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Hopium While We Wait

Nate Cohn at the NYTimes wrote a piece making the case for blow outs on either side as well as a repeat of 2020 or 2022 (which is really interesting.) I have excerpted just the Harris blow out scenario (but here is a gift link to read the other possible scenarios.) I have no idea if this will happen (I hope so) — I’ll be happy if the Democrats manage to win in a photo finish.

If Kamala Harris wins big, we should have seen it coming all along.

Democrats have won election after election since Mr. Trump’s upset victory in 2016. They beat him in 2020, and it’s arguably gone even better for them since Jan. 6. They’ve excelled in special elections and overperformed in the midterms (given the tendency for a midterm backlash against the party holding the presidency). They even fared well in this year’s Washington State’s top-two primary — a sort of election year groundhog day for political junkies.

Yes, the electorate is wary of the status quo, but the usual rules haven’t applied since Jan. 6 and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. If people go into the voting booth thinking of abortion, Jan. 6 and threats to democracy — as they have over the last few years — Ms. Harris could win decisively. In the final Times/Siena national poll, she had a 13-percentage-point lead on abortion and a seven-point lead on democracy.

Could Mr. Trump be repudiated with a decisive loss? It’s hardly out of the question. For one, there’s a chance that pollsters have overcompensated for failing to reach his supporters in recent elections.

For another, Mr. Trump’s strength rests on shaky ground. He needs to get disaffected, young, Black and Hispanic voters to turn out and vote for a very different candidate than they would have in the past. If these disaffected voters return to Ms. Harris or simply don’t show up, the race could look different very quickly.

And finally, the race turned toward democracy down the stretch. This is partly because the election itself naturally raises questions about whether Mr. Trump and his allies will accept the results. Mr. Trump has drawn attention to the issue with remarks about using the military against an “enemy within.” His former chief of staff John Kelly also recently said Mr. Trump fit the definition of a fascist.

It wouldn’t take much for the election to feel like a blowout for Ms. Harris. If she outperformed her poll numbers by a mere two points, she would win well over 300 votes in the Electoral College. Given where Democrats were a few months ago, even a modest victory would feel like a landslide.

There’s no reason she couldn’t outperform by even more. After all, the polls show her doing quite well among white and older voters — which, for Democrats, would usually count as the big challenge. On Saturday night, the final Selzer/Des Moines Register poll offered perhaps the most striking illustration yet of that potential strength: Ms. Harris led by three points in solidly red state Iowa. It may not pan out, but she can fall well short of “blue Iowa” and it would still count as a decisive rebuke of MAGA.

If you added the usual Democratic margins among young, Black and Hispanic voters to strength among older white voters, suddenly there are the makings of a rout. The final Times/Siena battleground polls showed her making late gains among exactly these groups.

2020 and 2022 repeats would be a squeaker in the first case and a really weird realignment in the second which would be entirely unpredictable. I don’t know what to make of that. The final possibility of a Trump blowoiut isn’t worth thinking about. If that happens we will have gone past the point of no return.

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