In keeping with the custom established four years ago, it is now time for the Toteboard to look back at the election and assess how all the key players performed. How did Kamala Harris do? How did the democrats do? How did the pollsters do? And of course, how did the Toteboard do? Some of the answers are not what one might expect.
To address these questions, the Toteboard will employ the rating system it established just after the previous election, one which should look familiar to those who regularly read reviews of restaurants, movies, and episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Four stars: Excellent performance, exceeding expectations.
Three stars: Solid performance, meeting most expectations.
Two stars: Adequate performance, though falling short of most expectations.
One star: Disappointing performance, falling well short of expectations.
Bullet: Complete and total failure.
HOW DID HARRIS DO?
One Star.
One could make a compelling argument that Kamala was simply dealt a pretty shitty hand from the very beginning. She had to assemble an entire campaign – staff, infrastructure, policies and programs – pretty much from scratch on the eve of the party convention, all without enjoying any of the benefits that ordinarily come from surviving the challenges of a full primary season. Most importantly, she could never escape her identification with Biden and his administration, which the American public – fairly or unfairly – viewed as unresponsive, tone-deaf, and out-of-touch. Of course, while Harris was stuck with a bad hand, it should also be pointed out that under normal circumstances, she may not have found a seat at the table in the first place, i.e., there’s no a priori reason to think that the democrats would have anointed her after a typical process of fair-and-square primaries. In short, Harris was as much an accidental nominee as Gerald Ford was an accidental president.
That said, how did Harris do? Well, she lost, obviously, but what context do we have for evaluating that loss?
As early as July, it was clear that Harris had a working electoral base of blue and blue-leaning indigo states – “Harris is leading, more or less comfortably, in nineteen states plus DC and that funky single Nebraska district, for a total of 226 electoral votes” – with another seven states and 93 electoral votes up in the air. In short, she pretty much entered the race with a floor of 226 votes (which virtually any generic democratic candidate would have owned) and a realistic ceiling of 319 votes. As we all now know, Harris was not able to improve upon her floor even slightly, having ended with the same 226 electoral votes with which she began. In fact, one could make a case that her support steadily eroded after her initial nitrous oxide rush, a trend captured by many of those long-haul daily tracking polls. In short, while Harris had some genuinely peak moments – her convention speech and single debate performance come most to mind – she pretty much ended up with the worst possible result we could have anticipated.
To provide a little more unhappy context, Harris not only couldn’t match Biden’s victory in 2020, but also couldn’t even match Hillary’s loss in 2016. In fact, her 1.58% loss to Trump in the national popular vote is the lowest a democrat has sunk since 2004 (!) – actually, it’s only the second time in the last nine (!!!) elections that the democratic candidate has lost the popular vote. OK now, scratch your heads on this one: The last time a democratic presidential candidate scored worse than Harris on both the popular and electoral vote margins was in 1988, when the now-forgotten Mike Dukakis had his clock cleaned by Geoge H. W. Bush (and when several Toteboard readers had not yet been born, or at least were well shy of voting age).
Still, it should be noted here that a deficit of a percentage-point-and-half hardly amounts to a humiliating landslide, despite the media narrative that has been taking shape over the last few weeks (which is, not so coincidentally, the subject of the very next Toteboard). If we look only at the absolute value of the final popular vote margin (as opposed to how much the democrat won or lost by), this was actually the closest election since Bush and Gore in 2000, and the second closest since Nixon and Humphrey back in 1968! And don’t forget, Trump won only two “cushion” states after the Pennsylvania “tipping point,” which is comparable to what has occurred every election since 2000. In short, the American voters remain stubbornly, frighteningly, but not surprisingly, divided into near equal halves, and it may not take much to tilt the scales in either direction during any future cycle.
HOW DID THE DEMOCRATS DO?
Bullet.
