Six questions the US election is about to answer

And two more it won't right away.

For my many sins, I am a US politics tragic.

It is a political system that is in astoundingly poor health compared to our own, one where a state with the population of Canterbury gets the same representation to one with the population of Canada¹, and yet it is impossible to look away. I am far from the only Kiwi with this sickness and NZ politicians of all stripes consistently look to the US for tactical inspiration, so I thought it seemed appropriate to set out some of the things we may learn over the next week.

Was the last few days just Democratic hopium?

As I write this, Blue America is beginning to hope again.

It’s been a harrowing month for Democrats. Swing state and national polling has slowly softened for Kamala Harris since a highpoint around her debate with Donald Trump in September. These have not been huge shifts - the polls are extremely tight - but they have been enough to give off that It’s happening again feeling.

The last 48 hours have seen a significant vibe-shift, thanks to predictions from the sort of people Democrats love more than anyone else: Experts who agree with them.

The first surprise was from Ann Selzer, whose final poll for Iowa put Harris at 47 to Trump’s 44. Iowa was not really considered a swing state in this cycle - Trump won by 8 points last time - but Selzer’s well-earned reputation for being an extremely accurate pollster able to push away from “the herd” has made people take a lot of notice.

After all, if Harris just runs it close to Trump in Iowa, that would suggest far more strength for her in the other crucial Midwest swing states than the general consensus.

The other is from veteran Nevada journalist Jon Ralston, who has predicted based on early vote data that Harris will (very narrowly) win Nevada. Biden won Nevada by two points in 2020, so this shouldn’t be such a boost to Democrats, but the state has followed its fellow southwestern states with high Latino populations into getting far redder in the four years since.

These two indicators are not the entire story - there have been some other decent polls for Harris - but they are a big part of the emotional story. Very soon we will know if these two bits of stray data are mere ‘hopium’ or real leading indicators of a Democratic win.

Is the Dobbs Effect still active?

If you’re not familiar, the “Dobbs” case was the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade and threw abortion rights back to individual states. Since the decision Democrats have massively overperformed in a range of elections - from the 2022 midterms when they held the Senate and only barely lost the House, to special elections (think byelections) across the country. Simultaneously, ballot measures concerning abortion have consistently been won by the pro-choice side, even in red states like Kansas and Ohio.

This election 10 states have their own ballot measures, including swing states Nevada and Arizona. Harris has naturally been pushing this button very hard - it was her best section of the debate and features in many ads, including a recent one where two women secretly vote in the opposite direction of their MAGA-coded husbands. You can definitely make a case that this, combined with those ballot measures, will push female turnout up and give Harris the edge she needs.

The counter-case can also be made. Perhaps the ballot measures actually give women an escape hatch - they can vote for abortion rights and Trump at the same time. Perhaps the Dobbs decision is long enough ago and not tied enough to Trump to really matter. We should see if this is another “Roevember” fairly soon.

Has polling fixed itself?

US polling had a bad 2020.

It was actually far worse in 2020 - when the polling correctly predicted the winner - than in 2016, when it did not. In 2016 there were some terrible state-level polls, but the overall national polling was not that far from the truth - after all Clinton did win the popular vote. In 2020, the polls might have correctly picked Biden, but they did so by a far larger margin than they should have - the average error was 4.5% in the national polls and 4.3% in statewide polls. This was the largest error in the national popular vote for 40 years.

Pollsters have done a lot of things to try to fix that, likely including what some experts describe as “herding” - cowardly weighting their polls so they aren’t outliers in either direction.

Needless to say, the polls are tight enough that you only need to see a “normal” polling error in the Democratic direction for Trump to sweep in a very convincing win. Given his overperformance of his polls in 2016 and 2020, this is hard to convincingly rule out, although many have tried.

Yet a normal polling error in the other direction is also possible. After all the polls underestimated Democratic strength in the 2022 midterms - if that kind of error happened again it would be a huge Harris win.

Does high turnout help Republicans now?

It has long been traditionally and understandably assumed that low turnout helps the right and hurts the left. Basically - the rich folks who were reliable voters generally swung right, while poorer voters who were less organised generally swung left.

This made a lot of sense in the politics of the 20th century, when having a university degree generally made you more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. Among white voters, this has now hugely flipped - there is no better predictor of a Democratic white voter than whether or not they have completed four years higher education.

This Republican dominance of the degreeless has shown signs of spreading from whites to other ethnic groups who generally favour Democrats and often don’t have degrees - Latinos and African Americans.

But this massive shift will only result in big wins for Republicans if these groups go out and vote. And there is some suggestion from those special elections that this shift has happened to the degree that Democrats are now the reliable voters, while many Republican-leaning voters may stay home.

