The Editors Told You So

I’m no Nate Silver, but I sure nailed this election call.

The Editors headline and subheadline from July 21, 2024.

At the risk of taking an overly self-referential and self-promotional approach to the news, let us, here at The Editors, take a victory lap. I don’t always get things right (see my November 9, 2016 post, “Humility”) but when I do, it’s satisfying.

Look back to what I wrote on July 21, 2024, the day Biden dropped out and the Democrats substituted Harris in. “Kamala Harris Is as About as Unlikely as Biden Was to Beat Trump,” was the headline I wrote that day. The subheadline was “When Harris loses, Biden can blame Nancy Pelosi, George Clooney, and the New York Times editorial board.” The post began:

A CBS News poll of likely voters conducted July 16 to 18—after the assassination attempt but before most of the Republican National Convention—found President Trump leading President Biden, 52 percent to 47 percent, and Trump also leading in a hypothetical matchup against Vice President Harris, 51 percent to 48 percent.

That’s probably a reasonably good handle of what to expect, as far as the effect on the outcome, of the Democrats swapping out Biden for Harris as the presidential candidate.

As I write this morning, the New York Times count of the popular vote has Trump at 51 percent and Harris at 47.5 percent. Bull’s eye.

I wrote then: 

She performed poorly in the 2020 presidential race, as Biden effectively attacked her for wanting to eliminate private health insurance, and voters found her not particularly likable. She was Biden’s vice president, so the Trump campaign can attack her for all the failures they have been attacking Biden for: the chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Kabul, the inflation, the uncontrolled immigration. She has her own lack-of-clarity-in-communications problems, being fond of profound-sounding but vacuous lines like, “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” She dated California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown for a couple of years starting when she was 29 and Brown was 59 or 60. She churned through staff as vice president. A 2021 Washington Post article reported, “Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.” And it could undercut the Democratic claim that “democracy is on the ballot” in 2024 that the Democrats are choosing their nominee without debates or much of a real contest, but rather in what Biden himself was only days ago denouncing as an effort by donors, elites, and the media to shove him aside. Harris will also have to answer questions about what she saw of Biden’s deterioration, and why she didn’t alert the public to it. Harris spent eight years of her life outside the U.S., in Canada. She’s from Berkeley, California, which for a lot of Americans stands for a far-left, culturally extreme place that’s at odds with mainstream middle America. Her parents were both academics, and she herself seems to have had hardly any work experience outside government. She frequently comes off not as deeply principled but as opportunistic; her presidential campaign’s policy initiatives seemed calculated at wooing interest groups—trial lawyers, teachers unions—more than substantively addressing problems. Harris lacks the deep personal relationships and negotiating experience with world leaders and on Capitol Hill that Biden touts. 

Harris doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Her weaknesses as a candidate are probably one reason Biden decided to run for re-election. He thought he had a better chance of beating Trump than she did. Biden chose her amid the Black Lives Matter protests, after a process that reportedly involved picking among only women of color, and after public pressure to choose a black woman as a running mate. Her selection was seen at the time as a posthumous victory for George Floyd….

When and if Harris loses to Trump in a few months, Biden can console himself that had he stayed in the race, he might have won. He can tell the Democrats to go blame Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the New York Times editorial board, George Clooney and the rest of the coastal elites who deluded themselves that some Democrat would have a better chance at beating Donald Trump other than the one politician in America who already did it once before—Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

After the Trump-Harris presidential debate, when much of the rest of the press was celebrating what they saw as a resounding and decisive Harris victory, I wrote, in a September 10, 2024 post called “Why Didn’t She Do It”:

if you believe Nate Silver that Trump went into the night with an electoral college advantage, it’s hard for me to see that Trump lost significant ground. Trump may have even helped himself some, particularly with people who kept watching all the way until the end.

There was a brief couple of weeks where the Democratic decision to dump Biden for Harris looked successful. If Harris loses, though, Biden will figure that he might have done better than her himself, which is what he thought all along and what explains his decision to run for re-election and his delay in dropping out after his own debate with Trump. The Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro types will be able to say they would have had a more convincing answer to the “why didn’t she do it?” question, because they weren’t in the White House for the past three and a half years, they were just running their own states.

Harris running as “turn the page” when she’s been vice president for three and a half years just comes off as phony—as phony as her campaigning as a tax-cutter, or as a unifying figure, or as the defender of democracy, or as middle class. Trump has plenty of flaws. I’m not here to tell anyone who to vote for. I’m just analyzing and reporting. The analysis is I don’t think Harris closed the deal with enough swing voters with her performance tonight to significantly affect the election’s outcome. As Trump made clear, the key issue isn’t debate performance, but performance of the Biden-Harris administration over the past three and a half years. Whatever solutions Harris now has to offer as a candidate, she didn’t get them done as vice president.

Anyway, I've been wrong in the past, and I’ll be wrong again. But the New York Times, with its thousands of newsroom employees and vast polling and newsgathering budget, led its Monday paper with the headline “Tightest contest in decades grows tighter at finish.” It touted a survey “finding Vice President Kamala Harris showing new strength in North Carolina and Georgia.” It declared “Ms. Harris is now narrowly ahead in Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, the polls show.” It claimed, “There are signs that late deciders are breaking for Ms. Harris.”

It turned out to be not so tight a contest, after all. So if you work at a university where political donations are running 98 percent in favor of Democrats, or you primarily are reliant on a newspaper such as the New York Times for your news and information, some time reading The Editors would have turned out to be a useful investment, a reality check, at least to avoid that sinking feeling of a morning-after-the-election surprise. We don’t always have this level of foresight. As with stock-picking, sometimes you can look smart just by being lucky. But in this case, let’s just say, we saw it coming.