Kamala's winning, and it's not close

Right in front of our eyes, she's assembling a new Coalition of the Winning

Oct 26, 2024

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My father-in-law Ike, flying like us, with nothing but blue skies ahead

Reports of Democratic bedwetting are not greatly exaggerated.

“Worried. I’m very worried,” texted a friend yesterday.

“Don’t be,” I answered. “The dashboard just shorted out, but the plane is fine.”

There’s a term in aviation for when you’re flying with no visibility called “instrument flight rules,” or IFR. Pilots have to train themselves to ignore the fact that all they can see outside the plane is a dark sky or thick clouds and to trust their flight instruments that tell them their altitude, airspeed, vertical speed, and heading. It’s hard for the brain to make the leap from trusting its eyes and ears to a machine.

American political culture learned to trust the indicators in 2008 when Nate Silver got us hooked on aggregating polling. Rather than fussing over whether one poll or another was right, he tossed them all together to come up with an average, which at the time produced an accurate predictor of election results. However, predicting elections was never what polling was designed to do.

Nate Silver has fallen.

Nate Silver was treated as a prophet for another two presidential elections, but thus corrupted, we invited more corruption. First came Donald Trump, who began a reordering of political coalitions that polling wasn’t designed to measure. Polls were built to fight the last war, not detect an insurgency in 2016 or the chaos of 2020. Then, after Dobbs, the dials swung left, and Trump’s partisans discovered they could game the system by flooding aggregators with what Simon Rosenberg dubbed “red wave polls.” These bad-faith polls goosed support for Republicans, but that support never showed up to vote in 2022.

Polling is broken, and yet the experts in the news media tap the dials, knowing something is off but reporting it anyway as if corrupted data were verifiable news. This creates a funhouse mirror experience for the last remaining consumers of mainstream news. As Frank Spring, who’s been on a bit of a rant lately about polling on his Substack, told me, “CNN’s Harry Enten is out here telling us that there’s just no conceivable way to read this election as anything other than 50-50, but also that it’s extremely likely that it will be decided by a landslide.”

The corruption has come full circle and claimed it’s Dr. Frankenstein. Nate Silver has fallen:

Frank Spring: “I would throw myself in the sea before I wrote such a thing or permitted it to be published in my newspaper”

Add to that the general brokenness of the media, unable to call Trump’s “fascination with genes” by its correct name—eugenics, and owned by billionaires with a business interest in staying off Trump’s enemies list, and we are what my pilot father-in-law Ike calls “scud running.” In aviation that means “flying in extreme low visibility just below the bottom of clouds, but also very close to the ground,” he said. “Usually not enough visibility to see radio tower or the hill right in front of you,” which he said will get you killed.

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair’s Joe Hagan, longtime Republican operative Stuart Stevens said the mainstream political news media made itself vulnerable to the corruption of over-reliance on polling because of the false dogma of objectivity, or dispassionately not taking sides. This has led to the industry-wide bunkering inside false equivalencies, or “both-sideism,” that prioritizes balance over facts. Says Stevens, who ran Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign and did media for George W. Bush in 2004,

“…that completely falls apart when you have one side that cares nothing about the truth. How do you tell both sides of a lie? I think that that’s what journalism has been struggling with in good faith.”

The malignancy metastasizing in the political news media presents thusly, according to Spring: “They have no idea what will happen or how to weight the various conflicting indicators. And also seem unwilling to see the variety of clear indicators that this race is in fact pointing in a specific direction, and that direction is toward a Kamala Harris victory.”

The fault is not in the stars but ultimately in us. I have been complaining about false equivalencies and reporting polls as news for going on 30 years, almost as long as I’ve been depending on political reporting to tell me what is going on. To paraphrase Tom Waits, “The world is a hellish place, and bad political reporting is destroying the quality of our suffering.”

What we need to avoid crashing into a mountain—which is honestly what the 2016 election returns felt like—is what Ike calls learning to fly a “partial panel,” which is when one or two critical flight instruments fail (see also: polling aggregators, reporting on polling as news and engaging in false equivalencies).

If we look up from the polls and ignore the unanimous pronouncements that this will be a 50-50 election (despite, FFS, that Trump has yet to exceed 47% in a presidential election), there are other, working indicators that point toward what this campaign looks like, which is a mismatch in which Kamala is cruising to a clear win and Trump is old, alone, done for.

Here is what I see happening that makes me think Kamala is headed for a deck-shuffling win:

Picking New Teams

A couple of weeks ago in looking at why polls were broken, I included a quote by The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo that keeps nagging at me.

Most times elections are played by set teams. The Democratic team for years has been labor, white liberals, and people of color. Barack Obama added unmarried women and young Millennials to the Democratic coalition. Republicans countered with all kinds of white people, both Anglos and Saxons, wealthy college grads, church folk, and, since the Civil Rights Act, white people motivated by racism. That last part was considered impolite to say out loud, though, and Republican leaders mostly pushed free trade and capital gains tax cuts.

