A little more than two weeks before the most important American presidential election since the last one, a nervous calm has settled over Washington. This serenity does not arise from any confidence about who will win; but rather the comfort of knowing that there is almost nothing anyone can do about it. More precisely, two somewhat unexpected developments have emerged during the last months of the campaign aimed at promoting this worrying calm.
The first is the shocking stability of the race. Over the past six months, Washington has witnessed a deluge of events, all of which have the potential to impact the outcome of the election. But despite the war in the Middle East, two assassination attempts on Donald Trump, and a brand new candidate in Kamala Harris, the actual dynamics of the race have changed remarkably little. Line graphs of how polling averages have changed over time look suspiciously flat, as Before And After Outgoing President Joe Biden has announced his intention to withdraw from his Democratic presidential bid. On August 1, shortly after Harris entered the race, she edged out Trump in the national average of the 538.com poll from 1.2 points. As of October 18, this figure stood at just 2.1 points. And the situation is similar in swing states. In this context, no one is too worried about a surprise in October: we have already had several which have apparently had no impact.
In 2024, it’s now a slight exaggeration to say that we know how everyone in America will vote – we just don’t know who will show up. Presidential elections have become more an exercise in participation than persuasion
Historically, this level of stability is unusual. Polls rose by more than 30 points in the 1976 election between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford; In August 1988, Michael Dukakis led the election with a 17-point lead before losing the presidency to George HW Bush. Even the 2000 election, where George W. Bush ultimately won the narrowest victory against Al Gore, was marked by frequent and significant shifts in polls at the state and national levels. But in today’s highly polarized environment, it seems that public opinion is not as malleable. Swing voters are increasingly a myth because, with each election, the polls seem to remain more stable. In 2024, it’s now a slight exaggeration to say that we know how everyone will vote in America – we just don’t know who will show up (and which votes will be counted, but more on that later). Presidential elections have become primarily an exercise in participation rather than persuasion.
The second fact is that the polls reveal a race that is closer than ever. Nearly all national and swing state polls show Trump and Harris in a statistical tie; their leads are well within the margin of error. Headlines commonly proclaim that Harris is “up one point on Trump in Pennsylvania” – but from a statistical point of view, this makes no sense if the poll cited has a margin of error of four points. It is scientifically impossible to measure something as large as the American electorate with this level of precision.
Since the advent of modern polling in the mid-1920sth century, presidential polls have almost always projected a winner at this point in the cycle, with the important exception of the 2000 election. Of course, they haven’t always been right; although they usually are. But more importantly, the sense of an expected winner would now shape the conversation in Washington as the favored party walked around government offices with measuring tapes, determining where to place their furniture. It’s frustrating for commentators and candidates for office today, but there simply is no analytical measure to determine who will win on November 5th.
These two facts combined mean that the outcome of this election is pure chance; and this will almost certainly remain the case throughout Election Day. Until then, there is no hope of knowing who will win and little hope of changing the dynamic. So, if persuasion is outdated and events are irrelevant, what else can influence the election? For the election strategists among us – who, at this point in the election cycle, represent everyone – there are only two paths left.
The first is to determine who votes. US elections have low turnout rates compared to many other countries, indicating that it is still possible to attract the most apathetic voters. Polls are all based on turnout models that predict not only how people will vote, but also who will vote. This latter prediction has recently proven inconsistent: Voter turnout reached record levels in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. But Trump is a bipartisan turnout machine and much of the campaign’s fiery rhetoric, for example example the accusation that Trump is a fascist or that Harris is a Communistseem more intended to scare people into voting than to change their votes. Campaigns are also investing heavily in “clearance operations» who seek to push their voters, often literally, to the polls. The Harris campaign in particular has 2,500 employees spread across 353 offices in the seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) who lead an army of volunteers to knock on doors and help people get to the polls.
The second and more innovative channel of influence involves determining who counts the votes. The only certainty in American electoral politics today is that Trump will contest the election results if he loses. Indeed, he will likely challenge them if he wins. And in anticipation, the Republican Party is preparing a sophisticated legal strategy. The party’s 2020 effort in this regard was ad hoc, largely incompetent, and led by a team of key police lawyers: the courts rejected it wholesale, with Team Trump losing all 60 cases. The Republican-dominated Supreme Court saw so little merit in the Trump team’s efforts that its justices even refused to do so. hear the cases. So this year, Republicans have planned a more sophisticated strategy to challenge the state’s results, already proactively filing more than 130 prosecutions challenge various voting rules and procedures to use as a basis for other post-election lawsuits. Democrats also prepared new defenses; The legal phase of the elections promises to be an entirely different battlefield than 2020.
So lawyers and door-to-door canvassers in swing states have a lot of work to do. But the rest of us in Washington can remain calm. The only problem is that everyone asks us to predict the outcome. So, for the last time, there is no analytical or factual way to make this prediction. But Harris will win.
The European Council on Foreign Relations does not take a collective position. ECFR publications represent solely the opinions of their individual authors.