American Election Predictions: It’s Apocalypse in the USA

A week out from the US General Election (Wednesday 06/11/2024 NZ time) the opinion polls in the swing states are slightly tending Trump over Harris but all within the margin of error, the betting markets favour Trump very clearly in the last three weeks (where it had been Harris ahead during her honeymoon from the convention acceptance) on average Trump now at $1.55 to Harris at $2.50. Conspiracies about crypto from Russia affecting the markets seems misplaced, the markets are tracking the polling releases quite closely.

I have seen all I can digest of the two candidates. I have seen Trump pout and do his meandering “weave” of hyperbole, bragging and victimhood with accompanying accordion hand gestures until I’ve turned orange. I have seen Harris pout and do her evasive middle class story-telling with associated condescending frowning followed by giggling all the time waving her hands around like the accordion was stuck fully open. And it’s all such plastic bullshit. Both of them have grossly mischaracterised the other, unfairly disparaged the other’s term of office, hypocritically called each other threats to democracy. I have heard everything they have to say on every subject a dozen times over.

I saw Trump on Joe Rogan for three straight hours uninterrupted, in numerous interviews, rallies, and even the aftermath of an assassination attempt. Harris a lot less (only because her handlers don’t trust her to do long formats), an hour on Howard Stern and a series of 15 – 20 minutes interviews, plus her rallies. For all the rhetoric both have four-year records to run on and from which we can base our judgments. If we look at that rhetoric – the slogans deployed – the thing that stands out is Trump’s messages are about policy and Harris’s are not, they are about her vibes. If we look at the half dozen tag lines that became prominent in chronological order for each candidate it becomes discernible that Harris has focussed on stopping Trump not on what she would do.

Trump has:

“Make America Great Again”

“Build the wall”

“Drill, baby, drill!”

“Mass Deportations”

“Tariffs”

“No tax on Tips”

Harris has:

“I’m speaking”

“Joy”

“Change”

“New”

“Turning the page”

“My to-do list”

Harris has in the last week rolled out “my to-do list” without having articulated what she would do, and has simultaneously said she stands by and will continue what Biden has done but also be a change from what he is. Who does this weak non-sequitur nonsense appeal to? – because it doesn’t appeal to men. Look at the huge gender gap in opinion polling – women might overlook the shallowness and superficiality of it because it’s a shot at having a female President, but men are unconvinced. So too with Trump’s sometimes sinister promises of retribution and systemic purges of the establishment – that may appeal to masculine decisiveness and comic book revenge fantasies but why would women ever warm to that? There will never be a larger gender gap in a Presidential election ever.

Harris has battled as a last-minute replacement but also benefited from a honeymoon period after the convention which inevitably ended about a month before the election. The Harris team has campaigned along the lines of a slick establishment agency – we can see that in the banal feel vibes of the slogans and the neutralisation strategy of simply co-opting everything Trump comes up with. So, Trump’s “Fight, fight, fight” quickly converts to Harris’s “When we fight we win”. He goes no tax on tips – so does she. (Trump claims he came up with this idea himself after talking to a waitress and I believe him on his account. Churchill says in his WW2 memoir shortly after he was PM he came across a distraught shopkeeper and his bombed-out shop in his constituency and he got the idea from that of a national war insurance levy to pay for destroyed private property – and it was a success. So, some one-off random encounters can indeed result in significant, popular, policy gains). I am still unsure what Harris proposes to do – it’s all up to Congress and she will just sign their Bills. Trump, we know all too well – chaotic, but things will get done, like it or not.

Reviewing my past posts for the US elections will set the scene for my last week of the campaign and final predictions.

Biden and that debate: he has become death (01/07/2024)

With his stumbling, stuttering and slurring you would assume Trump made mince meat out of old Joe and hammered him on it at every turn. Au contraire. Trump was at pains to keep this knacker’s yard donkey in the game by pulling punches in the debate and also at his rally the following day insisting Biden polls best against him. Quite something to watch – Trump is obviously terrified Biden will drop out. At this point Trump has offered more public support to Biden than the Democrats have. And what Dems have offered is pathetic and desperate reasoning, forced as they are to recognise the appalling debate loss: pity vote Biden. But pity votes are losing votes – the electorate will not vote out of pity that is not how competitive politics works.