On the surface, it might look like the democrats didn’t fare too badly. They basically fought to a draw in the House, leaving the republicans with a ridiculously narrow majority (though attempting to govern as though they have a massive mandate). They also won just over half of the contested Senate races in purple-ish states, all of which voted for Trump, which indicates that the party has at least a little oxygen left on some of the state levels. But make no mistake about it: the House had been eminently winnable this year, and the Senate losses were huge. Jon Tester’s defeat in Montana and especially Sherrod Brown’s in Ohio marked the final extinction of pragmatic democratic moderates in red states, and three-term incumbent Bob Casey’s loss in Pennsylvania (to a soporific Bush-era holdover who couldn’t even beat Dr. Oz in a primary two years ago) is a fitting symbol for just how badly damaged the party brand is. And no matter how you slice it, the worst implication of all this is that the failure to re-take the House and the net loss of four Senate seats gives the republicans what might be called a “sanity-proof” majority. They can now pretty much do whatever the fuck they want, regardless of how much Susan Collins wags her finger and clicks her tongue, and Heaven only knows just how far they’re going to go.
While these types of swings are not atypical in any given election year, what drops the democrats down from one or even two stars to a complete bomb is their collective failure to confront Biden over his rapidly diminishing capacity and their equally collective willingness to lie about it to the American people. Yes, they had reason to be more than satisfied with much that Biden’s administration was able to accomplish. And yes, as Patti Davis pointed out in a recent Times op-ed, it’s difficult for those in the immediate orbit of an aging person to tell (or acknowledge) when the teeter-tottering between “good moments” and “bad moments” has crossed the line to something more ominous. But we’re not talking here about whether to take away Grandma’s car keys; we’re talking here about the fucking president of the United States, i.e., the most politically powerful individual in the free world. The democrats (like everyone else in the country) could see Biden’s decline before their own eyes, and they had their chance to address it. The Toteboard may not be buying the right-wing fantasy that the democrats engaged in a conspiratorial cover-up from the very beginning, but it is calling them out for their passive enabling Biden’s recalcitrance and their deliberate propagation of the public fiction that he was perfectly competent. The republicans had already established themselves as spineless sycophants willing to cast their lots with a man who habitually lied and abused people; now the democrats established themselves as spineless sycophants willing to cast their lots with a man who was fading in and out of lucidity. And that doesn’t leave much of a choice. No wonder turnout was down across the board.
HOW DID BIDEN DO?
Bullet.
Wait, why is this question even here? Biden didn’t end up running for anything. Well if it’s not obvious by now, the Toteboard is seriously pissed at Biden for the shadow that he cast over this election. By failing to fulfill his implicit promise to act as a “transitional” one-term president, by failing to clear the time and space for his party to engage in a lively public debate about its definition and future direction, Biden thoroughly tarnished his own legacy, perhaps irreparably. No longer is he the man who successfully vanquished Trump from the public sphere – he is now the man who enabled Trump to return to power, with a more sinister agenda than last time, and more support from a disillusioned populace. The Toteboard suspects that in ten-or-twenty years’ time, no one will be talking about Biden’s legislative successes, his uncompromising stance against Russian expansion, or his appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. They’ll be talking about how he doomed his presidency by looking like an idiot in a debate against Donald fucking Trump.
HOW DID THE POLLSTERS DO?
Three Stars.
This is kind of a loaded question, as polling has really changed in recent years. A phenomenon that began as something of a small cottage industry has exploded into a massive and diverse fusion of business and science. There are now pollsters everywhere, and all kinds of them. We have independent pollsters and partisan pollsters, media pollsters and university pollsters, national pollsters and local pollsters, online pollsters and telephone pollsters, one-shot pollsters and everyday tracking pollsters. We have polls that are commissioned to raise money, polls that are commissioned to influence public opinion, polls that are commissioned to determine marketing strategies, and polls that are commissioned to figure out how much people are willing to pay for a little extra legroom on a Delta flight. The Silver Bulletin has analyzed and rated more than five hundred different political pollsters, and they are anything but a monolithic field in terms of methods, intentions, quality, transparency, and so forth. And so, even speaking of “the pollsters” is a problematic point of departure.
