The Dreading
On the inevitability of Donald Trump
NOTE: As it is more opinion and less data analysis, as well as the rapidly changing nature of events discussed within, there will not be an early release version of this article, it does however have a preview of something to come: my model for the 2024 presidential election that will be released in the coming weeks once we have certainty of the Democratic candidate. I have not yet decided on if or how I will go about paywalling it, but as always I am open to suggestions. This will be the first for-release model I have made of an election, but derivative of a far more barebones personal model I made for the 2020 cycle that performed admirably. This will not be a deep-dive into my methodology nor should my model be viewed as anything but an educated guess subject to my own biases as the designer, the designer in this case being a 21-year-old who delivers food on a bicycle for a living.
It’s been a while since I’ve written something. By this point granular NYS primary results from last month are certified and readily available. I moved back to Boston at the beginning of this month, and between my regular slog of UberEats and getting unpacked have gradually been writing several articles on the results since. I have been conflicted though on whether to write one a bit off topic, specific to the “will he won’t he” of whether or not Joe Biden will drop out of the race in the 11th hour after a disastrous debate performance. That question was answered for me when another unbelievable moment in this race occurred, that Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, PA.
It is hard not to feel a bit fatalistic in its wake, and I think we’ve seen that in both the media and the speeches at the Republican Convention. The imagery of the former president turning ever so slightly, the loud burst, Trump feeling his ear, seeing blood in his hand, the calls of “get down! get down!” When he comes up from the ground stunned, something new comes over his face. I think it is recognition of the significance of the moment. Donald Trump is a showman, and I don’t find it crass to admit that has helped him here. We do not get Reagan being slammed haphazardly into the limousine, we get the former president actively pushing back a bit against the attempts of the Secret Service to move him. He sees a crowd presuming him dead and be it to reassure or to project strength or some mix of both, he pumps his fist in the air and mouths “fight! fight!” The crowd erupts, rising to their feet and cheering. It is almost surreal, something we’d see in a WWE match or a bad movie. Instantly part of a wider mythos. “Give me liberty or give me death.” “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” And yet it isn’t some tall tale in a history book or a glamorized historical account, it played out in front of countless cameras and instantaneously was shown across the country.
We know what I do here, but I hesitate to make hasty claims about how this influences the race and they go well beyond a mere bad taste in my mouth about declaring a quantitative edge gained by a candidate being shot and a supporter killed. There have been polls since I have dragged my heels putting this out for, but they are too scarce and noisy in my opinion to take much away from. This is a tremendously divisive race with plenty of moving parts, and we just cannot know these things. What I can say however is that the attempt on his life and the debate have brought an uncomfortable truth to the front of liberal psyche: Donald Trump is a heavy favorite to win the 2024 presidential race. This was the case long before the assassination attempt, or even the debate, but has been out of mind for many people on the mere basis of its seeming improbability. How after all that happened during the Trump admin could he possible resurge? Polls were wrong about the 2022 midterms, surely they are wrong now? (more on this later)
Our brains have a tremendous evolutionary ability to assign symbolism to events. We seek patterns in the world to construct narratives and process what occurs around us. I think part of why Trump’s resurgence has been so unbelieveable is the fact that there seemingly has not been a moment like that. He did well in his primary, he has been polling well, but these are very unapproachable obtuse quantifications of the actual situation. Our brains crave something more than that, we crave Trump getting COVID or Hillary Clinton fainting at the 9/11 Memorial. An almost superstitious belief that there must be some moment where we can all (at least in retrospect) see which way the wind was blowing. If Biden’s inability to push back against Trump at the debate wasn’t it, an assassin’s bullet missing his brain by an inch certainly was. For the first time this cycle, what much of media and punditry has handwaved as a slim prospect is at the forefront of everyone’s minds: a seeming inevitability of Donald Trump.