Then Trump went down his golden escalator and started picking new teams. His first pick? Openly nativist white people. This put team rosters in flux at a time of great Democratic change, though at first Democratic leaders didn’t realize they were picking teams. Hillary Clinton took the Blue Wall for granted, blind to the uneducated white voters in Wisconsin, et al, who had finally found their leader. Joe Biden saw reality as a distortion; all people had to do was vote like they used to, and everything would go back to normal. They did neither.

Did we really not understand what it meant to live in a divided, fractured culture? When coalitions fall apart they are not put back together but reformed. And as Magdi Jacobs of The Editorial Board has pointed out, the biggest unreported story of this campaign is how Kamala has not only formed a new coalition on the fly but is holding it together without making liberal policy concessions to our new rightwing fellow travelers.

“Part of the brilliance of the campaign is that Harris, as a Black-Indian American Woman, has been able to center herself as *Who She Is As A Leader*. Her surrogates are functioning as a flanking cavalry. The surrogates are the ones addressing bias related to race & gender.”

In 2018, AOC was outside the tent. In 2019, she was leading sit-ins to pressure Nancy Pelosi. In 2024? She’s the auntie to the progressives, talking them through their Big Feelings.

College-Educated White Voters

The new coalition began forming as soon as white college-educated voters looked up and realized Trump was really happening. For many white degreed Americans, calling yourself a Republican when Trump was embracing racism and nativism became uncouth. Clinton won white college graduates by 5 points, Biden by 9. Kamala has led white college graduates by as much as 18%, and all college graduates by 21%.

This is a historic shift, and keep in mind, 41% of all voters are college graduates, and they are growing as a share of the vote.

Women

Next up in the new coalition are women activated by Dobbs. As Patrick Dillon, Obama’s White House Deputy Director of Political Affairs, recently pointed out, we do not yet fully appreciate how Dobbs has reordered American politics.

As much as Roe catalyzed a new movement for its opponents, brought in new groups of voters (many crossing old partisan lines), and energized activists for decades; Dobbs is doing the same here and now.

In examining Dobb’s impact on this race, I feel like one of Oppenheimer’s lab rats, looking at the mushroom cloud through darkened goggles, marveling at the power but clueless at its implications.

I am here to tell you this is a doozy. Back in the good old days when Very Smart People told us we were hysterical for taking Republicans at their word that they wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, not many people said they would “only vote for a candidate who shares their views on abortion.” In May 2000, only 15% said they were basing their vote primarily on where a candidate for major office stood on abortion.

In late October 2024, 31% said they would, and Republicans’ best hope on the subject is to avoid the question. “We don’t have a good response, and won’t, on women’s rights and abortion,” a Republican pollster friend of mine told me. “We don’t have a message for it, and frankly we won’t.”

“I'm here as a mother.”

How Kamala is prosecuting the case on abortion rights is particularly innovative, and sneaky even though it’s playing out in the open. Take Beyoncé, who spoke at Kamala’s abortion-rights rally in Houston last night. “I'm not here as a celebrity. I'm not here as a politician. I'm here as a mother,” she said.

The second-greatest achievement of Kamala’s messaging has been making motherhood, specifically the ability to safely become pregnant, the pitch for abortion rights. It’s so audacious, so far afield from the “safe, legal, and rare” pre-Dobbs framework and so much more inviting than protestors cosplaying The Handmaid’s Tale. Want grandkids? Vote for abortion rights.

It brings to mind Hunter S. Thompson’s definition of true happiness: “Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he's been trapped, but can't flee.”

Kamala has turned an issue that almost a third of ballots will be based on into a unifying message of motherhood, hold the apple pie — and Republicans have no good response. It’s amazing to me that some smart people want her to go back to talking about the economy.

Kamala Republicans

A long time ago, it was common for Southern Democrats to vote for Democrats for state office but vote for Republicans for national office. Often, conservative Democrats could get themselves elected to Congress or the Senate in the South, but when it came to voting for President, Southerners usually voted Republican.1

Nationally, however, the white working class elsewhere voted Democratic—until Ronald Reagan. Thanks to the oil bust, gas lines, stagflation, the Iran hostage crisis, and other manifestations of suckiness, American voters were in a crap mood—but until the last two weeks of the campaign, the race was tied before it broke wide open with Reagan winning 48 states.

How did Reagan pull that off? His team knew they had to get voters to change their behavior, namely Democrats to vote for a Republican. He didn’t ask these voters to agree with the Republican platform or to switch parties, merely to vote Republican. They did, giving birth to a new category of voters, the Reagan Democrats who stayed Democrats but voted for Reagan in 1980 and 1984 before voting for George Bush in 1988 and then switching parties in the conservative revolution of the mid-1990s.

