Election prediction: 2024 US Presidential edition

We’ve established who we think should be the next President of the USA, but who do we think will win the prize?

I have to say that I have a bad feeling about this. The polling analysis at FiveThirtyEight, which I mostly trust, has Harris clearly ahead in the popular vote, but Trump just edging it in the Electoral College, though they do caution that it’s all within the margin of error.

The pessimistic view is that the polls are underestimating Trump’s support, due to sampling bias underweighting his rural base, and people being reluctant to admit, perhaps even to themselves, that they’re going to vote for the unstable fascist. This would be in line with what happened in 2016 and 2020, and, if true, would see Trump win fairly comfortably.

A more optimistic take would hold that, to the contrary, the polls are understating Harris’ chances. There are two reasons to believe this; firstly that the GOP has been pumping out figures that inflate Trump’s numbers to establish plausible grounds to dispute a Harris victory, and secondly that the pollsters are not picking up just how much white suburban women are recoiling from the toxic misogyny of the Trump/Vance ticket. The over-performance of Democrats in the 2022 midterms, and the success of constitutional amendments favouring reproductive autonomy, particularly in red states, give some weight to this argument.

This uncertainty prompted me to seek out some firsthand intelligence, but everyone I know in the US is a progressive resident of California, and while they are all lovely people, their opinions are not exactly a reliable insight into the mind of Middle America, so that wasn’t really much help.

All this leaves me telling myself that Harris will win, but not really believing it. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” is what I used to say, but I think I’m getting too old for this kind of stress…