Monday, August 13. In my last column, I was marveling at the outpouring of support for Vice-President Kamala Harris. In the two weeks since, it has grown exponentially – in money being donated, in volunteers enlisting, in voters registering to vote, in news coverage, in polling results. The race has been turned entirely upside down.
I always thought we would win, even with President Biden, because I thought voters would, at the end, albeit grudgingly, vote for Biden to reject the former President’s dystopian vision and hateful rhetoric. But now there is this unprecedented joyfulness suffusing the Democratic campaign and spreading out into the populace generally. In the fifty years I’ve been doing politics, I’ve never seen something like this. Even President Obama, with all the pride and hope he brought, didn’t quite have the impact that Vice-President Harris has had on the electorate.
You can see it in the stunning amount of contributions that have come in – well over $300 million, with probably another $50 million coming in this month. That gives the campaign the ammunition not only fully to fund the ground effort, but to expand advertising into states like Georgia, North Carolina, and even Florida and Ohio, states that typically would be ceded to the GOP. The news media have reported that 2/3 of these contributions have come from first-time donors; but what they haven’t noted is that most of those first-time donors are not going to be one-time donors. The Harris campaign will be soliciting them again and again, and my guess is that most will contribute again, and perhaps again, and perhaps yet again. So that $300 million that the Vice-President has raised will turn into $500 million or perhaps $600 million – now we’re talking some real money.
The Trump campaign, only a month ago, had been talking about expanding their battlefield into states like New Hampshire or Minnesota. Not any more. In their first major media buy, the Trump campaign reserved $37 million in TV ad space, but over $24 million was just in Georgia. If they think Georgia is slipping away, then we know we’re on the right track.
The other fascinating change has been how totally the Harris-Walz ticket has dominated the news cycles. They’ve had plenty to crow about, with national and state polling on a constant upswing and Trump wallowing in self-pity and despair. It’s become a virtuous cycle – better polling feeds the news, which leads to still better polling (and more contributions and volunteers), which feeds the next news cycle. The Trump campaign has tried several times to break in to that cycle, most recently with the Elon Musk interview, but nothing seems to be working for them.
With the Democratic Convention coming next week, the Harris-Walz campaign will continue to dominate the news, and only three weeks thereafter, early voting will start in Pennsylvania and a few other states, with the rest of the country to follow shortly thereafter. That’s why former President Trump is so eager to have a debate, in which he thinks he can dominate the Vice-President. But I think he will be unhappily surprised. The Vice-President has that rare talent of combining substance with style, enhancing a mastery of facts with the occasional deft put-down.
So now it’s time for the rubber to hit the road, as they say. What will the final score be?
My prediction is that the Harris-Walz ticket will win with 377 Electoral Votes. Extreme? Perhaps, but I’ll lay out my state-by-state predictions and why I think so. I invite all our ACT members and other readers to send in their own predictions; we’ll keep a spreadsheet and recognize in November who came closest.
I’ll start with the Democratic “base” – all the traditional states we typically win, including one electoral vote from Nebraska’s central district covering Omaha and its suburbs (Nebraska and Maine are the only states that allocate their electoral votes by Congressional District, rather than by the state as a whole). That’s a total of 226 votes.
Then we have the “Blue Wall” – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. I’m giving all 44 votes to Harris-Walz, which puts them at 270 (exactly enough to win the election). Each now has a Democratic Governor. In Michigan, in 2022, we swept all the state-wide offices and flipped both houses of the Legislature. In Pennsylvania, we captured the lower house (and may flip the upper house this year). In Wisconsin, the GOP still controls the Legislature, but only because of gross gerrymandering (and, interestingly, those districts have been redrawn by court order so we have a shot at flipping the lower house this year). I say all this because my sense is that all three states are trending Democratic. Further, in Wisconsin, the Democratic Party State Chair, Ben Wickler, has created one of the best grass-roots organizations in the country. So I think these states are less in doubt than many assume, but you can be sure that the Harris-Walz campaign will be pouring tons of money and effort and personal appearances into these states.