[…]

I can’t see Biden going on much longer even with the institutional backing of the Dems and the donors after this debate. It would seem impossible. The tepid and apologetic endorsements from Obama et al impute reservations. Biden’s rally the following day was also rather sad and miserable and for what energy he may have summoned for that occasion he was still slurring and fumbling.

As of Monday (01/07/2024) morning to win the Presidency: Trump $1.65, Biden $4.60, Newsom $10, Michelle Obama $17, Harris $26, Whitmer $34.

Trump’s winning shot (15/07/2024)

 Fortunately the Trump assassination bid was not a complex affair, it was straight forward in the result – he lived. That was clear from the outset. The Dems best chance of victory in the Presidential ballot only grazed his ear and scored a direct head shot on some poor (as yet unnamed) schlub in the bleachers behind him.

[…]

What struck me though was the photo of the fist pump, blood on his face, defiant, from the middle of a security scrum, the red, white and blue in the background. Powerful would be to understate the significance of that image. It was just so America. It was so evocative. And then it I realised exactly what it was evocative of. I googled up Iwo Jima image – and there it was! The famous one of the US soldiers together erecting the pole with the American flag after they had captured the island from the Japanese – oh that was what the memory trigger was alright. That symbolism is a deep well. That son of a bitch had managed to recreate the defining moment of American victory whilst surviving an assassin’s bullet. That’s a home run, that is the ball game.

[…]

It seems unfathomable that the building he was on was not part of the security area and that Trump was not taken off as a precaution in that period. However if he had been stopped beforehand we would not have these iconic images and Trump maybe wouldn’t have won the election – which seems to be the outcome if the betting markets are to be believed. Luck of the devil?

Right keys, wrong notes: Lichtman’s 13 Keys to the White House (10/09/2024)

Allan Lichtman and his 13 “Keys to the White House” has successfully forecast every US Presidential race since 1984.

[…]

The Keys in general are fine, but this time round Lichtman has applied them inaccurately I believe, and the result, for the first time might be wrong. […]

I love the Keys, but Lichtman is a 77 year old Dem who cannot interpret the more qualitative keys in an objective light. He has not updated how he determines matters within the Keys. […]

Lichtman’s formula is based on the performance of the incumbent President and their party as the determining factor, and interestingly his formula does not include opinion polling per se in any of the 13 keys. This is a solid approach (New Zealand elections could equally be assessed on the same incumbency axis). His refusal to believe that electoral campaigning has any effect whatsoever though is mistaken when it comes to close elections. In close elections – intuitively – campaign ups and downs must make a difference. The debate between Trump and Biden, where Biden performed so poorly there was a palace coup against him, is clear evidence of how important a candidate’s campaign performance is.

The first seven Keys are not in dispute (with the caveat around the short-term economy being subject to a stock market collapse, bank run or war-induced energy shock), the last six however are what I want to focus on.

[…]

Lichtman has marked 8 of the 13 as true, and one as likely true, so that the incumbent, Harris, will prevail. 3 are marked false and one likely false so they go to Trump – but far short of what’s necessary. But things are not as clear cut as he makes out and his conclusion is doubtful for the reasons below.

