Analysis: The Final State of the Presidential Race (Adam Turner, Red State)

For whom the bell tolls.  It tolls for thee…Kamala Harris.

That’s right – I am predicting that former President Donald Trump will defeat Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

We now have less than a week to go before Election Day. The Democrats have chosen their final argument against Donald Trump.  t is – Donald Trump is a crude, barbarian crook who abuses women and minorities and wants to overthrow America’s democratic society in favor of dictatorship. Did you hear, they say, that Donald Trump held a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden (strangely attended by many Jewish Americans)?  Did you hear, they say, that Trump is a crude, insulting and racist New Yorker (e.g., he let Puerto Rican’s be insulted)? Did you hear, they say, that Trump sexually assaulted another woman, this time, with Epstein?

And Kamala Harris just gave her final campaign speech, castigating Donald Trump for being a dictator wannabe, at the site of the events of January 6, 2021.

There is nothing new with any of these assaults, and they will not help the Harris campaign to actually win the race.(especially if Joe Biden is stepping on their message). Presumably, Harris and her campaign are doing this because they are trapped in their own doom loop, which I mentioned in my prior column. Even worse, they may also be resorting to it in desperation to get their own base voters frightened enough to vote in the coming election.  Because the turnout so far has not been good for the Democrats, and nothing else seems to be going their way, either.

But, let me start my predictions with RealClearPolitics. Trump is up in the RCP average by .4%. As I have said before, Harris needed to be up by at least 3% points here to be confident of winning the electoral college. She is down, instead.

President Biden’s approval rating is still at 41%, and his administration is not popular either, according to all the traditional signs. This is not a positive for him, or his vice president.

Vice President Harris is intrinsically tied to the Biden-Harris administration. Her feeble attempts to pretend to be independent from it were laughable and unconvincing to even the most uninformed swing voters. Most embarrassingly, multiple times, she explicitly stated that she would not have done anything different from the Biden-Harris policies. Way to differentiate yourself, Kamala.

The issues of 2024 were heavily stacked against Harris. The economy was, and still is, bad. Inflation, especially, is a killer for her campaign. And after first pretending that the economy was good, Harris pivoted to complaining about big businesses’ supposedly gouging the consumers. Which was never going to work for a key member of the incumbent administration who could have addressed this supposed problem ... anytime during the past four years. 

The border was, and is, porous. Every few months, another American is killed, wounded or terrorized by an illegal alien let in by the Biden-Harris administration. The latest – an orthodox American Jew was killed by a jihadist Muslim illegal who had entered this country through the southern border. Why the Biden-Harris administration did not limit the flooding of the border so that it was “slow and steady,” and then slow it down even further near the election, I will never know.  

The world was, and still is, on fire because of the Biden-Harris administration’s appeasement. Which has led to rioting in the U.S., with terror sympathizers attacking other Americans, especially Jews, on college campuses, and elsewhere.  And Harris continues to cover for these antisemites, who are overwhelmingly Democrats.  

Finally, Harris proved to be the bad candidate that most assumed she was prior to the Obama/Pelosi coup, ousting Joe Biden as the Democrat candidate. She was known to be far to the left, and to be inauthentic. She was also known to be lazy (as even the MSM had admitted). And this all showed in her campaigning, her embarrassing interviews, her word salads, her strange cackling, and her many, many mistakes.  

What Harris, and before her Biden, needed to do most was undermine the belief that Donald Trump had an excellent record, both on the economy, and in foreign policy, from his 2017 to 2021 presidential term in office. But these Democrats never did so. Except for their lame attempts to pretend the COVID year of 2020 was representative of Donald Trump’s entire term, despite the fact that no swing voters believed that it was true, or that the Democrats would have done any differently.  

So, now, for my final presidential predictions:

• Donald Trump will win the popular vote for the presidency. The RCP has Trump up 48.5% to 48.1%. This is not likely to be the actual vote for the race, however. As I discussed before, even the RCP, which was the best of the polling aggregators, still underestimated Trump’s final vote. My normally pessimistic buddy Cameron has claimed that this might not happen again, since he believes that the polling industry is making real efforts to identify these voters.  

• Based on current polling numbers, I agree, but only partly. They have done better, BUT the average still includes at least one of the ridiculous Tier 1 polls, Morning Consult, which has Harris up 3%. And the other polls are still going to include those that are off, but more slightly. In this situation, I believe that the true number will be closer to those produced by the Tier 3 polls, which now include Atlas Intel, the Wall Street Journal, and Gallup, and are seemingly merging with some of the Tier 2 polls, including CNBC, Forbes/Harris, Fox News, and the bouncing daily tracker, Rasmussen. Further, all the early vote indicators have the GOP doing extremely well (see above), and the Democrats panicking. Also, history dictates that any remaining swing voters should be going to the out-party at this point (or just not voting). The 1980 results demonstrate that sometimes the out-party can see its vote swell against the in-party as swing voters throw up their hands and gamble (and here they aren’t gambling – Trump was already president before, and his record was good). The Harris campaign is clearly panicking in general, as they have sent Harris to Fox News, with Bret Baer, for a horribly embarrassing interview, and to other more pro-Democrat media groups, where Harris has also managed to humiliate herself. She would not be doing so if she were ahead.

•   Further, at a recent GOP event that I attended, a Republican data bigwig proved to be very cagy about what he expected the final results were going to be. Importantly, he expressed an uncertainty about who was going to turn out, and acknowledged that the affiliated GOP campaign (e.g., Turning Point, Elon Musk’s group, etc.) were trying to duplicate what the Obama campaign achieved in 2012 to get out less likely voters. So, putting all these variables into my, big as a factory, unbelievably complicated, math-heavy, scientific model, which puts all other models to shame – I have scientifically come to the conclusion that the math clearly dictates that Donald Trump will win 51% of the vote, Kamala Harris, will gain 47%, and the remaining 2% will go to the sad, third-party candidates. My model predicts that there is a 60% chance of this happening! There is also a 25% chance that Trump will get more than 51%; and only a 15% chance that Harris will do better. Believe it, my vast, enlightened, well-read, and non-garbage audience.  Don’t be a science denier!   
•  Donald Trump will win the electoral college, rather easily, with 312 (plus) votes. Just looking at the RCP averages, again, Trump is marked as favored to win all of his 2020 states. In AZ and GA, which he narrowly lost in 2020, he is up 2.2% in AZ and 2.4% in GA. Of the big industrial states – MI, PA, and WI – Trump is very narrowly leading in all but MI. However, the underestimation of Trump’s vote in 2016 and 2020 has been heavy in these states, which have a larger amount of blue-collar voters. If there is any underestimation at all, he will sweep these three battlegrounds.  
• Lastly, there is NV, where Trump is up .5%. Here, the polling tends to underestimate the Democrats. However, I am a very optimistic fellow, and Jon Ralston, a long-time Democrat but reputable political observer of the state, is noting how bad the early numbers are for the Democrats, so I am predicting this state goes to Trump. Finally, there are other states on the cusp of competitiveness – ME, MN, NH, NM, and VA.  Mark Halperin, who has access to campaign staffers and their polling numbers, has hinted that in all these states, Trump may be more viable than expected. My model, however, unfortunately predicts that just oneof these states will go for Donald Trump. Sad! But once again, don’t you dare question the science!  

Perhaps the most chilling fact of all for the Harris team is that my buddy Cameron, that champion of bottomless pessimism, has come to make his final call. He says, emphatically, that Donald Trump will become the 47th president. And that, my friends, means its time for the horizontally challenged lady to prep to sing for Kamala Harris.  

Does anyone know where Stacy Abrams is, by the way?