2024's Wild Possibilities

On The Many Maps

What would the conventional wisdom said Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate in 2020 would have been if we somehow knew Susan Collins won again in Maine?

One of the lessons of the 2020 election was that Democrats played too wide of a map. In many ways, that was true - big, well-hyped pushes in South Carolina and Kentucky and Kansas and Alaska and Montana and Iowa all failed, and frankly none were even particularly close in the end. As someone who indulged far too much nonsense in 2020 and who spread what turned out to be essentially propaganda, it’s hard with hindsight not to agree with that conventional wisdom. Democrats absolutely should have fortified Maine and North Carolina instead of indulging those red state reach targets. Some people were smarter than me and never bought the hype. But in 2020 it was absolutely true. To a point.

The reason it’s worth remembering that Susan Collins won is because she won … and Democrats won the Senate anyways. Now, it took Georgia having a dumb and bad runoff system that deprived David Perdue a Senate seat he would have won in 48 other states, but Democrats did. In the Presidential race, Democrats won Georgia while losing North Carolina and Florida, two neighbouring states that both voted for Trump by less than Georgia in 2020.

It’s also worth remembering that following that conventional wisdom in 2022 arguably cost Democrats the House majority and certainly cost them a Senate seat. The refusal to spend national dollars on Mandela Barnes (and to a lesser degree Cheri Beasley) cost Democrats. It’s also arguable a wider deployment of the House dollars could have seen Democrats win the House, though it’s fair to say neither side saw the House battlefield great in 2022.

None of this is to say that I am some genius or that I have any greater wisdom than the wisdoms of crowds. 2020 is, in fact, a pretty good argument I don’t, because the amount of money wasted in races I genuinely believed were either tossups or Democratic leaning could rival the GDP of some island nations. But I do think there’s a pretty clear lesson in both 2020 and 2022 - even if we know the macro environment, I’m not sure we have a great sense of the micro.

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Last week, I went deep for TheLines on Georgia and why I’m more optimistic than many on Harris’ chances in the state. You can agree or disagree, it’s not really the point. What that column is is a falsifiable belief that the suburban trends will continue and that Harris will do better with Black voters in November than she polls now. Maybe one or both of those things don’t happen. I’m certainly by no means as cocky as I was last cycle.

Where that lack of certainty comes in is the conversation about Georgia and North Carolina. When the NYT/Siena polls of the Sun Belt came out, it was the topic of the day, for obvious reasons. The trends say it’s crazy, the polls say it’s real, and it comes down to which of those you find more persuasive. What I think that example shows is that we really don’t know what’s going to end up happening.

If you were to rank the Big 7 swing states in order of likelihood Kamala wins them, I’m not sure there’s an order I could particularly argue with. There’s orders I agree with more or less, but so much of forecasting and predicting this election is weighing conflicting data points. You can argue Wisconsin is her best state, which is what the polls say. You can argue it’s one of her worst, given 2016 —> 2020 trends and the nature of Wisconsin polling history. You can make a case for Georgia being her worst state - the only swing state she’s losing in right now, per the polls! - or that she’s favoured in it and it’s mostly fine. There’s plenty to theoretically disagree with, but not a lot we should be confident in.

Take the RFK dropout. It’s probably good for Trump, as a first order effect. The people who were still voting for RFK in August of 2024 were probably more of a Trump voting constituency, yes. The counterpoint to that is that Trump risks losing suburbanites and social liberals who are deeply uncomfortable with the modern GOP, who find the “weird” line of attack potent, and who are deeply pro-vaccine and not a fan of Trump appearing with America’s leading anti-vaxxer. There’s quite literally no way of knowing which theory is right except with time, and even then there’ll be deep uncertainty about whether anything to do with RFK was in any way causal to the results.

The nature of this election is that there’s a fairly flat mix of states. In 2020, there was a very clear tier of states for Biden to flip - the upper Rust Belt 3, then Arizona was State 4, and then Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina were the next tier. The reason Florida was such a gut punch was that it meant that the chances of a quick call were slim, but also that the chances of a big win were gone. The hope was that Florida would deliver a knockout punch, because Trump’s chances of winning the Electoral College without it were almost non-existent. This year, I don’t know if we can say that any state in isolation really could provide such a knockout punch.

This election has been incredibly wild since the debate, essentially. It’s probably going to continue to be, and that extends to the map we’re going to see in November. Maybe it’s a map that confirms some grand theory of everything (2016 —> 2020 trends, minorities trending right, maybe some theory of propensity, etc), but there’s also a decent chance this map looks pretty odd. As someone who was far too confident that 2020 was knowable, this time I’m not making that mistake. I’ve got my takes and I’ve got my guesses, but fundamentally too many smart people can make smart cases for any number of potential combinations to be too confident in any of them in specific.