1. 1. Social unrest. I agree no mass protests and riots have taken place, however if we think about how Lichtman defines these things as “millions on the street” as a visibility issue then the unrest becomes moot and the millions become the substance. Just as there were millions of people on the street in the depression – sleeping on the streets and in parks, dispossessed without any rioting – then what of the estimated 11 million migrants over the last four years who have streamed across the southern border and now fill hotels in every major city? The homeless situation? Are these dispossessed, homeless millions, visible to every urban dweller not a social calamity? No unrest, but is not the crime spectre and extreme social deprivation enough to mark this a likely false or even likely true?
   2. No Scandal. Lichtman has rejected the notion that Biden’s ouster was a scandal, or indeed that the cause of his ouster – his obvious dementia – was scandalous. His crack-head son, Hunter, and his antics similarly dismissed as a scandal. Surely a “likely” on this, please.
   3. No foreign or military failure. To Lichtman’s credit he does concede a likely false on this. The fall of Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam – they were in there for longer (20 v. 13 years) and the chaotic withdrawal had worse optics than the last chopper out of Saigon. There isn’t anything “likely” about it.
   4. Major foreign or military success. Laughably Lichtman counts Ukraine as an American success! A totally unnecessary, craven war that destabilises Europe and pits Russia against the US with no way out – and Lichtman rates this as “likely true”.  Ukraine is Vietnam and Afghanistan with white people. Maybe Lichtman thinks as long as US military contractors are making money out of Biden’s belligerence that it’s a success – he is woefully mistaken.
   5. Charismatic incumbent. Can’t fault Lichtman for thinking Kamala Harris is uncharismatic and discounting the female factor. I must agree. Harris’s performance in that awkward CNN interview with her running mate was hopeless and you see why she hasn’t done any one-on-ones. In that interview whenever they cut to the three shot Walz looked like the President. Her answers to very straight forward questions were word salads tossed high. Her answer to what she will do on day one was like a skipping record far worse than Trump because she never answered the question at all: she started off vaguely about the middle class, went into a hypocritical attack on Trump claiming he was divisive and drifted off into platitudes and when the interviewer brought her back to the question she reeled off things that she could not do as President (things that needed to go through congress) and ended by saying she’d do all that on day one (!?) What a hot mess. She is an airhead. Trump’s answer is: energy and the border – simple. The debate with Trump on Tuesday (Wednesday NZ time) will be enthralling.
   6. Uncharismatic challenger. A guy who takes a bullet to the head in an assassination attempt at a rally on live TV and emerges with blood streaming down his face and puts his fist in the air saying “Fght! Fight! Fight!”… is uncharismatic? You might not like him but a non-politician who can do what he has done… and he’s… uncharismatic? If it was a Dem Lichtman would have marked it a False.

If we re-calculate the Keys we get a different result: 6 False and another two likely False: that’s a Trump win.

Reigning Cats and Dogs: Trump and Harris’s Black Swan Event (16/09/2024)

After watching the Trump – Harris live TV debate on Wednesday (Tuesday 10/09/2024 NZ time) and rallies from both of them afterwards and then watching analysis of the debate from American political insiders, pundits and media (of all stars and stripes) my opinion of both of them and of the insiders, pundits, media, and to a large degree the electorate itself, has crystallised and fused into stony derision.

Both congressional caucuses would really prefer someone else to be their candidate, but both parties are forced by circumstance to clutch onto their respective candidates in a fake hug as their credulous sign-toting minions gawp in awe and the 50,000 undecided voters in the half a dozen states (or counties) that will decide the outcome purse their lips, squint, and have yet another go at trying to imagine how their own quality of life will be under the two prospective regimes.

Who do they trust not to fuck it up? At this point – with the polls in the swing states all within the margin or error and the betting markets an even 50-50 – what matters most to those 50,000 will determine the result. Is it pocket book or culture war? Is it personality or policy?

