victor regardless of the contest’s actual outcome, once again making statement after statement about “millions” of “uncounted” votes, or alleging large-scale voter fraud while producing little evidence of said. After all, these statements are costless to him, and might yet lead to some recount or re-evaluation of the vote somewhere, presumably in his favor. Indeed, a whole slew of possibilities open up if one presumes that one or both candidates will attempt to subvert the electoral process irrespective of the actual, mathematical outcome. Might Harris urge the electors to vote against Trump regardless? Might Trump once more urge Republican-controlled state legislatures to reject the vote results and submit their own slates of electors? Might, as in the Late Roman Republic, armed mobs of supporters physically beat the opposition to death on behalf of their candidate? That last bit might be rather unlikely, but unless there is a sufficiently clear margin of victory for Harris, or unless the Democrats decide to collectively fold to…the man they’d spent the past week or two explicitly comparing to the Nazis…at any rate, to the extent that there is any questionable outcome in any of the battleground states, a sort of a Florida 2000 1-2 thousand vote margin in, say, Pennsylvania, things could get very interesting indeed, and not in a good way.
Footnotes:- Such as one well-known pollster suddenly moving Iowa into the Democratic column, which on the surface seems rather unlikely.[↩]
- US Census Bureau, Table – “Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for the United States”, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-state-total.html, retrieved November 3, 2024.[↩]
- RealClearPolitics, https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/pennsylvania/trump-vs-harris, retrieved November 3, 2024.[↩]