The Last Leg of the Final Stretch of the Horse Race of Our Lives

A bit of sound advice to get you through the next 30-ish days...

Home stretch or whatever clichéd horse race metaphor you wanna use, we are in the final sprint of the last leg before we get to the gate of the 2024 Presidential Election. This is the time I’d like to remind you not to get caught up in the polls, poll analysis, and especially predictions. None of us has the magical foresight to know what is going to happen less than a month from now. None of us has the insight to know what is going to happen tomorrow or the next day, that is, other than Donald Trump and JD Vance will continue to crank up the lies. Best to get comfortable with the unknowing.

Analysis is not helpful, not when what is being analyzed changes every day. Between now and election day the main subject of election analysis - the polls - will “tighten,” shift, and swing. Why? Dunno. A natural disaster hits. The government response is good. The government response is bad. We get good employment numbers. We get a bad housing report. The stock market soars. The economy crashes. Someone says something stupid at the wrong time. People have second thoughts…about anything.

For the first 11 months of the 2012 contest between President Barack Obama and former Governor Mitt Romney, Obama was the clear favorite, often besting Romney by nearly six percentage points. Come October, the polls started to “tighten.” On September 28, Obama was ahead by 4.3 points. On October 2, Obama’s lead was down to 3.1 points. Five days later, Obama was only one-half point ahead of Romney. Two days later, Romney was up a point and a half. And until election day, the lead ping-ponged between the two candidates, neither gaining more than a one-point advantage. On November 4 – the only date that matters – the polls had Obama up 0.7 points in the polls. At the ballot box, Obama won the national vote by 3.9 points.

As I’ve written elsewhere, candidate/election polls are very useful if you are a campaign operative, a public relations pro, a political scientist, or a historian. They are also helpful to political journalists if they are used to illuminate what goes on in an election season. Candidate/election polls are not helpful, and are even damaging, if they are used in horse race reporting or are just numbers on a screen.

And then there’s this: Unless you are a political pro, specifically someone working on a campaign that is subject to polling, someone who has the power to adjust campaign strategy because, say, you saw that your candidate’s support is weakening among first-time voters, senior, women, Black women, White men, West Coast union workers, East Coast queers, or another voting bloc, there is absolutely nothing practical that you can do with polling numbers, not in real time. So, why fuss about daily data?

In the Harris vs. Trump contest, and most competitive elections, what matters is getting out the vote. Whichever camp can get their supporters out in a “handful of key states,” while keeping their voters interested in “safe” states and districts, will almost certainly win. Add some new and occasional voters to your core and your odds of winning increase. Same goes if you can discourage your opponents supporters from voting, either by seeding cynicism or through old fashioned voter suppression. And It take more. It takes grit, hard work, smart strategy, and seizing opportunity. Combine all that, especially during an election’s “last leg,” and a campaign has a great chance of winning a close contest.

The textbook example of what I’m writing about is 2016’s Clinton vs. Trump, which also serves as a warning about relying on polls. From the first of that election’s polls and until election day, Clinton led Trump. Her smallest lead was in mid-September (+0.9). On October 16, she was up by more than seven points. On election day, the polls had Clinton with a 3.2 point lead. Go by the polls and Clinton should have won…and she did win the national vote (by 2.1 points).

Here's the problem, a problem we all know well: We do not elect our presidents through a national vote. We decide presidential elections state by state, using an “electoral college” to divvy up the ballots. And it is not like whoever gets the most states wins. It is whoever gets the best combination of states so that they can tally up the most electoral votes wins. So, if the Clinton campaign, in the last days of the race, rests on national poll numbers and outdated state polls and if the Trump campaign sees Clinton slacking, notices her weakness in a few swing states, and gets to working hard in those states, with a good strategy, the underdog can win, which is what happened.

Russian interference, “But, her emails,” James Comey, Wikileaks, misogyny, etc. - sure, those things had an impact on the election, mostly by forcing the Clinton campaign to pay attention to/spend energy on shit that they wouldn’t have. The crap also gave some voters an “excuse” to vote Trump. And, yeah, they probably impacted vote margins. However, Clinton could have neutralized all that stuff had her campaign not taken the Upper Midwest for granted. Her campaign slacked and we paid for it.

You see, in 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama was hit with racist backlash every bit as intense and strong as the misogyny that hit Clinton. Obama didn’t have to deal with foreign interference (that we know of), but he was dogged by Birtherism, conspiracy theory, the “Jeremiah Wright controversy,” and other bullshit. I’m not saying that Obama had it worse or racism is a bigger evil than misogyny. I don’t see this as a contest of who had it worse, a ranking of evil, or anything like that.

What I do see is a stark difference in how the Obama campaigns and the Clinton campaign dealt with these very predictable challenges. Obama’s people “stayed in the game,” working hard until the very last minute, knowing that if they eased up, their opponents would take advantage. Clinton’s campaign looked at the polls two weeks out and started planning for a peaceful transition of power. As the great philosopher Kenny Rogers once said, “You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table…”

My riff isn’t original. For those inside politics, all of the above is pretty much accepted as fact. While there are a lot of things that every candidate for any office should or shouldn’t do in a campaign, if you want to win a competitive race, you have to embrace “I’ll sleep when I die,” work as hard as you are able and then some, and take absolutely nothing as a given. Harris, Walz, and their people know this. Trump, Vance, and their people know this. The team whose supporters know this will have a significant edge. Are you that edge or just another dull blade?

You will not be getting Soriano’s Circus on Monday. Instead of writing, I’ll be sitting in a dentist chair getting a couple teeth pulled. Fun fun fun.