[…]

Donald Trump was swerving wildly in his debate with Kamala Harris. He doesn’t respect her in the same way he respected Hillary Clinton or else he would have stuck to the script and not been drawn into the obvious baiting she threw out. Fortunately for him his supporters are so uncritical when he crashed in a ditch most of them were prepared to go along with the line he had just parked creatively – even if they knew better. His critiques were inchoate and lost in the lane-changing and manic manoeuvrings of his stream of unconsciousness so she slipped through unscathed and emboldened. Her supporters are equally uncritical, so their gushing would have been at Niagara-level regardless, but it was – for the first time – justified. She most definitely had a script and she, very wisely, didn’t budge from it. Her well-honed jibes triggered shouty replies as if on cue. With mics muted her rehearsed face-pulling at him was designed to agitate, but very wisely, he had rehearsed ignoring it. The split screen made her exaggerated expressions appear redolent of Hillary’s irksome condescension and the visage of the sneering Washington elite crept into mind. The bottom line of the exercise – given she was the one introducing herself to the electorate whereas his expectations were already set at a threshold of near lunacy – was for her to look and sound presidential. And she did. Not a great deal of detail or convincing answers exactly, but a presidential vibe it was. Enough for the 50,000 to take her seriously and want to know more – and the TV network focus groups thought as much in their discussions straight afterwards. And he was near lunacy – which was indeed his anticipated baseline. But the one take-away (and I do mean takeaway) from the debate was Trump’s controversial excursion into an unsympathetic examination of Afro-Caribbean cuisine.

[…]

As for the impact of the debate – beyond establishing Harris’s credentials and Trump’s credulity – this will be seen not so much in the media prognostications but on social media which has overwhelmed mainstream media now to the extent that the micro pieces of the debate in circulation on the socials in aggregate will eclipse the viewership of the live TV debate or the replays of the whole debate. The consequence of this drastically edited redistribution plays better to Trump in my assessment. His angry, combative rebukes package well as short clips and I think his responses are calibrated deliberately with just that in view. Sure, Harris’s clips would play well to her supporters but they won’t quite have the punchy energy that Trump can dish out that cuts through to a disengaged voter scrolling through the endless material the algorithms are delivering.

N Word, please! – Trump’s Black male voting strategy (29/09/2024)

My guess is Trump taking a bullet proved his metal, his character – for all the faults, chronic through to comedic – to a Black male voter. He gave them the Covid cheques – that is a refrain heard in most focus groups. Prices of everyday goods were lower under Trump – everyone acknowledges that. He ended the endless wars that Bush and Hillary (and Harris-endorsing Cheney) and the Washington establishment had foisted on the American taxpayer and no-one doubts Biden’s war in the Ukraine will be ended swiftly by him if he wins in November. Trump, despite his temperament, is still a known, predictable force. Harris is known for what? For not knowing. For refusing to do interviews because she is a giggling empty-headed bimbo – tell me it ain’t so? We know it is so. There is no other reason for not doing interviews. It is a plain self-evident fact. She couldn’t even give reasonable answers in her own orchestrated Oprah sit-down for fuck sakes. The question is whether the unknown depths of Harris’s ineptitude and incompetence is better or worse than Trump’s known depths of dystopian administration.

After reviewing the last few weeks I have firstly come to the conclusion that Trump’s campaign has identified Black men as the key to victory and this explains some otherwise inexplicable decisions, and secondly that his courting of the Black male voter is progressing better than can be measured. The polling undercounts Trump because people – especially Black people as mentioned above in the televised focus group example – are unlikely to disclose their intentions.

What else was Trump’s interview session with three Black women at the National Association of Black Journalists last month if not an appeal to Black men? How else to account for such an unconventional and on the face of it suicidal encounter? The kamikaze gambit with its predictable outcome only makes sense if it was an appeal to the Black male voter. Anthony Scaramucci (the 11-day wonder as Trump’s communications head) thought whoever booked him into that gig should be fired – and at the time I concurred.

[…]

As Trump has courted Black men – and more assiduously over the campaign period – Harris has rather neglected them. Abortion has been held up as Harris’s strong point, but that in particular cuts. I think Black men average just as much time as White men in America considering the Roman world. We think back to the Roman law. The man as the patriarch – the ruler. The power to take the life of his wife or his children resting solely in his hands. Harris wants the power to wantonly murder a couple’s children to rest solely in American law with the woman, like it used to under Roe v Wade. Because: my body.  How’s that reversal of unlimited rights to kill his unborn child working out for him? How is her main selling point looking like to him? Is he supposed to just go along with her infanticidal inclinations is he? I wonder.