With such a large and diverse collection, it’s inevitable that some pollsters really stuck the landing (e.g., AtlasIntel called just about every swing state right on the money), and others tumbled off wildly (Ann Selzer’s usually reliable Des Moines Register poll missed Iowa by more than 15 percentage points). But when competent number crunchers like Silver, Nate Cohn, and Logan Philips assimilated all the various reports, they found that the pollsters collectively told a coherent story, and that story ended up getting things mostly right. First, it was the pollsters who early on identified which seven states were most in play, including not only the recent swing states, but also Nevada, which had been reliably (albeit narrowly) blue over the last several cycles. Second, the analysts correctly noted that the most likely outcomes had one candidate or the other carrying all of those states, as opposed to the mix-and-match scenario one might have intuitively expected in a seemingly close election. Finally, their “poll of polls” numbers didn’t end up all that bad. According to Silver’s numbers, the national polls missed by about 2.58%, while the seven swing states misses were all in roughly the same ballpark: Arizona (2.6%), Georgia (1.0%), Michigan (2.8%), Nevada (3.4%), North Carolina (1.9%), Pennsylvania (1.6%). These numbers may not be tight enough for universal bragging rights, but they are very much in line with the typical polling error. Yes, they dropped the balls on a handful of House and Senate races, but that’s inevitable when you’re dealing with so many races and smaller polling samples. All in all, the pollsters did not lose face.
HOW DID THE TOTEBOARD DO?
As noted back in 2020, because the Toteboard does not really predict election outcomes as much as provide frameworks for understanding elections – it only provides horse-race odds for primary outcomes – the Toteboard will forgo rating its own performance. But it will dig up some juicy quotes from the archives, implicitly noting the ways it was (or wasn’t) a useful companion on this bumpy and often uncomfortable ride.
8/10/24 (21 days after Biden dropped out, 9 days before the Democratic Convention): “In the best of all worlds, Biden would have honored his promise to be a “transitional” president, announced shortly after the midterms his decision to step down after one term, and (as suggested by Atlanta Journal-Constitution political reporter Patricia Murphy) allowed/encouraged his party to engage in a lively, thoughtful, public debate about its vision of that transition.”
8/10/24: “Barring unexpected (and inexplicable) changes in established voting patterns, the race is going to be fought, and won, in . . . Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In other words, we’re kind of exactly where we were in the 2016 election, and the 2020 election, and the 2022 midterms.”
9/26/24 (16 days after the Harris/Trump debate): “Now that we have moved into the post-conventions, post-debates, post-candidate-switches, post-assassination-attempts phase of the presidential election – that opening phrase is certainly a Toteboard first – the race has apparently settled into what is more or less a statistical dead-heat. Yes, that means we are in for six crazy-making weeks of non-stop campaigning and poll-watching.”
9/26/24: “As was the case during the last senate cycle, don’t be surprised if there are very few flips this time around. The most likely scenario for now is somewhere from one to three seats turning red. But an unexpected wave in either direction could take a lot of incumbents with it, with republicans having more to gain and less to lose. A very best case scenario for the democrats would be a net gain of one seat (and the Toteboard suggests you don’t start holding your breath on that), while the republican best case could be a gain of as many as nine seats, which is a truly terrifying thought.“
10/8 (28 days before the election): “That is to say, for all of the bizarre circumstances framing this contest and occurring in its wake, the 2024 election is actually replicating the patterns, both narrative and numerical, that were already established in the 2016 and 2020 elections. All indicators are that we are locked in an astonishingly close race, echoing the dynamics of the previous two races, with few signs of day-to-day movement. That is, as of today, it really could go either way, and it probably won’t go either way by very much.”
10/22 (14 days before the election): “In other words, just because the polls and analyses of the polls show the race to be astonishingly close, it doesn’t mean that the results will actually be that close. It just means that the results will be unpredictable. All it takes is a slight (or larger) systematic polling error, or a late national movement toward the democrats, and Harris wins all seven states (currently a decent 16% possibility), but a slight error or movement in the other direction means Trump wins all seven states (a horrifying 25% possibility). In any event, the swing states really are seven completely separate contests, at least in terms of the electoral math, but they may be seven separate contests that ultimately track closely with one another.”
10/29 (seven days before the election): “Actually, the truly perplexing question is why tens of millions of Americans are okay with all of this, why tens of millions of Americans think it is, in fact, a good thing that a lying sociopath who has brought so much destruction may once again become president.”
And as Mr. Vonnegut said those many years ago, “So it goes.” Or perhaps more appropriately, so it went.