This is happening now, but in reverse. Remember my Republican pollster friend who identified Trump-fatigued Republicans as the key constituency Kamala had to win over?

These are voters wanting a break from status quo, who don’t like the economy (even though they are doing well), and think the country is moving in the wrong direction. They should be inclined to punish the incumbent, which Kamala technically is. Except she isn’t. The greatest trick Kamala has pulled—perhaps the greatest in modern history—was to turn Trump into the incumbent and the Trump era into the status quo that she promises to move on from.

Republican women are also part of this—witness the time she’s spending campaigning with Liz Cheney. Says Stuart, “Women are the dividing line—the dividing line in Nikki Haley versus Trump, with whether or not you believe Trump is the legally elected president.”

Republican Not A Fool | Harris Walz Yard Sign next to pavement

Keep in mind these are Republicans who feel not just abandoned but attacked by a GOP that has turned into a vengeful cult, and she’s not even asking them to switch parties (or, for that matter, offering to moderate her policies). It’s also why she’s making democracy and fascism her closing argument and casting abortion in motherhood’s warm glow. These Republicans might be anti-Trump, and a lot of them are anti-abortion, but they like traditional gender roles, and for many of them January 6 was the last straw.

These Republican holdouts have finally started making decisions. They are breaking for Harris nearly 2 to 1, and those among the 15% of voters still undecided, they’re leaning toward Harris by 10%, which represents an 11% swing in her favor.

Kamala’s Coalition of the Winning

There are other major parts of Kamala’s new Democratic-led coalition of the winning—a basket of adorables if you will. Gen Z is wildly in her camp; hilariously, the young men Trump is doing best with are the least likely to vote. Kamala’s cutting into Trump’s margins with white working-class voters, and Stuart cautions against believing the hype that Kamala’s campaign is bleeding younger men of color, who are extraordinarily hard to poll.

“And all of these polls that show Harris getting under 90% of the Black vote are wrong. Nineteen sixty-four, Barry Goldwater got 7% of the Black vote; 2020, Trump got 8%. That’s one point every 56 years. It’s not going to change. I can’t tell you how many times I sat at Republican campaigns with very good pollsters showing us getting 15 to 20% of the Black vote. But I can tell you how many times it happened: Never.”

In turning herself into the preferred change agent, she exempted herself from the rules that should apply to the Vice President of an unpopular President. And by checking the economy and immigration boxes, she can stop pretending what the news media insists upon, namely that this is a normal race.

This isn’t remotely a normal race. Trump has gotten less than 47% each time he’s run for president, and as Dillon notes, he has been beaten “in every election since he first became president - 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 - either where he was on the ballot directly or by proxy through candidates closely identified with him.”

And now he’s diminished without a coherent message or persuasive delivery, says Dillon:

“In 2016, he had an underrated strategic ambiguity on what kind of Republican he was, whether promising to protect Social Security or maintaining a wink-wink ambivalence on abortion, aided by voters’ inability to truly imagine him doing the most outrageous things, or the horror of Roe being overturned. In his own way, he had a kind of disciplined, positive and constructive message about what he would do: make America great again, build the wall, drain the swamp. In 2024, he has none of it, much less the vitality and clarity of eight years ago.”

He’s lost a step. He’s never even settled on a nickname for Kamala. Trump is fading, running a worse version of his 2016 self against a stronger candidate in a post-Dobbs, post-COVID, post-Russia invading Ukraine, post-Jan 6 world, thinking he can distract voters with fantasies of balderdash, “the festival of imaginary demons,” as Stevens puts it. Only his hard-core base vote could possibly believe that students are getting sex change operations in schools.

Voting early, voting often

There’s one last dial on the dashboard to check before we land this plane. Forget polls. People are voting.

Even though Republicans have rediscovered early voting, we’re looking good, folks. Of the nearly 10 million votes cast in the seven swing states, almost 1 million more women have voted than men have, 55.1%-44.9%, and the gender gap grew by almost 88,000 from Thursday. Women are winning the gender gap in every swing state but Nevada (-2%). They’re up 4% in Arizona, 9% in North Carolina, 10% in Wisconsin, 12% in Georgia, 13% in Pennsylvania, and 14% in Michigan.

Remarkably, as Tom Bonier of TargetSmart points out, the gender gap in Michigan is bigger than it was in 2020 or 2022 even though Democrats are putting less of an emphasis (and Republicans more) on early voting.

My nervous friend texted me again this morning. “I went crosstab diving late last night,” she wrote. “Both national and Pennsylvania. Women are gonna save us, again.”

Women, yes, and also a woman. We’re going to look back on this and marvel. This is what winning looks like, but the reason we can’t see it clearly isn’t just because our trusted flight instruments have zonked out but because no one has ever won like this before. This is new. Go boldly. Get every vote. Let’s win this thing with enough daylight to shut them up. We’ve got nothing but blue skies ahead.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.