This educational realignment is far from contained within the United States. It’s one of the main metatrends of Western political life in recent decades and we will get a huge new datapoint for it soon.

How fucked is free trade?

Excuse my french. Since 2016 the US Government has become more and more hostile to free trade, with Joe Biden going even harder than Donald Trump was to “shield” American workers from the efforts of Chinese workers to make things cheaper than they can.

The free trade glory days of post Cold War era don’t seem to be coming back any time soon, no matter who wins. But Trump is promising a significantly stepped up program of tariffs - sometimes 10% on all imports, sometimes 20%, and up to 60% on China.

It goes without saying that Donald Trump saying he will do something is not a promise you should take to the bank. But he has worked hard to surround himself with people who won’t say no to him like so many did in his first term, and he will want to do something on trade if he wins. The repercussions of the world’s largest economy doing this are hard to put in proper perspective, but they will definitely hurt New Zealand.

Then, so will Harris’ policies. Just not to the same degree.

You could say the same thing about climate change, which is intricately tied up with trade given China is the world’s pre-eminent EV and solar panel producer. It’s not that Harris winning means big wins for the climate movement, it’s just that she will probably do somewhat less damage than Trump would.

How will the historians see Biden?

I reckon this one is pretty cut and dry. If Harris wins Joe Biden will go down into the history books - which will largely be written by liberals - as one of the most important presidents in decades, one who managed to defeat Trumpism once at the ballot box and once by stepping aside. This combined with his serious domestic policy record could see him eventually outshine Obama in terms of early 21st century Democratic presidents.

If Harris loses, Biden’s decision to wait so long to pull out will doom his record. He will become a punchline.

Two questions for the longer term

How do the Democrats pick up the pieces if they lose?

Losing this election will not doom the Democrats - the nature of two-party systems is it is very hard to really die within them.

But it will give the party several months of turmoil and likely a bigger shift to the right on immigration politics than the one it has already taken.

The scale of the loss and congressional results will matter here. If the Democrats manage to somehow win back the House while losing the presidency (unlikely but far from impossible) they will have a base within the Federal Government to fight Trump. Yet they are very unlikely to keep the Senate - which means four more years of Trump Supreme Court picks which will make it even more right wing than it is currently. That could well change the position of top Democrats on Supreme Court reform in 2028.

The sense of loss might slowly fade around 2026, when the Democrats would probably have a good midterm election that could give them back some real confidence. Nothing is ever certain, but the Senate map is much kinder to the Democrats in 2026, and the party in the White House typically has rougher midterms. And hey, at least Trump would be term limited in 2028. Speaking of.

Trump 2028?

Back in 2020, a lot of people didn’t think Trump would or should run in 2024. Many were in his party and have now sworn fealty to him once more.

Trump will turn 82 in 2028 - about a year older than Biden is now. That brute fact would seem to rule him out given the Biden experience.

But people don’t really expect Trump to speak in complete sentences or submit himself to proper medical exams. Being a cranky but funny old guy who goes on little journeys within each of his sentences is part of the charm

Still, there is always the possibility of the party stepping in more effectively than it did in 2016 or 2020. After all this would be a third straight loss of the popular vote for Trump, a measure the Republicans have only won once since 1988. It would probably rebound in hundreds of other promising careers being snuffed out.

Yet his eight years of dominance leaves the party a very different beast. Perhaps Glenn Youngkin and Marco Rubio can take it in a different direction, but the base seems more likely to want a “Trump 2” of some sort, if he does stand down. That could be one of his sons, it could be another outsider (Joe Rogan?), it could be JD Vance - although I suspect he would be far too tainted by the 2024 loss.

Think about it for a bit, and it starts to seem more than possible that Trump takes it all for one last spin.

Recommended Reading

• I just finished Nixon Agonistes by Garry Wills - it is one of the best political books I have ever read. Wills is everything you want in an analytical journalist: Extremely well-read (he’s a trained classicist), ideologically heterogeneous (he wrote for National Review but was disgusted by Vietnam), and able to take the little facts of a single political career and stretch it out to tell a full story about a country. It’s hard to find a copy in print but there is a recently-recorded audiobook on all the services.

• Madeleine Chapman lays out the case against Mike King very elegantly.

• Adam Tooze has a great piece on “Bidenomics” and where US policy is now heading.

• I can’t recommend the NYT’s ‘The Runup’ podcast enough, and all of the episodes will be useless very soon - so do go listen. The Pennsylvania one is particularly enlightening about why so many poorer African Americans are breaking for Trump (or not voting at all.)

• Twitter will be the place to be for the next week. Follow the Nates (Silver and Cohn) and your preferred party’s various data wranglers. Get ready to lose some sleep.

1. In the Senate, but that is more and more where it really matters.