The far more active matter at the moment is the question of if Joe Biden will, or will not withdraw, and if he does who replaces him. I have had more or less the same opinion on this since the debates, and it essentially goes as such: how exactly does one put this genie back in the bottle? It has been clear since the day after the debate that there is widespread discontent among donors, among media figures, and among elected Democrats that this is the nominee. A wrinkle is thrown into this on the basis that there was a Democratic Primary nominally, technically Biden got 87.1% of the vote against a backbencher congressman from Minnesota, perennial candidate Marianne Williamson, a guy that fluked into victory in American Samoa under the radar which only I seemed to pick up on, and an Uncommitted vote that was a muddied mix of Trump supporters who forgot to change their party registration to Republican and people like me protesting Biden’s Gaza policy. We can regret that a truly open process did not occur, but that doesn’t change that it didn’t.
For this reason and various allocation thresholds, a whopping 98.9% of delegates are bound to Joe Biden. This does not include the uncommitted delegates in several states where party hacks supportive of Joe Biden were manouvered into those slots, another under-the-radar story. There is some ambiguity between state law and DNC rules, but what I can say pretty unambiguously is that despite pro-Biden statements to the contrary if Biden willingly unbinds his delegates, a vast majority of them are free to vote for whoever they wish without concern of serious legal challenge. There was concern around an Ohio law that said candidates needed to be nominated before the date of the DNC convention, a law was passed in Ohio to change that. Before the law was changed, the DNC has scheduled a “virtual vote” to nominate Biden weeks early, one which would also serve the role of avoiding floor protests by the couple dozen pro-Gaza delegates that did manage to secure slots to the convention. In the face of expository reporting that this law had changed and the DNC no longer had a reason to do this, the vote has since been scuttled.
The true hangup here is simple: Joe Biden, a man who has wanted to be president his entire life and now has it, must consciously and unambigously withdraw from the race in humiliation. We are witnessing a standoff between the party apparatus and a singular ego.
I listened to the audiobook of “What it Takes” by Richard Ben-Cramer in high school. It’s a tome, a 1,072 page, 55 hour in audiobook format account of the 1988 presidential race and more specifically the background and interpersonal history of various candidates. What interests me in mentioning it now is that one of the candidate it focuses on is a young Joe Biden. In this being an account of his first disastrous presidential campaign and also many of the interviews conducted for it being after he had several severe brain aneurysms, it offers a candid window into how Joe Biden operates with the baked in presumption of the interviewees being that he would never again seek the office. I would encourage anyone interested to pick through the Biden chapters, I have told many people this since the 2020 campaign but looking at the wait times at the Brooklyn and NY Public Libraries, you may have to splurge on a paper or audio copy. The Boston Globe also has a pretty good outline which in lack of a physical copy myself I will refer to.
Biden thinks very highly of his abilities. It is a cliche thing to say, but it is true everyone that seeks the office has to be. I think the most revealing part of it all to me is that when he met his future wife Nelia at Syracuse Law, Biden told her he would be a senator by age 30, and then president. His inner circle politically was and by all accounts remains his immediate family and a handful of long term advisors, Ted Kaufman comes to mind.
Biden has a comeback complex. Born wealthy to a family that proceeded to lose it all, he overcame a severe stutter and landed at Syracuse Law. He was caught plagiarizing a paper and managed to not be expelled. He ran against a longtime Republican incumbent for the Senate on the same ballot as the 1972 Nixon tsunami and managed to defrock him, very soon after losing his wife and young daughter in great tragedy. He dropped out of the ‘88 presidential race in disgrace after another plagiarism scandal, was very nearly killed by a brain aneurysm, yet made a complete recovery. He became chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and traded this credibility in 2008 for the VP slot after another also-ran bid for office. He lost his son and protege Beau in 2014 and let his grief and a seeming inevitability of Hillary Clinton’s victory keep him out of the 2016 race, one he believes he would have won. He came back from the dead in the 2020 primary when all had counted him out and you better believe he expects he is underestimated in the current race too and like clockwork will win in November. He is stubbornly persistent, and that persistence has often driven him ever higher.
