Coin Flip
On the anguish of electoral uncertainty
Twelve days from now, America will elect itself a new president. Nobody in the media, however, can offer much guidance as to who that will be, and the uncertainty seems to be growing by the hour. As a political scientist told Newsweek just yesterday, “The race has gone from almost a toss-up to definitely a toss-up.” Chris Riddell’s recent cartoon for the Guardian perhaps best captures the mood of the electorate: lady liberty has dropped her torch and grasped the sides of her face à la Edvard Munch, while an orange fist grips the hem of her cloak. “Too close to call,” she screams, “Noooooo!”
The probabilistic models that typically offer some clarity amid the rising panic of an approaching election are no help, either. They’ve converged to an evenly divided race, with Nate Silver, ABC’s 538, and The Economist all giving Donald Trump the slightest of edges over Kamala Harris, with somewhere between a 52 and 53 — sorry, make that 53.7 — percent chance of victory. That represents a marginal change from last week, when the race was exactly 50/50 in all three models, and neither candidate's chances in any of them has ever been higher than 64 percent. Bizarrely, the 64 percent mark was the high-point for both Harris in the 538 model and Trump in Silver’s model, but with each candidate hitting opposite highs within a week of each other in mid September. Such fluctuations — and the attendant squabbling between devotees of Silver and G. Elliott Morris, who took over 538 after Silver left ABC earlier this year — seem to have been based more on the assumptions baked into each program about the impact of the conventions and broader economic headwinds, assumptions that reduce in relevance as Election Day approaches. With so little time to go, the models are shrugging their digital shoulders in unison with all the talking heads on cable news.
As CNN’s Harry Enten recently observed, this is the first election since 1964 in which no candidate has managed to garner a lead in the polls of even five percent. That threshold isn’t arbitrary: most national polls have a margin of error of between 3 and 4 points, so it's only beyond that mark that statisticians can express any confidence about the tilt of the electorate. The same goes for the seven swing states, where neither Harris or Trump has more than a 2 point lead. As a handy chart from the New York Times illustrates, the polls being off by the same magnitude they were in 2020 would push Kamala Harris over the top in every swing state save North Carolina. If they were instead off by the same margin as in 2016, Donald Trump would beat her everywhere except Nevada.
“We have seemingly reached an end point in polarization,” Jay Caspian Kang wrote in a column for the New Yorker earlier this month, “where any new developments short of swapping out a candidate wholesale will be met with indifference in the polls.” In the Boston Globe this week, James Pindell described the discomfiting truth that “one of the most unusual presidential contests in modern history, full of twists and turns” is somehow “also one of the most stable races in terms of polling.” The contest has become so stagnant that the news cycle now veers from meta commentary about Harris’ appearance on Fox News to Trump’s bid to generate some earned media attention by bobbing to music for half an hour.
Can it really be that the nation is divided so evenly, like a black-and-white cookie or a perfectly bisected orange? I spent most of the month in Maine’s second congressional district, where every roadside had been refashioned into a checkerboard of Harris and Trump signs, often with accompanying ads for congressional candidates Jared Golden and Austin Theriault. This was as true for residential lanes as in the more remote reaches of Hancock and Waldo counties, with all the red, white, and blue at ground level making for an odd juxtaposition with the thrilling yellows and oranges of the October foliage above.
While a proliferation of yard signs has no predictive power, what little non-partisan polling we have from northern Maine proves out the idea of a tight race in the region (which will award a single electoral college vote because of the state’s slightly screwy tradition of splitting its votes up by congressional district). One survey in August found Harris leading by 5 percentage points, while the more recent one, from September, gave Trump a 7 point lead. Average those widely divergent results out and you’ve got a tilt towards Trump (who, it should be said, won the district in both 2016 and 2020), but hardly a conclusive one.
It’s possible that, twelve days from now, the razor-thin margins in current surveys will be proven out. If so, be prepared for a long slog of waiting for votes to be tallied and a cascade of lawsuits and meritless fraud accusations. More likely, though, is the possibility that the polls are off, since the polls are always off by some amount. Underestimating either candidate by, say, 2 points would make for a clear victory on Election Night, a perfectly plausible scenario should that most perplexing of species, the undecided voter, definitely break in one direction. Unfortunately for us anxiety-ridden political obsessives, we won’t know until we know. Riddell’s lady liberty said it best: “Noooooo!”
My personal unease with the approaching election has much to do with the story that I’ve been working on for Columbia Journalism Review, which was published earlier this week. There’s been a fair amount of vague hand-wringing in the press about what a return of Donald Trump to the White House could mean for the Fourth Estate, so I set out to determine how he might actually seek to prosecute reporters using existing statutes. Turns out that the Espionage Act of 1917 offers the clearest path, as it has not only been used by Republican and Democratic administrations alike to ensnare journalists in leak investigations, but was the basis for charging Julian Assange for doing the exact same thing that traditional reporters do all the time: working with a source to uncover government secrets and then publishing them. As numerous lawyers told me, the table has been set for the first-ever prosecution of an American journalist for espionage under a law that past scholars have compared to a “loaded gun pointed at newspapers and reporters.” If Trump is elected again, I fear he may just pull the trigger.
As far as more mundane election coverage is concerned, I thoroughly enjoyed the L.A. Times columnist Gustavo Arellano’s road trip around the Southwest, a series that includes profiles of Latino and Hispanic voters across California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada. Through talking with everyone from green chile farmers in Hatch to the activists of La Sociedad Protección Mutua de Trabajadores Unidos — the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights group! — Arellano showcases why the Hispanic electorate is far from monolithic, which of course only adds to the uncertainty pervading election season. I also loved Tammy Kim’s New Yorker profile of the Montana race that seems likely to determine control of the Senate in 2025, which doubles as a window into how Democrats became such an endangered species in rural America.
That’s all for now. Thanks, as always, for reading and subscribing. If you haven’t already, please pre-order American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest and check out my tour page for some info about the promotional stops I’ll be making in Boston, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Austin come January. Until then, you can find me at my sweet new website, or soaking up as much autumn sun as I can before the time change forces me to drag my SAD lamp back out of the basement.
Your pal,
Kyle