As I finish this column Harris has just done an interview with Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC now uploaded to Youtube. It’s only 24 minutes. Harris still can’t go even half an hour! That is ADHD-level disability. Last interview she had to have her support St Bernard, Tim Walz, along to sit in, this time it was solo, but Ruhle was supine and gushing the whole way through, throwing in supportive comments and smiling and nodding to every response. She was even mirroring her hand gestures, finishing her sentences. Not an interview so much as a collaboration. So soft and lacking journalistic integrity. The mainstream media are giving Harris the easiest ride imaginable purely because they loath Trump. The artificiality of the hype cannot alone keep her afloat against the currents of events of the next five weeks to polling day. Her runway is limited and Trump is hovering able to block her approach.

Her answers were once again avoidant, once again undetailed, and once again uncritically received. To a man – Black, White or whatever – is her whiney voice, her patronising tone, her idiotic cackle and her desperately underwhelming competency and judgement anything to be joyful about being subject to for the next four years?

Regardless of the actual result this election is set to have the most extreme gender gap ever. In this situation the Black male voters in the swing states will have a disproportionate effect on the outcome and that favours Trump.

Truth and consequences – the Vance-Walz VP debate’s nuclear moment (06/10/2024)

Vance was wearing more eyeliner than the two female hosts were and what’s more he did his own. He has a sleazy confidence. Maybe he had got to second base with the sofa in the Green room just before, who knows. Walz was practically bald, looking and like Ed Asner (Lou Grant) but more concerned than confident, unsure.

[…]

It starts with a dramatic question on the Middle East. “Earlier today Iran launched its largest attack yet on Israel, but that attack failed thanks to joint US and Israeli action…” See how they framed that? It “failed.” Because no civilians were killed like how Israel defines a successful attack? Failed because only some of the missiles got through to their intended (military) targets? The only thing failing in this was the journalism. They’re the ones that need to be fact-checked. Straight out propaganda, just like NZ mainstream media, how familiar. Fuchsia barbie recounts all the American military assets scrambled to defend their 51^st state and then simply says: “Iran is weakened.” As if the propaganda spiel listing American hardware alone justifies that claim. It is just outrageous. She says Iran getting nukes is down to “one or two weeks time.” Astounding claims just thrown out there. “Governor Walz, if you were the final voice in the situation room would you support or oppose a pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iran? You have two minutes.”

He finally looks up from the podium and he looks ill. Is he pale or is he just Minnesota white? He’s nervous. He’s swallowing hard, he’s stopping and starting. He mentions October 7^th. He mentions the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. He’s struggling for coherency. “But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute and fundamental necessity for the United States to steady leadership there…” He meant Iran. He meant Iran. He said Israel, but he meant Iran. He’s barely into his third actual formed sentence and he’s got the two confused. What a mess. You wouldn’t want this guy even serving coffee in the situation room let alone making a final decision on anything that might precipitate WWIII – he’s likely to nuke the wrong country. Then he suddenly veers off saying that Trump in the Presidential debate was an 80-year old talking about crowd sizes and how terrible he is. And I thought Harris was the flaky one!? His disjointed sentences are just random bullet points. He’s running down the time and he hasn’t answered the question, squeezing in at the end: “we’ll protect our forces and allied forces and there will be consequences.” It took until the last seconds of the two minutes to get a concrete answer that was both vague and belligerent.

Same question to Vance. He gives an introduction to himself instead – completely understandable. He sounds smooth, slick. He hits on “the American dream.” He handles it like a pro, making Walz’s flubbing by contrast much worse. He pivots to attack the Biden administration for easing sanctions on Iran. Fair enough. To his credit (and he did this throughout the debate whereas Walz seemed incapable of it) he reiterated the question and then answered it. “It is up to Israel to do what they think they need to do to keep their country safe and we should support our allies wherever they are fighting the bad guys. I think that’s the right approach to take to the Israel question.” But it was an Iran question wasn’t it? “Bad guys” was a folksy phrase aimed to the lower education grades where Trump is doing well.

