Kamala Harris is going to be the next president of the United States.
On January 20, 2025, she will become America’s first woman president, America’s first woman of color to be commander-in-chief and America’s first person of Asian heritage to become the country’s chief executive.
Born in late 1964, she will bring the perspective of a new generation to the presidency. Whereas Joe Biden brought the experiences of growing up middle class in the industrial heartland of America, Harris will bring the views of someone who grew up, lived, and worked in the Bay Area of California as it was transformed by Silicon Valley and the onset of the digital era.
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Her inauguration will signal a historic watershed in American history, and will also mark the end of nearly a decade during which Donald Trump was a central figure in American politics. He will become an ugly footnote in U.S. history, a name that students will find relegated to “worst presidents” lists and books and articles about corruption.
For students of politics, his rise will be linked to a backlash against irreversible trends in American demographics that will ensure that within just a few years, the majority in the country will look more like Harris than Trump.
She is the future. He is the past. And on Election Day, American voters will embrace that change.
This will all be made possible because, when the final votes are counted in next week’s election, Harris will have outperformed the vast majority of polls and won by a more substantial majority than most commentators expected. Trump will howl and contest the vote. But in the end his conspiracy theories and unfounded legal challenges and intrigues will again be unsuccessful as they were in 2020 and 2021.
The reasons that the pollsters and pundits—who have a pretty lousy record in recent years—will be proven to be wrong again are manifold.
First, Harris has run an exceptional campaign, which she and her team have executed flawlessly. She has not set a foot wrong since Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election on July 21, from her first efforts to reach out to party leaders in a wave of calls that Sunday afternoon through to her first statement as candidate appearing at the campaign office in Wilmington the next day.
Her first public speeches were suffused with a new energy and vision that was desperately needed in American politics, and her choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate was inspired. A flawless convention culminated in a superb speech by her, and she sliced, diced, and julienned Trump like a Veg-O-matic at their debate.
Her recent “closing argument” on the Ellipse in Washington, the site from which Trump launched his coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, was a perfectly orchestrated and executed finale of a whirlwind campaign in which she made it crystal clear that she was the president American needed now—that she and this moment were made for each other.
As a consequence of those efforts and of the energy she brought to the race, Harris has also produced concrete results that will soon be recognized to have had a direct and meaningful impact on her victory next week. She raised vastly more money than Trump.
Unlike Trump she did not divert any funds to legal defense funds nor did she distract from fundraising efforts with the sale of Home Fascism Network tchotchkes like golden sneakers, overpriced watches, electronic trading cards or souvenir books. Her money went to supporting a grassroots network many times the size of Trump’s, run by professionals—unlike Trump’s which is being farmed out to the likes of Elon Musk, who knows absolutely squat about politics.
Those funds have helped pay for a campaign that has been distinguished not just by massive rallies and big ad buys but one that has mastered digital media like no other campaign in history, recognizing its new preeminence in delivering news to Americans and in shaping their views. It has also paid for a vast, detailed, well-run campaign that has had the benefitted of unprecedented numbers of volunteers from coast to coast. Trump’s corresponding efforts were a fraction of Harris’ everywhere that matters.
Harris has mobilized a new coalition that will be responsible for her victory, thanks to a massive GOTV (get out the vote) operation, and carefully targeted messages that have tapped into the gestalt of every crucial group of voters with concrete ideas. She has by aided by the support of the historically productive track record of the Biden-Harris administration, and persuasive, timely, often edgy messaging,
As in 2022 and in interim elections before and after, the modeling of pollsters will have been proven wrong because it underestimated the anger of women at the repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Trump’s pick of misogynist troll JD Vance as his running mate, his repeated chest-thumping on Roe and his promise to protect women “whether they like it or not” (a toxic male outlook that has seen him named in accusations of sexual abuse from dozens of women throughout his adult life) have also sent the message that Trump-Vance-MAGA is the most anti-woman ticket in history. Women have noticed and that is why the most striking data from the now over 30 million votes that have already been cast is that the gender gap among voters is approximately 10 percent.
