Where Certainty and Uncertainty Merge
The election coming in 22 days paradoxically features both certain change and absolute uncertainty. The certainty of change comes in part from it being the first presidential election since 1976 without a Bush, Clinton, or Biden on either ticket. For that matter, the presidential election four years from now will almost certainly be the first without a Bush, Clinton, Biden, or Trump on either ticket since 1976.
The absolute uncertainty can be found in that the races for president and control of the House are both coin flips, with no discernible advantage for either party.
The Senate offers not only near-certain change from Democratic to Republican hands, but also the certain departure of Sen. Mitch McConnell from his longtime post as Republican leader. His party will have its first new leader since 2007.
The fact is indisputable that all seven swing states in the presidential race are basically dead even in polling. Any poll in the swing-state presidential contests in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, or North Carolina that doesn’t show the contest within the margin of error should be viewed as an outlier. If Kamala Harris were to win all seven, she would win 319 votes in the Electoral College to Donald Trump’s 219, a 49-vote edge in electors, 13 more than President Biden’s margin in 2020. Should Trump sweep all seven, he would prevail by 42 electors, 312 to 226, six electors more than he won in 2016. For such a close race, that actually is a wide range in potential Electoral College outcomes.
In the Senate, the open Democratic seat in West Virginia is a gimme putt for the GOP, effectively generating a 50-50 chamber before the outcomes of competitive races are factored in. Unlike the Electoral College, not all of the most closely watched Senate races are coin-flip contests. At this point, it would be an upset if Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen lost to Sam Brown in Nevada or the open seat inArizona flipped Republican, with Rep. Ruben Gallego favored over Republican Kari Lake. Conversely, if Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana were to survive his challenge from former SEAL Tim Sheehy, that would be an upset. Another Democratic incumbent, Sen. Sherrod Brown, faces a partisan headwind in Ohio as he tries to fend off challenger Bernie Moreno, but not nearly as stiff a headwind as Tester’s.
That leaves two more Democratic incumbents, plus an open seat currently held by Democrats, in very tight races. Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania now leads former hedge-fund CEO Dave McCormick by just 3.2 points in the polling averages. The race in Wisconsin between Sen. Tammy Baldwin and venture capitalist Eric Hovde has narrowed even more dramatically, with Baldwin now leading by just3 points. In Michigan, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin has pretty consistently led former GOP Rep. MikeRogers, but RealClearPolitics now shows just a 1.9-point average lead for the Democrat.
The one remaining race with any real uncertainty is the open seat in Maryland, where Prince George’sCounty Executive Angela Alsobrooks has the partisan wind at her back in the heavily Democratic state against former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan. After a substantial onslaught of pro-Alsobrooks ads helped give her a high-single-digit lead in September, Hogan is now trying to claw his way back. The pro-Hogan advertising is more backloaded, so we’ll see if it has the same effect on the race as the Democratic ads did for Alsobrooks. Though Democrats are mounting spirited challenges in Florida and Texas and may well beat the point spread, it is very unlikely that either will flip into Democratic hands.
The uncertainty even extends beyond the November election. Whether Trump wins or loses the presidency, the GOP will soon begin to contemplate who the next leader of its party will be and what a post-Trump Republican Party will look like.
To what extent will the GOP continue the more populist course charted when Trump descended the golden escalator in June 2015, eschewing the internationalist direction that the GOP has largely pursued since World War II? Like our international allies, the business community now finds itself in an uneasy relationship with the GOP. The populist tendency to spurn the “bigs”—big government, big labor, big media, and the scientific establishment—has now led to some estrangement from big business.
Given the change we’ve seen in the demographics of the Republican Party, trading its old country-club traditions for a more small-town and rural orientation, a U-turn back to the center-right positioning of John McCain and Mitt Romney seems unlikely.
And what about Democrats?
When Trump left office, he was the first president since the advent of modern polling never to reach a 50 percent job-approval rating, and more Americans saw his presidency as a failure than a success.But roughly six months into Biden’s tenure, those numbers began to change. As Biden’s numbers began to plunge mid-year, dropping from a 56 percent approval rating in the Gallup Poll in June to 42 percent in October, the public assessment of Trump’s tenure began to improve.
Will Democrats question why Biden’s numbers dropped and Trump’s rose? Did it stem from Biden’s decision to pursue a more aggressively progressive course than that of either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama? If Harris loses, will Democrats see a correlation?
Trump’s post-November 2020 election loss triggered a presidential temper tantrum that likely cost the GOP both Senate seats in January runoffs in Georgia. Without them, Democrats would have begun that new Congress in January 2021 in the minority, holding just 48 seats in the Senate, likely mitigating their adventurousness on the policy front.
With such certain change and absolute uncertainty in our immediate future, one is tempted to wonder whether we will ever see “normal” again.
This article was originally published for the National Journal on Oct. 14, 2024.