Next are the “Biden wins” – Nevada (6 votes), Arizona (11 votes) and Georgia (16 votes). Again, I’m giving all 33 to Harris-Walz, taking their total up to 303. Both Nevada and Arizona have hotly contested U.S. Senate races as well, and just this week the Dems held major rallies in both states. But even more importantly, we have a secret ingredient! In both Nevada and Arizona, there will be reproductive rights measures on the state ballot. These State Constitutional amendments are hugely popular and mesh directly with one of our core themes. In Arizona particularly, the grass-roots effort that collected signatures and qualified the amendment was brilliantly organized, and the campaign will be focusing, first, on the 700,000 voters who signed the petition. Their campaign is well-funded, entirely separately from the Harris-Walz-Gallegos campaigns, but entirely complementary. Anyone voting for the ballot measure is going to vote for our side, from the Presidential race, to the Senate race, to Congressional races (where we have 2 seats we have a great shot at flipping), down to state legislative races (the GOP controls each house by one vote, so we have an excellent chance of flipping both houses of the state legislature).
In Georgia, for reasons incomprehensible to me, former President Trump has decided to pick a fight with GOP Gov. Brian Kemp. Kemp is not only popular; he controls much of the ground operations of the GOP in Georgia. The former GOP Lt. Gov., Geoff Duncan, has already publicly announced he is supporting Harris-Walz. I think Georgia was already slipping away, but these self-inflicted wounds make it all the more likely that Dems will carry Georgia by margins similar to those with which we won the two Senate races.
Next we have North Carolina, with 16 votes. Obama carried the state once, and Democrats have come heartbreakingly close several time thereafter. This time, though, we have another secret ingredient – the Republican candidate for Governor and their candidate for Education Commissioner. Mark Robinson, the current GOP Lt. Governor and candidate for Governor (Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is termed out), is an incredibly inflammatory, radical, extreme nutcase, and I use that term in its technical sense. Robinson has said he would sign a bill to ban abortion “for any reason”; he referred to LGBT topics as “filth”; he said Christians should “be led by men.”
It may be hard to believe, but the GOP candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction, Michelle Morrow, is even wackier. In 2020, she actually expressed support for the televised execution of former President Obama and then President-Elect Biden. When challenged by CNN, she defended her previous tweets and argued that President Obama committee treason.
North Carolina may traditionally have had close elections, but the latest polls show Democrat Attorney-General Josh Stein 10 points ahead of Robinson in the gubernatorial election. I think that lead is likely to grow, and this may be a case of upward-bound coattails, as the down-ticket races help propel the Harris-Walz ticket to victory. And this doesn’t even factor in the impact of Harris on the African-American women in North Carolina. With North Carolina, that takes our total up to 319 EV’s.
Lastly, we come to the “stretch” states: Florida (30 votes), Missouri (10 votes), Ohio (17 votes), and one vote in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Florida and Missouri are traditionally solid GOP territory, but once again, we have a secret weapon. They both will have reproductive rights amendments on their state ballots, to overturn strict abortion bans enacted by their state legislatures. In Florida, the amendment needs a 60% majority to pass, but the most recent polling shows 69% of the voters supporting the measure. Certainly, not all of those voters will vote for Harris-Walz, or for Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell who’s running for the Senate against incumbent Rick Scott. But we don’t need all 69% -- 60%, or 55%, or 52% will do just fine. And I think, in the end, we’ll get to that number.
Missouri is even more of a stretch, but again voters seem overwhelmingly to support the reproductive rights amendment, and I think that will leak over into the partisan races and let us carry the state. It wasn’t that long ago that Claire McCaskill was representing Missouri in the Senate.
Ohio doesn’t have a reproductive rights amendment on the ballot (although they do have a fairly designed redistricting measure on the ballot, to pull out the good government types). But they did, just last year, go through two successive elections on reproductive rights, with our side winning by about 58% each time. This is a solid pro-choice majority that U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, one of the most endangered Democrats, can pull together to ensure his re-election, emphasizing that the GOP wants to ban abortion nation-wide if they get control of the Federal Government. And, indeed, Brown is leading by 5 – 10 points in various polls. Once again, this may be an example of upwards coattails, with Brown helping Harris-Walz squeeze by in traditionally hostile territory.
I think we get all 58 votes in this last group, taking our total up to 377.
So send in your predictions. We’ll keep a record, and let our readers know who came closest. (And extra credit for sending your predictions in early – waiting until November 4th won’t get you much glory.)
Jon Fuhrman
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