My 2024 Election Prediction

I am not a pollster, nor do I play one on cable television, but having taken you this far in the 2024 election, it’s only fair to expose my ignorance of the American electorate and post a projected Electoral College map of the November 5 results.

This map shows Kamala Harris defeating Donald Trump 298 – 240. In my forecast what puts Harris over the top are her victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Nevada. I don’t think she will win in North Carolina or Arizona. I know Georgia’s a stretch but there I am betting on a large Democratic turnout. I have added Iowa to Harris’s win column after listening to an interview with pollster Ann Selzer, who is persuasive. (I also listen a lot to Nate Silver, but have the impression his mind is only counting cards at Vegas poker tables.)

Nor did I brood a lot about putting Pennsylvania in the Harris column, as the large Puerto Rican communities (in cities like Allentown) will have thrown Trump out with the floating garbage.

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If Trump loses in 2024, I believe what will have been decisive is the six-hour Second Reich rally in Madison Square Garden during which even the most ardent Trump dog whistlers will have come to the conclusion that Trump is the sound of one hand clapping and that his campaign is just one long racist conversation with himself.

Essentially the Garden rally was a replay of the 2020 Republican National Convention—certainly with the same speakers and probably with the same balloons—and one thing that has held true about American elections since 1800 is that they are to make choices about the future, not about the past.

Trump only lives in the world of the 1970s, with graffiti on the New York City subway and the South Bronx burning (not to mention his aging rocker comb-over dyed mane and the fried brain of someone who has done too much blow).

Since the days of disco, Trump has been a boy in the bubbles of Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower, as detached from the United States as was John D. Rockefeller when he passed out dimes on the street during the Depression.

(Watch the tape of Trump tossing $100 bills at a woman in a grocery store checkout line, if you want to witness his contempt for the electorate.)

While I don’t think it is possible for Trump to win the 2024 election (at least not legally or without the tilted wheels of the getatable Supreme Court), I do think it is possible for Harris and Walz to lose the election—basically for running an empty-vessel campaign that boils down to this slogan: “We Ain’t Trump.”

Even in 1976, candidates such as Jimmy Carter knew that elections had to be about something more than a negative, and he positioned himself as a new-age technocrat who could run the government with “zero-based” budgeting.

The Harris campaign has everything—Swifties, Beyoncé’s endorsement, and The Boss—except ideas. Somehow “the opportunity economy” does not quite stack up with a “chicken in every pot” or “Fifty-four forty or fight!” (the latter was over a border dispute in Oregon and in 1844 got expansionist James K. Polk elected).

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Why am I not to be believed on the subject of U.S. presidential elections? For the simple reason that in just about every election in the last fifty years, the candidate I have favored has lost.

I cast my first vote in 1972 for George McGovern, having heard from my professor of political science, Chuck Longley, that if McGovern “won Minnesota and Wisconsin” he had a good chance of being elected the next president.

I loved my courses with Chuck Longley, and still grieve his early death, but Chuck missed the 1972 election by about 49 states (all of which Nixon won). Since 1972 I seem to have taken over the Longley mantle in failing to predict the results of just about every election.

I missed the Reagan landslide in 1980, thinking he was little more than Doonesbury’s Ron Headrest, and in 2000 I could not believe that anyone would vote for a candidate as dim as George W. Bush. (“Is our children learning?”)

Then in 2016, I drank the pollster Kool-Aid that Hillary had it in the bag (although whenever I went to her events, say, in New Hampshire, the walk-on music was “I Will Survive,” never a good song to hear at a wedding reception).

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In 2024, my thinking is that even diehard Trumpeters know he’s pathologically insane, a Yellowstone geyser of lies and criminal conspiracies along the lines of Trump Media, Trump University, and Trump Steaks—for whom his political career is merely the front story to cover up massive fraud and garner immunity. But they are drawn to the columns of light at his Nuremberg rallies.

Yes, many of Trump’s supporters have had it with President Joe Biden’s mumblings and inflation, but is the solution to those frustrations to elect someone (almost 80) to the nation’s top job who has groped and abused more than two dozen women and who needs the presidency to pay off his criminal damages and lawyers?

I think not, hence my map above, but please don’t remind me of my predictive shortcomings unless you have posted your own Electoral College map and have had it time-stamped prior to 9 a.m. on Tuesday November 5, 2024.

Otherwise, your only recourse is “to vote early, and vote often.”

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