Is this all Biden’s personal doing? No. Biden wasn’t chosen to be Obama’s VP out of some personal exceptionalism, he was chosen because Obama needed a moderate white guy and a Republican governor would have appointed Evan Bayh’s successor in the Senate if he was chosen. Biden was not illegitimately counted out of the 2020 race, he had dismal performances in the first three contests and there was an 11th hour consensus to coalesce around him. There is no evidence that Biden was the only candidate who can beat Trump, only that he was in the strongest position to win the primary head-to-head with Bernie Sanders. And yet our brains recognize patterns, Biden’s no different, and this all reinforces a certain cockiness and stubbornness in him.
I’d like to go back to the inner circle thing. I think one of the reasons we are seeing so much opposition within the party is that there are not really Biden people. There is his family, longtime friends like Kaufman, and an infinite number of Obama alums and Clintonworld people who were in the woods for four years until there was a Democratic White House to work in. No one is getting frozen out of a Democratic administration in ten years because now they went against the grandiose Biden political infrastructure, for it does not actually exist. There is zero sustained base of power that will outlast his time in the big chair. I see it as a losing game to speculate on if a man with the self-assurance and ego of Biden will willingly drop the reins of the party, but it is clear the pressure for him to do so has not reduced. Past a point when you have no cashflow, lack the confidence of the powers that be, and lack the confidence of your own base: the writing is already on the wall. The question is if he ever acknowledges that.
If not him, it will be Harris purely on the basis of the institutional line of succeession. There has been speculation mostly among the media and donors of some Sorkin-esque open convention, where the usual suspects will all pull their sleeves up to cajole delegates as it went before the 1970s but for various reasons I see that as highly improbable. This process and its extension has been chaotic enough, there is great incentive to quickly have someone to rally around and passing over the VP would be a disastrous narrative. Additionally as bizarre as it is to say, it is not clear the usual suspects want it!
There is some reporting that Newsom and Whitmer have requested to not be considered as Harris’ running mate, and of course a few weeks ago they all publicly stated confidence in Biden. The prospective candidates besides Harris are threading a narrow needle, should it be Harris and she wins that effectively puts 2028 off the table for them. Hence, expressing confidence in Biden was to their advantage. Now though with the national climate as it is and Biden appearing more likely to get out than stay in, they may be making the calculus that it is preferable to wait until 2028 than be the vice presidential or even presidential nominee on a Democratic ticket that seems highly likely to lose this year.
Let’s get into that now: can we quantifiably determine if Harris is doing better? Not really. Polling is scarce particularly at the state level, and as far as the fundamentals go it is much harder to determine exactly how much the baggage of the current administration should be factored against her. With that said, I’ve been creating a model over the past few months of the election. It is hardly ready for prime-time and I will be vague on the methodology, but could be fairly illustrative of the state of play. I should note right off the bat as of this date my model as about a 75/25 weighing of fundamentals over polling. “Fundamentals” are a variety of economic indicators I will explain at a later date, and these are far more favorable to Biden and Harris than polling is. It is not ready for prime-time, but I still have some faith in it for these purposes. These are the results of a little over 1,000 simulations I ran last night. Ready to see it?
As of yesterday July 18th, Trump has a 71.5% chance of winning the White House. Biden meanwhile has a 26.7% chance, with the remaining 1.8% chance being ties which effectively would elect Trump given the expected composition of 2025 House delegations. Trump wins the popular vote 62.8% of the time, and Biden 37.2% of the time. In the median scenario, Trump flips from most to least likely Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, Pennsylvania, and just barely Minnesota to finish with 308 electoral votes to Biden’s 230. Trump is also projected to win the popular vote with 46.4%, with Biden coming in at 45.2%, Kennedy Jr. at 6.0%, and other third parties filling out the remaining 2.4%.
