No one knows anything. Biden was an 89 percent favorite to win in 2020 and won by a little more than 40,000 votes across the swing states. Things that seem beyond all likelihood could happen. Forecasts are for fools.
And yet—the Donald Trump era may be about to end.
An aging man may be about to become the fading face of a political movement that has lost four elections in a row: the 2018 mid-terms, 2020 election, 2022 mid-terms and—on Nov. 5—the 2024 election.
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Trump remains a near 60 percent favourite in betting markets, where more than $3 billion has been wagered, much of it by younger men. A wave of their money have swung behind him in the past month, driving up Trump’s odds of victory on Polymarket from 49 to 67 percent through October.
But now a different wave may be about to sweep across the country: a wave of women. Here are five reasons, all readily visible in publicly available data, for thinking Kamala Harris may win, and soon become America’s first female president.
1. Look outside the swing states
On Saturday night a shock poll by Iowa’s most respected pollster suggested Harris will win the state by 3 points—this in a state Trump won by 8 points in 2020.
Ann Selzer, the architect of the Des Moines Register Iowa Poll, has been polling Iowa for 27 years. She has correctly estimated the final margin of victory in Iowa to within 2 points in each of the last three elections.
Her predictions of a comfortable Trump victory in 2016 and 2020 were outliers too: others thought the race was close. Her record stretches back through the Obama years—she called his victory in the Iowa caucuses in 2008, and his re-election victory in the state in 2012.
The poll itself needn’t be correct for Harris to win. It only needs to have captured a shift in Harris’ favor across the Midwest—one that swing state polls in neighboring Wisconsin may be missing.
This shift isn’t just evident in Selzer’s Iowa poll. Look too to Kansas, where another long-running survey recently showed Harris doing far better than Biden did in 2020.
The Kansas Speaks survey, run by the Docking Institute since 2009, gave Trump a lead of just 5 points in the state on Oct. 31. Trump won Kansas by nearly 15 points in 2020: a margin that the Docking Institute poll correctly predicted at the time.
Both polls suggest a swing of around 10 points toward Democrats in solidly red states in America’s heartlands. And both find common cause for that swing: women.
2. It will be women who won it
If Harris wins, women will have driven her victory. She is ahead by 5 points among women in the Kansas Speaks survey (Trump leads by 15 among men).
Selzer has also pointed to a wave of female support for Democrats in Iowa, where new abortion restrictions, enacted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs 2022 decision, may have driven women blue in unprecedented numbers.
Harris leads by 35 points among women over 65 in her poll, and it is younger, female, and college-educated voters who are saying they are more likely to vote.
We are a long way from the world of Joe Rogan’s podcast.
There is also nationwide evidence of a stark and unusual enthusiasm gap among women. In the previous four final election polls by NBC News, dating back to 2008, there has effectively been no difference in the level of interest men and women have shown in the election.
This year there is a six-point gap: women are almost as engaged as they were in 2020, but there has been a notable drop-off in male interest.
3. Trump’s gains are greatest in Democratic states
Trump does appear to have made some gains since 2020, particularly among non-white voters, and younger ones. But those gains may be less dramatic than they appeared earlier in the campaign.
There is evidence from YouGov that Black support for Democrats is holding up relatively well: they favor Democrats by around 70 points, down from 82 points in 2020 but not down by as much as national polls have shown in the past fortnight.
Trump’s gains appear to be concentrated in big Democratic states with more diverse (and younger) populations. Look at where the New York Times currently estimates he will do several points better than in 2020.
It is the big deep blue states of New York and California, as well as Maryland, while similar gains in New Mexico and Virginia won’t be enough to turn those solidly Democratic states red.
The only notable states where Trump looks to be doing materially than in 2020 are in Arizona—where he is running around 3 points better than in 2020 and the issue of illegal immigration has weighed heaviest on Democrats—and in Florida, which has been tracking ever more Republican throughout the Trump era.
4. Polls are overcorrecting for Trump, as they did in 2022
There are way too many close polls this year, as Nate Silver has argued. Pollsters appear to be “herding” in the swing states—i.e. artificially ensuring their results show a close election. They may also be hemmed in by a new back-dated approach to weighting results (one that Selzer doesn’t deploy in Iowa).
That herding is most extreme in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, along with North Carolina and Nevada. It is less intense in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan.
In whose direction are pollsters adjusting the results? If they over-weight in Harris’s favour, they risk under-estimating Trump for a third time in a row. That could be fatal for some firms. Under-estimating Harris carries no such risk.
The incentives are all pointed in one direction: over-correcting for Trump, as happened in 2022. The “red wave” prophesied for that year’s mid-terms never happened. Democrats out-performed. They may do so again.
5. Congressional races are flashing blue not red
When Trump beat Clinton in 2016, the most concerning data for Democrats was lying there under the hood: swing congressional races down ballot all began flashing red in the days before the election.
That hasn’t happened this year. Democrats are narrowly favored to take the House, and analysts are moving races toward them in equivalent swing districts this time round.
Throughout the campaign media attention has focused on Democratic weaknesses compared to 2020. David Plouffe, the Obama 2008 campaign manager drafted in to help run the Harris campaign this summer, called out that focus weeks ago.
“The bigger issue here,” he told New York Magazine in mid-October, “is Donald Trump’s huge struggle with women voters, college-educated voters, [and] suburban voters.”
Analysts have obsessed over Harris’s weakness with younger voters, Black and Hispanic voters, and with young men. But the bigger story may prove to be how she has cut into Trump’s margin with white voters, winning the presidency by piling up historic margins among women in a post-Dobbs America.
