Poll Position

In Pennsylvanians we trust

We are less than 30 days away to Election Day. Some observations:

National polls are not useful

The person who wins the most votes does not become the President of the United States. The Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, created something called the Electoral College, whose job is to choose the President. They did so out of fear that the people, if given direct power, would elect the wrong kind of person. The Electoral College was created to weed out traitors and criminals, like Donald Trump. Instead, it became the reason Trump was elected in 2016, despite not winning the popular vote. Given this anomaly known as the Electoral College, national polls are not entirely useful. Harris is leading Trump by (on average) 2.5 points nationally, which does not really mean anything other than she is likely to win the popular vote. National polls say very little about who is likely to become the 47th President of the United States.

Voter micro-segments are disproportionately influential in close races

The voter base in the US has fragmented over the last two to three decades. There are more micro-segments of single-issue voters today than ever. These groups are not large, but they signal that basic demographic profiling (gender, age, state, ethnicity, education levels, etc) are no longer reliable indicators of voting patterns. When the margin of victory in swing states is in the 10s of thousands, micro-groups tend to be disproportionately influential. A black male in Philadelphia is no longer an automatic Harris voter. He could be activated by bitcoin or Palestine or any number of other issues that are amplified on social media. Crazy as it sounds, the 2024 election could be decided by a handful of Jewish guys in Pennsylvania who are upset that Harris didn’t pick Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Or it could be equally decided by ten thousand black men in Atlanta who own crypto tokens. Until we have granular polling of micro-segments, we must take even state and regional polls with a healthy dose of salt.

Old prejudices die hard.

It is just the nature of humans to be tribal. The desire to express one’s identity and display pride in tribes is very strong when it comes to voting. It takes centuries of education and propaganda to get someone to vote objectively, instead of automatically lining up with their tribe. This is why those who espouse tribal-grievance politics dislike universities.

Each of us has a deeply ingrained, often unarticulated, description of what our country is, in our minds. For many, their vision of America is that of a Christian nation, built by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, who earned the right to rule it for generations to come. While anyone is free to enter the land and make a living, only the select few get to lead it. It’s not an issue of competency or trust. It’s a question of what who has earned the right to lead. When a second generation Indian American like Vivek Ramaswamy arrives on the scene, flush with his newfound billions, the unsaid question always is, “You seem like a bright and competent guy but what have you or your people done to earn the privilege of leading Americans?”

We have many examples of non-white men, and white women successfully managing complex organizations like Google, General Motors or Microsoft. A brown man running Microsoft does not make the company any less American. A white woman becoming the Governor of Michigan says nothing about America as a whole. But, when a brown or black man or woman becomes the President, it signifies that something has been changed. That some ground has been lost irretrievably, for good or bad. This is a HUGE hill to climb for any candidate who is not a white male.

When Obama beat McCain in 2008, it sent waves of pain and joy throughout the country. Some rejoiced because they never thought the day would come. Others fumed because they had allowed it to happen on their watch. Even those who voted for Obama were no doubt encouraged by the fact that his mother came from a long line of white, Irish immigrants.

Kamala Harris is black. And she is a woman. She is battling historical prejudices and daunting odds. To add another wrinkle to this, there has been only one sitting Vice President (George HW Bush) to have become President in the last 140 years, another daunting stat for Harris to overcome.

On the other hand, America may have reached the tipping point of progressive liberalism

Since the end of the second world war, America has gone woke as it came more in contact with the world through trade and diplomacy. To lead the world, one must shed one’s prejudices. No one wants to be led by a bigot. America has long admired and been inspired by Athens and Rome, bastions of liberality and pluralism. Somewhere along the way, the insecure, persecuted peoples who fled to America morphed and blossomed into a confident people. They became more accepting of differences, introspected into past mistakes and spoke openly about them, and embraced diversity. In the post war world, Americans set out to be admired by the world for the society they had built. They had seen how the English, the previous conquerors, were reviled around the world. Americans wanted to be better.