That gender gap is bad news for Trump. Polls have revealed that Harris does much better than Trump with women. But polls may be missing some important women voting groups. These include so-called “ghost voters”—women who are not showing up in models, either because they are from groups that have historically performed differently, like young voters; or they are from traditionally Republican voter groups but will not state publicly who they are voting for due to family pressure but who, in the privacy of the voting booth, will vote for Harris.
Regarding those who have voted Republican in the past but who are crossing over to Harris, the vice president has wisely made reaching out to them a central goal of her campaign. She has won the backing of notable GOPers including both Liz Cheney and her father and hundreds of former Trump campaign officials or GOP officials nationwide.
Harris will win a previously unimaginable number of Republican voters, perhaps 15 to 20 percent of the GOP vote in some states, and that will also come as a shock to political modelers. So too will higher turnout among young voters more broadly and among voters of color.
Since she entered the race, Harris has closed the gap that had Joe Biden lagging Trump by some estimates, and has consistently been tied or ahead of Trump on both national polls and on polls in the seven battleground states.
Polling data that you may hear or see on television or the internet is, however, skewed by as many as 100 polls that have been bought and paid for by Trump supporting entities. According to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who was one of the few to call the 2022 election right and dismiss the hype about a “Red Wave” that never materialized, independent polls have Harris up nationally by an average of 2.4 percent.
Further, in battleground states, among independent polls, there has been considerable movement toward Harris. In a YouGov poll, Harris is up by 7 in New Hampshire, by 4 in Michigan, by 1 in Pennsylvania and she is just 2 behind in North Carolina. A CNN poll shows Harris up by 5 in Michigan, up by 6 in Wisconsin, up by 1 in Arizona and it shows Pennsylvania a tie.
Rosenberg wrote on his Substack, “Where is the election today? I still think we are up by 2-4 points nationally and in a stronger position in the Electoral College—despite what the averages and forecasters say. The VP is far better liked, and likable, something that matters to late breaking voters. We’ve closed the gap on the economy with Trump—a huge campaign achievement—and the economy itself is doing incredibly well right now. We are closing strong. They are closing ugly, really, really ugly.”
The key point from all of this is that polls are showing Harris up, and the polls are likely undercounting the number of votes she is likely to get. Further, early voting and voter registration data supports this thesis. Consequently, take the past performance errors of pollsters, the likely skewing of their current models, the fact that most polling, donating, volunteering, registration and early voting trends are in her favor and there can be no other conclusion but that Harris is going to win on Nov. 5 and do so by healthy margins.
Further proof of this comes from the fact that Trump is already spinning up lies about “rigged elections’ as he has in the past, most recently, for example with a lament about Pennsylvania. In other words, addled as he is, Trump also knows he is going to lose on Tuesday.
There is one last factor that I believe Harris will win: the good sense of the American people.
The electorate has made mistakes. But it has never had a choice quite as clear-cut as this. This year’s election pits good against evil, the prosecutor against the felon, the career public servant vs. the most corrupt, self-serving official in history, a dedicated patriot against a proven traitor, a joyful warrior against a merchant of hate and division, and a leader of the most successful first term administration in modern U.S. history against a man historians have voted the worst president of all time. I don’t believe the American people will get this one wrong.
That said, I have not garnered the view that Harris will win by exploiting a glitch in the time-space continuum and glancing at the headlines from the day after. I could be wrong. But it will be less likely that I am if you and everyone who reads this and all the people you and they know, get out and make sure this prediction comes true.
Vote Harris.
If you have voted, helped ensure others vote. Help those who can’t get to a polling station get to the polling station. Volunteer. Donate. Help ensure the elections are fair. Do whatever you can to make sure that Kamala Harris not only wins but that she does so by a margin so large that it makes it harder for Donald Trump to challenge it. It probably won’t stop him. But it likely will make the period of wrangling and MAGA lies that will follow shorter and ensure that it be resolved in a way in which, in the final analysis, the will of the American people is realized and the historical turning point I described at the outset comes to pass.
