At least until Trump does
JV Last reminisces about America’s halcyon days when winning the popular vote meant that you’d also win the electoral college, something we all took for granted until 2000 when we learned otherwise. (Ye, it happened once before in the 1870s but nobody gave it much of a thought after that.)
He talks about all the variables, including the impact of late-breaking news about one side or the other,and how these variables have changed over the years and concludes:
Unless Harris expands her lead over Trump to greater than a +5 margin on Election Day, we’re in coin-flip territory for the next 42 days.
Yeah. This is one of the reasons I really wish the news media would be careful about how they frame the polling.
Here’s the bad news we can definitely count on:
Not being able to see over the electoral horizon is a problem because we know what Trump is going to do on Election Day: He’s going to claim victory.
His voters will believe him, and this in turn will cause Republican elites to support his claims, irrespective of evidence.
We saw how quickly and easily Republican voters believed Trump in 2020, when Biden’s margin of victory was overwhelming and had been anticipated by polls for months.
Within days a supermajority of Republican voters believed that Trump was the winner, even though there was no evidence to support this view and a great deal of evidence against it.
Ask yourself: What are these people going to say—and do—if Kamala Harris is not a heavy favorite going into Election Day? And if no one really knows what’s happening until the returns come in?
As Last says, even if she wins and none of Trump’s attempts to overturn it succeed, he will still say that he won and will convince many Republicans that it’s true. The results of that will be a Republican Party that continues to be required to adhere to the Big Lie even if Trump is out of the picture which means:
[W]e’re going to have another four years in which the price of admission to Republican politics is claiming that the sitting president is illegitimate.
I’m afraid so.