Soon, longstanding historical errors began to be fixed in earnest. The first Civil Rights bills were passed in the 1960s, a full hundred years after the Civil War. Immigration was reformed and the doors of America were thrown wide open. The first person of Jewish ancestry to run for President was Barry Goldwater in 1964. In 1981, Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman Justice on the Supreme Court. In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to be nominated (as VP) on a Presidential ticket. In 2000, Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman, a Jew, as his running mate. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first man of African American descent to become the President. In 2015, the Supreme Court granted gay people the right to marry. In 2016, Hillary Clinton made history as the first woman to be nominated for President by a major political party. In 2020, Kamala Harris became the first woman and the first person of South Asian and African American descent to become the Vice President of the United States. In 2022, Joe Biden appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman Justice on the Supreme Court.

For nearly two hundred years, America stayed much the same, largely uncultured, obscure and even dismissed by most of the world. In the last seventy years, it has reinvented itself over and over, a feat no other nation has matched. While old attitudes still exist, Americans have acquired a voracious appetite for making history. Today, America may stand on the tipping point of yet another milestone. 2024 may well be the year in which one of the oldest myths in America is demolished, that a man is always better than a woman. The vibe is in the air.

Winning elections is all about doing better than the last time.

All elections are sequels of past elections. By that I mean, 2024 elections begin where the 2020 elections left off, even if the cast of characters has changed. Ultimately, the winner is determined by who gets more votes. A party which performed strongly in a previous election may be at a disadvantage because they may have topped out and have nowhere to go but down. Gravity is a real thing. We saw evidence of this in India earlier this year, when the ruling BJP suffered losses relative to the previous cycle. They had peaked in 2019. There are only so many voters in the land and it is hard to organically grow the voter base by repeating the same set of grievances. You will tend to level off at some point, or worse, start leaking jaded and disgruntled voters. This does not bode well for Trump. He is old and tired. His rants are boring. On the other hand, Harris is the shiny, new choice. She is young, good looking and charismatic. She will do better than Biden. Trump will have a hard time matching his 2020 performance.

The road to the White House goes through Pennsylvania.

The Keystone State is a must-win for Harris. Let’s look at some numbers for Pennsylvania.

The Democrats have about 400,000 more registered voters in the state than the Republicans. There are about a million registered Independents. In a theoretical scenario, if everyone casts their vote, the Independents will determine the outcome, which is what makes Pennsylvania truly a swing state. Harris and Trump are locked in a dead heat in the polls. However, Bob Casey, a Democrat running for Senate, is leading his Republican opponent by nearly 10 points. Josh Shapiro, another Democrat, won the Governor race in 2022 by 12 points, a year in which pundits had predicted a red wave and a rout for the Democrats. Suffice it to say that it is unusual to have such a disparity in polling between the Presidential and Senate candidates. What does this say about Harris’s chances? We can perhaps say she has an edge, with no certainty about the outcome. The question in everyone’s minds is: Hillary had a bigger lead in 2016 over Trump, and yet she lost. How is Harris going to fare with the polls showing a dead heat?

It is widely believed that Hillary squandered Pennsylvania in 2016. The story goes that Clinton neglected to campaign and left the door open. Truth is Hillary did not underperform Obama in Pennsylvania. She got nearly the same number of votes as Obama. Her margins of victory in Democratic counties were much larger than that of Obama. The issue was not her performance. It was Trump who pulled off a dramatic win. He polled 400,000 votes more in 2016, compared to Romney in 2012. He won Republican counties by much larger margins than Romney did. This surge was enough to edge Hillary out in an unexpected upset. Who were these 400,000 voters who handed Trump the White House? It was rural Republican voters, men and women, many of whom had sat it out for decades. Trump activated them.

The question now is – who has that hidden voter base, if any? It’s certainly not Trump. He likely had his best performance in the state in 2016. By 2020, the Democrats knew that they had to turn out an additional half a million votes to beat Trump. And they did. Joe Biden won by 80,000 votes. Trump’s voter base largely remained the same.

This pattern will repeat this year. My prediction is Harris will win Pennsylvania by a wider margin than Biden, say 120,000 votes or more. There is a pitched fight to the finish going on in Pennsylvania. It is no coincidence that Trump staged his fake assassination attempt in Butler county outside Pittsburgh. The Democrats will prevail because they have the numerical advantage. They will prevail because they know exactly what they need to do. They will prevail because Trump’s jaded narrative has run its course and it is time to turn the page.

Our long nightmare will be over when they call Pennsylvania on Election night. It might take after midnight, or even the next morning. But whenever it comes, Pennsylvanians will have helped push America over yet another threshold of history.

Have a good week ahead!