Neither candidate wanted to sketch out the strategic issues of what protecting forces and supporting our allies would mean. That sketch might take on the shape of a mushroom cloud – no wonder they don’t want to start painting by numbers provided by Netanyahu on live TV.

Final week of the campaign

The bombshells secreted away for detonation at maximum impact ten days out from the election have been dropped already. The Trumphobic media ran the two big ones red raw, but they were not new allegations, neither were they verifiable – “he says/she says” type without smoking guns. An allegation of groping from the 1980s by, of all people, Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend in which her recounting of it on video left the viewers asking why she went back neutralised that allegation. An allegation that Trump demanded “the kind of generals Hitler had” and that Hitler “did some good things” were dropped to boost the fascism line, topped off by Trump’s former Chief of Staff General John Kelly describing him as meeting the definition of a fascist. Harris immediately agreed Trump was a fascist. However, it is political invective and there is no verification of the comments. I don’t think those two lines – the groper and the fascist – had any overall effect on the electorate because they would be likely to energise both sides equally, rather than change any votes.

At this point, four days to go, the media atmosphere is combustible and every spark is being treated like a 5-alarm fire. The set piece smear hits have already been dropped, so every hiccup and mistake are now magnified to game-changer proportions. A comedian at Trump’s Maddison Square Garden rally last week said Puerto Rico is a garbage island and pundits are speculating Pennsylvania (with a high Puerto Rican population) could turn against him, and then a day later Biden says (or slurs) in a video that Trump’s supporters are garbage and the pundits are speculating that might antagonise working class voters for him. Trump’s team immediately responded by putting Trump in a garbage truck and wearing a garbage hi-viz during a rally to try to own the narrative on their terms. The to and fro is aimed at motivating likely voters to actually vote by reinforcing messages and putting out fires rather than changing opinions or picking up undecideds.

The Republicans have been combative, unrelentingly so, whereas in the last couple of weeks the Democrats have turned from “joy” to rather cynical. The Obamas – both of them – have struck a desperate tone in their pitches, an angry edge to their mix of fear and guilt aimed at lecturing Black voters was not fused with confidence. The latest Democrat ad to white women shows one misleading her friends as to who she’s voting for, which is both patronising and – as a portrayal of women as deceptive liars too weak to be honest – is likely to be antagonistic to them, not a refrain consistent with the feminist message. The Dem’s anti-Jill Stein (Greens) ad is clear evidence the pro-Israel stance of the White House is hurting their chances with the Muslim and Arab vote in Michigan especially. Stein is on the ballot in all the swing states except Nevada, while the RFK Jr ticket managed to deregister everywhere except Wisconsin and Michigan as I understand it. The brother, Cornell West, is running in many states too. These micro permutations are going to have people on both sides pulling their hair out the same way Nader has not been forgiven (by the Dems) for running against Al Gore in Florida in 2000 costing him a viable margin in that contested scenario.

Predictions:

The betting markets say Trump. The opinion polling says it is even in the swing States and close to even nationally. Lichtman’s Keys can be read either way, but my assessment is the Keys favour Trump. The early voting seems to be higher for registered Republicans than registered Democrats, but the Democrats seem to have a stronger ground game. Trump has made some headway with Black men, but has Harris made just as much headway with White women? Has either target demographic been pulled enough to slide if not flip?

Lichtman had an online show yesterday making a final “assessment” (he hates the word prediction) forecasting Harris will take all the “blue wall” mid-west/rust-belt states and win the electoral college handily 302 – 236. My forecast, based on the betting markets, the opinion polling, the rolling early voting returns and the media coverage is that Trump will win both Arizona and Nevada, win one or both of North Carolina and Georgia, and two of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania (and might pull an upset in New Hampshire) which would deliver Trump the Presidency.