Prediction: Kamala Harris Wins the Presidential Election

The day has finally arrived. You should congratulate yourself for making it through this minefield of a year where polls hedged themselves into total uselessness, further ratcheting up the stress and pressure on today. I cannot wait to do something else tomorrow, as we leave this harebrained election season that was the most superficial of my lifetime. The rubber is finally meeting the road, and those of us political commentators who have been hedging our bets while trying to explain the daily twists and turns of the race must now make our calls.

Here are the four reasons why I think Kamala Harris is primed to become the next President of the United States.

Women Voters

Since June 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to ban abortion outright, untold misery has followed. Women have died from preventable complications from pregnancies because doctors have been threatened with jail time by Republicans in states across the country should they perform a procedure that saves the mother but not the fetus. Iowa, which Ann Selzer’s famed poll suggests is winnable for Kamala Harris, had a six-week abortion ban passed and then upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court. The figures of older women supporting Harris by a 2-to-1 margin in polls like Selzer’s are surprising, but in the context of all this depraved Republican hostility towards women, is it really?

A 71-year-old woman was 18 when Roe was established. They have lived an entire life witnessing progress on women’s freedom to access healthcare, and now the GOP is doing everything it can to roll back a lifetime of achievements. Inferring reasons behind strangers’ votes is always dangerous, but it’s hard for me see the consistent flashing red lights for Trump in the data with Midwest women voters and not make the connection to the biggest domestic political development in America since Trump’s first election.

The great polling for Harris over the weekend certainly reinforces my priors on this election, so I will admit I cannot be totally objective when interpreting it–but I just believe that despite all the wild twists and turns since June 2022, that this has still generally been the same election all along. Women’s rights are directly under assault from the outwardly chauvinistic Republican Party, and the data is indicating that women are voting in large enough numbers to carry Kamala Harris to victory.

Trump Is a Known Quantity

Donald Trump’s superpower in 2016 was his lack of experience in politics burnishing his outsider credibility. Ever since 2008, it’s been crystal clear that Americans are clamoring for change from the decaying status quo that is leading us to certain doom, and Trump has benefited more than anyone from that dynamic. He is the hammer with which to smash the establishment, and a lot of people were convinced to back him initially simply out of opposition to the politicians helping their donors at the expense of their voters.

But every time he runs, he loses more of this aura. The idea that a former president is a political outsider is a belief that really only holds purchase on the right-wing who has fully detached themselves from reality at this point. Trump won in 2016 because he convinced a lot of Independents and leaners that he is the outsider who alone can fix it, and those Independents and leaners have now watched him bumble around for eight years, while polls indicate that today’s Independents are generally in favor of Harris, and they broke for Biden in 2020.

Trump is running on something of an establishment line, asserting that when he was in power, things were good and he can return us to a previous era. While this conservative style appeals to conservatives, it is also a tacit acknowledgement that Trump has pretty much used up all his outsider credibility with those who are willing to let reality change their interpretation of it.

In short, Trump just doesn’t have a ton of upside left in the regular electorate who knows him well by now, which is why he has bet the farm on expanding his coalition through low propensity voters who may be voting for the first time ever today. Which brings me to my next reason behind why I think Trump will lose.

Trump Needs Elon Musk to Get Out the Vote

About three days ago I landed on this prediction, and ever since I have been trying to challenge it and see how it could be wrong. The expected high turnout from women voters is not wrong, we have data showing that turnout among women is already surging, and that is the chief reason for liberals and anti-Trump types to be hopeful today. I could be missing something with a typical group of undecided voters who still see Trump as an outsider, but data from the weekend indicates that late deciders are breaking for Kamala Harris. There obviously could be something I am not seeing, and I have been very wrong in predicting electoral outcomes before, but the best counter-argument to my optimism that I can mount is that Trump does turn out the low propensity vote he has been targeting in droves.

So how does that happen? Through the efforts of Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk. Typically, campaigns and political parties have their own get-out-the-vote operation on election day, where volunteers and party members help get key voters to the polls. The Democrats are very good at this. The Republicans are too, and they were primed to invest a ton in get-out-the-vote operations before Trump outsourced it to Elon Musk’s America PAC and the idiotic conservative youth group, Talking Points USA.

Musk’s America PAC has already been hit with a class action lawsuit for allegedly scamming their workers, and there are countless reports suggesting this operation is incredibly disorganized, as NBC indicated over the weekend:

Data reviewed by NBC News from Campaign Sidekick, the app America PAC’s door-knockers are using as they canvass, showed what sources described as an inordinate number of potentially suspicious data entries filed in recent weeks.

In Arizona, nearly a quarter of data entries submitted in early- to mid-October were flagged in the app’s “unusual activity” log. That trigger automatically fires when door-knockers submit entries more than 100 feet away from the homes they are marking off, or if their locations are marked as a flat “zero” feet away from the homes, which occurs when the app is connected to Wi-Fi — which, in most instances, should not be the case for door-knockers walking around outside.

There is also a video that has made its way around Trump’s canvassing operation showing how to spoof your location in America PAC’s app, demonstrated by putting two voters into its database the person did not contact, and “A source with access to America PAC’s back end confirmed to NBC News that those names were actually entered into the system — and were not initially flagged as suspicious, given that the location spoofing app placed the user close to the person’s home.”

So not only is Elon Musk not knocking on anywhere near the number of doors he pledged to, but potentially as much as a quarter of data submitted in some states was flagged by its internal system, and there is a confirmed method to submit data into America PAC that does not get flagged. I just cannot bring myself to believe that Elon Musk, lifetime charlatan and perpetual promise breaker, will out-perform the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote operation today.

A GOP Porn Forum Poster Running for Governor

Lastly, I think the Democrats will win because the Republicans are being dragged down by a historically bad candidate in North Carolina. Without the porn form enthusiast who once described himself as a “black NAZI!” the Democrats’ path to the White House would be much narrower, as historically red North Carolina would likely not be in play. But it very much is, all because Mark Robinson is polling under 40 percent and dragging Trump to hell with him. Without North Carolina, this entire election would very likely come down to Pennsylvania, but thanks to Mark Robinson, Kamala Harris has a few more outs left in the deck than Trump does.

Prediction

I still think this is very close, and I would not be surprised to see the final margin in every single swing state be under one percent, but in a close election where every edge you can get is vital, I just see the Democrats with more of them. I believe the Selzer poll is a strong indicator for a big boost from older women in the Midwest, the “oracle” Jon Ralston believes Kamala Harris will eke out a victory in Nevada, and I will go on record predicting that Mark Robinson will cost the Republican Party the Tar Heel state for just the second time since 1976.