Forget vibes. Trump is still the underdog

Hillary Clinton has a simple but bitter lesson to teach Donald Trump’s supporters in 2024: the best way to lose an election is to assume you’ve already won it a week before it happens. 

The MAGA movement ­— aiming to Make America Great Again, namely by Making Trump President Again — has never been more confident. Opinion polls have Trump faring much better against Kamala Harris than he ever did against Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, the polling averages actually place Trump ahead, which wasn’t the case at this point in either of his earlier elections. 

And since the polls underestimated his share of vote the last two times, maybe they’re underestimating him again — in which case Trump will not only win re-election, he’ll win handily. 

Harris has three things strongly in her favor

There’s certainly a feeling of elation on the American right at the moment, and a corresponding dread on the left. The fact that the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, three of the country’s biggest and most reliably liberal newspapers, have broken with tradition and declined to endorse any candidate this year is an ominous sign that their owners see Harris as a loser.

Yet all that is rather misleading. Trump is still the underdog, however much the “vibes” have shifted in his favor of late.

For one thing, Trump’s lead in polls of the most critical battleground states is typically within the margin of error. The message these surveys are sending is that the race is a virtual tie, yet eager Trump fans on social media are treating a 0.6 percent lead — his current margin in Pennsylvania, the biggest prize on the electoral map — as if it were 6 percent. Trump won Pennsylvania by 0.72 percent in 2016 and lost it by 1.17 points in 2020. It could easily go either way this year.

Harris has three things strongly in her favor. First, her campaign has much more money than Trump’s does: between January 2023 (when the Harris campaign was the Joe Biden campaign) and mid-October, Harris raised about $1 billion, compared to Trump’s $388 million. Independent political action committees, or PACs, supporting Trump have also been massively outspent by Harris-aligned PACs, with Trump’s side reporting $124.6 million spent between July and October 25, compared to Harris’s $533.7 million. That money buys saturation-level television and radio advertising, as well as funding more campaign offices and staff. This gives her a more muscular, traditional get-out-the-vote effort. 

Second, the electoral map gives Harris a stronger starting point in the crucial swing states. Of the seven most closely contested states, five have Democratic governors, and Democrats performed well in all seven states in the 2022 midterm elections for the U.S. Senate and statewide offices. When Republicans cite Trump’s record of beating the polls in 2016 and 2020, Democrats counter with the highly accurate polling in the midterms, which correctly showed Trump’s party falling short of the sweeping victories that political analysts and pundits (including me) imagined. Democrats also claim that many of the polls that now show Trump leading are low-quality surveys compared to others that show Harris with an edge or tied. 

The polls are debatable, but Republican exuberance ahead of election day in 2022 was indeed much like the feeling on the right today. And however unclear the signals from polling might be, the record of the seven battlegrounds in the most recent contests is unambiguous. Democrats did well in all seven two years ago, and the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket won six of the seven in 2020. (Trump won North Carolina by 1.34 points. He lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.)

Finally, despite the unwillingness of three large newspapers to endorse Harris, she enjoys all the advantages that come with being the preferred candidate of the media and the opinion-forming classes. She can rely on favorable news coverage for her campaign and relentless hostile coverage of Trump. When a comedian at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City makes an insulting joke about Puerto Rico, the media makes his remarks the centerpiece of the news cycle. (There are more than 5 million Puerto Ricans living in the mainland US, including some 472,000 in Pennsylvania.) Indeed, the liberal-leaning media have likened Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally to a Nazi rally held at the same venue in 1939. 

Though the media has woeful poll numbers of its own — only 27 percent of American who describes themselves as political independents say they trust the media, according to the most recent Gallup opinion survey — the non-stop condemnations of Trump as a fascist, racist, Putin-loving, felonious lunatic take a certain toll. The remarkable thing will be what it says about the media’s credibility if Americans elect Trump again anyway. The jitters at the Washington Post and LA Times may be just the beginning of a great reckoning for those institutions and many more like them.

Trump is indeed in a better position to win this time than he was in 2020 or appeared to be in 2016, when his defeat of Hillary Clinton shocked America’s elite the way Brexit jolted Britain’s a few months earlier. Harris was a complete washout when she tried to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination four years ago, and it was Biden, not Harris, that the party’s voters nominated this year.

Democrats are divided by Israel-Hamas war, with the curious consequence that Trump is gaining Arab-American support even as he also has the backing of those Americans who stand most firmly behind Israel. (That category includes many American Jews but also millions of evangelical Christians.) Harris, for her part, is attempting to win over Republicans troubled by Trump’s attitudes toward Ukraine and NATO, as well as those still shocked by the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

To make her case, Harris has been campaigning alongside former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, and boasting of support from Liz’s father, Dick Cheney, too — a man the American left once considered a fascist just as surely as they now hang that label on Trump. If Harris wins, neoconservatives will claim vindication. If she loses, it will be clearer than ever that Trump represents voters’ repudiation not only of the Democratic Party of Harris, Biden and Clinton, but the Republican Party of the Bushes and Cheneys as well.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.