Two Election Scenarios (and the Shortest Case for Harris and Trump)
What we know—and don't—about tomorrow
I wanted to write today with some advice about how to approach the next 48 hours, this time of such great anxiety and such uncertainty.
Here's my main advice for how to handle the next 48 hours — volunteer, vote, and tune out. Try to avoid as much news as you can between now and after the polls close. There's almost nothing that we will learn between now and Tuesday night that will *lessen* anyone's anxiety, and half of everything we learn between now and then will be wrong. So vote and volunteer, if you can, but then go read a book, binge watch a show, exercise outdoors, or do something like that. Last election day, in 2020, I spent the day cleaning my basement. (Below, I have a couple suggestions for short, thematic books to indulge in instead.) Me, I’ll be spending the next two days reading research for my next book, offline on the couch, and cleaning the garage in anticipation of winter.
The simple truth is that no one — pollsters, pundits, or candidates — knows how tomorrow and this week will unfold. There will be a lot of uncertainty even once the votes are being counted and even after they’re tallied. But for today, I thought it was worth just talking about the voters themselves.
Everything we know from the entire year says that this is a close election, where about 47 percent of the country is firmly committed to the Donald Trump — a convicted felon, would-be authoritarian, a man found liable of sexual assault, who tried once to overthrow a peaceful transition of power — and where the election is highly likely to come down to a question of who turns out to vote in seven states. Will disaffected Arab-Americans stay home in Michigan? Will insulted Puerto Ricans turn out in Pennsylvania? Will it matter that it's going to rain tomorrow in Wisconsin but not in Pittsburgh?
This is a terrible way to run the world's largest and most advanced economy and a diverse democracy of 330 million people, but it's what we've got (for now).
If you had to choose to be one campaign vs. the other today, though, you'd want to be the Harris campaign. Democrats have the money, the enthusiasm, and the field organization, and the polls seem to indicate a narrow but distinct lead for her nationally. That scenario may very well come to pass. But there are two other scenarios worth considering as well: A big Harris win or a narrow Trump surprise. To me, one of these two scenarios is the most likely outcome for tomorrow. I thought I'd lay out, briefly, the case for each campaign right now.
The shortest possible case for a big Harris surprise: Dobbs. Women are angry. I spent this weekend speaking at the Cape Cod Book Festival, where the panel before mine was author Clara Bingham talking about her new book, THE MOVEMENT, about the women's rights movement of the '60s and '70s. The audience was heavily older women (and granted Cape Cod isn't exactly a swing state) but it was incredible to feel the visceral anger in the room about Dobbs and rights being taken away, about America's daughters being the first generation to inherit fewer rights than their mothers. There was an almost physical and electric vibration of anger through the audience as Bingham talked. Remember, last Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act — the 50th anniversary of women being able to get credit cards and mortgages without a man co-signing. The march of women's rights and the precariousness of those being taken away is far more recent lived history for many mothers and grandmothers than we usually think.
Democrats have consistently outperformed the polls since Dobbs — remember the Red Wave that never materialized in 2022? — and there's a chance that women of all stripes are both loudly and secretly marking ballots for Harris at levels we haven't anticipated. That evening, Iowa's gold star pollster Ann Seltzer rocked the political world with a poll showing Harris leading Trump in Iowa, a state on no one's competitive bingo card for 2024.
The shortest possible case for a narrow Trump surprise: Immigration and nostalgia. Around the world, we've seen the upheavals of the last five years around inflation and immigration devastate incumbent political parties, in the UK, France, Germany, and more. I think a lot about a conversation I had in 2022 with my friend Neil Irwin, the chief economics correspondent for Axios, where he said we were unprepared for the political ripples of inflation because this was a generation of voters and consumers who had no memory of what it was like to experience inflation — anyone younger than about 50 had no memory of what double-digit inflation in the 1990s was like. Neil said, “The thing people don’t understand is that when inflation comes down, the prices stay higher. The prices don’t go back down—they just go up less steeply.” I think that simple insight explains a lot of our political unhappiness still today. People still don’t understand that prices are now just higher.
In fact, Biden has achieved an almost stunningly successful economy; I've had this Slate piece from this summer open in my browser tabs for months. His economy is actually, effectively, the gold standard of what economists hope to achieve. But to the average voter, they see the prices are still high. And voters are still angry. The "success" that the Biden administration has had on inflation is not that prices have gone back down to what they were in 2019; "success” is those prices are not going higher more quickly. They’ll never again be what they were. (And, in fact, anyone who knows anything about economics knows you don't really want to live in an era of actual deflation, when prices do go down.)
To me, a major part of the Trump voter discontent in the country stems from a weird political nostalgia—they’ve memory-holed the chaos and human cost of the Trump years and instead long for America as it existed pre-Covid. They want the country and world we lived in circa 2019, where downtowns were bustling, people still showed up to the office, restaurants and hotels and airlines seemed (in retrospect) to be fully staffed and things just worked better, where prices were just lower, an America as it existed pre-George Floyd reckoning where white men could be white men with apology.
Speaking at a conference last month, I summed up the nation’s choice in a single line: The question before us this election is whether women are angrier about Dobbs than men are about the economy. I still think that’s the simplest way to look at this election.
Bottom line: Make sure you vote. Hundreds of thousands of America have died, across nearly 250 years, to protect this right. I wrote earlier this year about how my D-Day book inspired me to think about how that generation defended democracy in their time—and how, now, it’s our moment to defend democracy in ours. As I wrote in June, “Across the next few months we will be hearing a lot of argument about what America is and what it isn’t. There’s a simpler answer to that question than many would like to admit: What we’ll fight for is who we are. And, as we look ahead, we must decide if we’re still as willing today to fight for democracy as the generation who stormed Normandy was 80 years ago.”
I hope that the answer tomorrow is yes, we are.
In almost every political talk I’ve given over the last four years, since the 2020 election, I’ve warned that the challenge is we don’t know where we are in the arc of Donald Trump and his impact on our country — is this the end, the middle, or even merely the beginning? Me, I’m going to hope hope hope that tomorrow marks the beginning of the end of the Donald Trump story in American politics.
GMG
PS: Here are eight books, all of them short, about waiting and the passage of time, that you might want to consider reading this week instead of doomscrolling on social media. I guarantee you that reading any of these books this week will be a more worthwhile investment of your time than the equivalent amount of time doomscrolling.
1) Olga Grushin’s amazing THE LINE, a book about the very specific Russian practice of waiting in line, for who knows how long for something that may never happen.
2) WHALE FALL, a new debut novel by Elizabeth O’Connor, is set on a fictional Welsh island in 1938 about a young girl and the anthropologists who come to study her island culture. I recommend the audiobook, which captures all the lyricism of Welsh.
3) Howard Norman’s THE MUSEUM GUARD, a small book about the life of a museum and the paintings on its wall that transform lives.
4) Robin Sloan’s magical MR. PENUMBRA’s 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE, about the oddest bookstore of all—and the quest to understand what it’s really selling.
5) Justin Cronin’s THE SUMMER GUEST—one of my favorite books of all time—about a dying man and his fishing camp in Maine.
6) Calvin Trillin’s hilarious TEPPER ISN’T GOING OUT, chronicles a man and his parking space. If you need a hilarious read, grab this. I dare you not to read it in a single sitting.
7) Denis Johnson’s TRAIN DREAMS manages to pack an epic tale of the west into a novella’s 116 pages.
8) Julian Barnes’ SENSE OF AN ENDING, about a man considering his legacy.