this is some very premature football-spiking
Let’s start with the caveat that all of these numbers have likely moved meaningfully in Harris’s direction due to the convention, but convention bounces usually fade.
Above is the latest polling breakdown from the New York Times. As you might notice, it does not currently project a Kamala Harris victory! She’s leading at the national level, but as everyone suddenly forgot in 2016, the United States does not have a national popular vote system. She’s leading in two of the three “blue wall” states, but the outcomes are within the margin of error, and most paths to victory require her to carry all three. She’s tied in Pennsylvania and Arizona. The only state here where a lead exceeds the margin of victory is Georgia, which favors Donald Trump. If Harris’s recent gains regress back to this state of affairs in the coming months, it’s a coinflip election where Trump could easily squeak out victory in Pennsylvania and Arizona and regain the White House. That’s not some wild hypothetical! It’s an entirely plausible state of affairs! Much more plausible than Trump winning in 2016, where it took Hillary’s wild unpopularity, Robby Mook’s incompetence, and decades-long indifference among Democrats towards the collapse of the Rust Belt. This election is very, very close.
And yet this current state of affairs has produced some of the most wildly unrestrained football-spiking and expressions of certainty that I’ve seen in 24 years of following presidential elections. Matt Yglesias’s piece today – which continues his genuinely sad collapse into just pure anti-left bitterness – is more or less a declaration of victory. The entire crew at New York magazine is rabidly invested in the notion that Harris’s victory is assured, to the point where I doubt anyone affiliated with the magazine would be able to get real sustained skepticism into its pages. (And if you did the company Slack would call you a fascist.) The stentorian New York Times has been having a month-long collective orgasm about what’s happening, seeming to drop even the tattered fig leaf of impartiality, which until recently they’ve still pretended to embrace. Social media is stuffed with gloating, gleeful overconfidence about Harris’s coming victory.
