Four weeks to go

The United States goes to the polls in just four weeks for presidential and congressional elections. If you haven’t been following much, my three-month preview from August would be a good place to start: in fact, one of the most remarkable things about the campaign is how little has changed since then.

At that time, Kamala Harris had just opened a small lead against Donald Trump in the polls. She retains that lead, but it is still small: it peaked at around 3.5% following the Democrat convention in late August, and for the last month it has stayed mostly within a narrow band from 2.5% to 3.0%. (I’m using FiveThirtyEight’s aggregation; different sites will give you slightly different numbers, but the basic picture is the same.)

On a uniform swing, Harris needs a lead of at least four points to win in the electoral college, but that probably understates her chances: as Lenny Bronner argued back in August, the bias in the college was especially strong last time and is unlikely to be as bad again. Nonetheless, it will still favor Trump, and there’s no guarantee that a lead of three points for Harris will be enough.

It also remains true that most attention is directed at six largish states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In 2020 Joe Biden won all of them bar North Carolina, but only Michigan was at all comfortable. Georgia, the narrowest, was won by less than 12,000 votes, which Trump famously told its Secretary of State to try to “find”.

And in keeping with the extraordinary stability of recent elections, the margins in all six again look very small. Currently the polls put Harris ahead in the northern three (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), although Pennsylvania is almost line-ball, and give Trump narrow leads in the other three. If Harris can pull off wins in four of the six, she can’t realistically be beaten. Ditto for Trump, unless the advent of Hurricane Milton somehow puts Florida (his second most marginal state) into play.

At three states all, however, things are more complicated. Harris would be favored in that case, but no certainty. If she wins the three northern marginals and also holds Nevada, a small state with just six electoral votes, she has a majority, but if Trump can pick off Nevada he would be within a single vote of tying the electoral college. If he were to win Pennsylvania instead of Arizona he would have a majority (albeit the smallest possible) even without Nevada.

If the result comes down to a very close result in a single state, the possibilities for fraud and malfeasance – already far too great, as we saw in 2020 – would multiply alarmingly. That’s what happened in 2000, when Florida, the state that decided the election, had a margin of a few hundred votes at most. The chance of things being that close again is small, but even a few thousand votes in a big state is much too close for comfort.

Overshadowing every discussion of the polls and the mathematics is the fate of American democracy itself, and the awesome question, how has it come to this? How can there be any doubt about the outcome of a contest between a normal, at least broadly competent candidate and a man who brazenly attempted to steal the last election and has made no secret of his belief that he is entitled to again?

The Republican Party, disappointing yet again even the lowest expectations of its sternest critics, has fully capitulated to Trump. Its senior officials and supporters have no illusions; they know what Trump intends (many of them have said so explicitly), but they still promise to vote for him. Philosopher Michael Huemer took on one of them, Ben Shapiro, this week, likening him to a passenger who wants to re-employ a bus driver who has deliberately tried to drive over a cliff:

Do I have to spell it out, Ben? Driving off a cliff is not the only bad thing a bus driver can do. There is an indefinite number of disasters a crazy person can cause. Anyone who would try to drive a bus off a cliff can never be trusted with a bus, or indeed anything else, and if you think he’s an acceptable driver, you’re as crazy as he is.

But while of course the Republicans must bear most of the responsibility, the Democrats are not blameless as well. They have failed to convey to the electorate the magnitude of what is at stake and have helped to normalise a deeply abnormal situation. This was an occasion, if ever there was one, to try to get beyond ordinary partisan loyalties and reach out to mainstream Republicans. There have been some modest attempts, but much more needs to be done, and time is running out.

Most Republican voters are not Trumpists; they support Trump not because they like him or agree with his insane plans, but because he is the Republican candidate. The alternative, to vote Democrat, is something they have never considered a live option, and so far they have not been offered a reason to change that.