For Harris meanwhile, my model has Trump at a 65.0% chance of winning the White House, with Harris at a 35.0% chance and no ties in this sample of 1,000 simulations, though for technical reasons I will discuss in a moment don’t read much into the lack of them. That is for the record 8.3% better odds of Harris winning than Biden. In the popular vote there is a bigger differential, Harris actually wins it the majority of the time at 55.2% of simulations to Trump’s 44.8%, 18.0% better odds of Harris winning the popular vote than Biden. Harris manages to keep Minnesota in the Democratic column and keeps Michigan which Biden only had slim advantage in more decisively blue. She is projected to win 45.6% of the popular vote to Trump’s 45.1%, with 6.9% going to Kennedy Jr. and 2.4% going to other third parties.
For those more interested in the granular level, here are state-by-state odds as well as some other statistics of interest for each candidate as percentage odds (100 is 100%, 0.5 is 0.5%). Additionally note that the popular vote is an average, hence Biden leading slimly in the popular vote average in Minnesota but Trump having slightly higher odds. Trump won it in more of my simulations than Biden, but when Biden won it was by a larger margin on average:
What do we gleam from this? Well first I need to discuss those technical issues. My model considers both national and state polling, and there are fewer polls of each that measure Harris. That means individual national polls weigh higher in the aggregate, and other factors such as previous vote totals and general partisanship weigh heavier for states that do not have state polls measuring Harris period. This leads to what I think is easiest to describe as a higher variance with the Harris model, you can see this for instance in 19.0% of scenarios in the Harris model being landslides (defined as >350 EVs for either candidate) vs 14.7% in the Biden model. This gap should close as more data comes out, but for that reason I wouldn’t put much stake into one candidate or another doing marginally better in an individual state. The significant thing I will say is that at least in how my model calculates it, the fundamentals are better for Harris.
Why am I weighing fundamentals so highly? Well I am of what may be a shocking belief given the content of this article that polling is legitimately a bit borked right now and likely to Trump’s favor. I’ll save getting into the details for when I do a writeup on my model, but the distinction I would draw between my position and what I find to be a deeply myopic one is that that should not be taken as a saving grace. Generally if a campaign is casting doubt in the polling even if there are legitimate crosstabs that make little sense and banking on dramatic polling error, you’re looking at a losing campaign. As stated my model already dramatically overweighs fundamentals in a 3:1 ratio with polling and yet both Harris and Biden are deeply underwater. There is no get-out-of-jail-free card, any Democrat is an underdog against Trump right now.
The theory of a Harris nomination as I see it is really not about some quantititative edge readily seen in polling or data modeling, we simply do not have compelling evidence there is one. It is about an ability to change the field of play. The Biden campaign pitched the debate as their moment to change the narrative, to make this a referendum on Trump. Instead, his performance made the race a referendum on Biden’s worst issue, his basic ability to conduct the business of the presidency. Besides the failure of this one opportunity, it is difficult to imagine an aging Biden managing to change the dynamic of the race positively and that is what Democrats need. My model presumes as in past campaigns that each candidate is able to run a normal-ish campaign, one which accounts for likely boosts to their odds after good performances in debates and media cycles. Biden seems to have proven himself incapable of pushing back against his opponent face-to-face, Harris meanwhile should have a greater ability to generate positive moments.
I think there is some utility to thinking about the consequence of a second Trump term and planning for how it may affect our lives. I figure state governments will be more relevant in regard to antidiscrimination law and other protections. In my case, I anticipate that as long as my Pell Grant remains maxed out over the next two years and I’m able to work more hours I should be able to stay in Massachusetts to finish my degree and eventually go back to New York. I operate on the assumption large chunks of the country beyond that will not be entirely safe depending how much federal policy is deferred to state governments and I’ve been candid with family and friends that live in such places. These are not fun things to consider, but I think we tend to feel better having anticipated and planned for these things than either banking on them not happening or drowning in fear.
I will have one, perhaps two articles out next week.