Election 2024: Are Americans Ready for Another Close Presidential Election?

The United States looks headed for another extremely tight presidential election where a small number of votes could decide the winner. If that happens, will the result look more like 2016 or 2020?

Politico Nightly summarizes how tight things look with just over five weeks left until Election Day:

One of the best known forecasts, Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, gives Vice President Kamala Harris a 53.2 percent chance of winning, compared to former President Donald Trump’s 46.6 percent shot. The Economist has Harris at 57/100 and Trump at 43/100. The Hill/Decision Desk HQ projects Harris has a 55 percent chance of victory and Trump has a 45 percent shot. And 538 says that Harris wins 58 times out of 100 while Trump claims victory 42 times out of 100.

That the race looks to be a coinflip doesn’t mean that it will be close. Things could break for either Harris or Trump, giving one of them a clear or even resounding victory. There is precedent. The 1980 race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan was close until the final weeks. Some polls in late October even showed Carter with a small lead. Reagan won running away.

If the race does go down to the wire, it could repeat 2016. Moving just 77,000 votes in the right combination of states eight years ago would have made Hillary Clinton president. Despite that small margin and the fact that she received nearly 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump, few people questioned the results.

Clinton’s supporters accepted the bitter pill of her defeat for at least three reasons. One was that no one thought the votes had been miscounted, even in states where she narrowly lost. A second reason was that early and mail-in voting was comparatively small, so the initial vote counts on Election Night mirrored the final result. A third reason was that Clinton quickly conceded defeat, saying that “Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”

None of those conditions held in 2020. The race was even tighter. Moving just 42,000 votes in the right combination of states would have reelected Trump. The margins were so small in Arizona and Georgia that it was conceivable that a recount could have changed the outcome. The fact that Democrats were more likely to vote early, and that several critical states counted those votes last, created the false initial impression that Trump had built a commanding and perhaps invincible lead. Most important, though, Trump refused to concede. A political system that rested to an underappreciated degree on norms as much as law suddenly found itself in a new world in which the loser refused to act as expected.

Looking ahead, if the results are close, a repeat of 2020 seems more likely than a repeat of 2016, especially, but not only, if Trump loses. The former president has repeatedly questioned whether votes will be counted fairly and accurately in 2024, sometimes suggesting that his loss alone would prove the election was “rigged.” Trump’s supporters agree with his attacks on the integrity of U.S. elections. Just 28 percent of Republicans but 84 percent of Democrats have faith in the accuracy of the vote. However, what happens on Election Day and the days thereafter could dramatically alter what Democrats think.

There is a lot to worry about. This year’s vote could test the U.S. election infrastructure in ways not seen before. As every American who has stood in long lines to vote knows, most American towns and cities have not invested heavily in their election infrastructure. Why spend a lot of money on elections when most races produce clear winners and voters often yawn at who wins?

That changes when elections are razor close and passions about the results are enflamed. Election officials in battleground states report that poll workers and vote counters face heightened scrutiny, which in many instances has escalated into criminal harassment against them, their families, and friends, making it much harder to recruit and retain the unsung heroes who make American democracy possible. The U.S. deputy attorney general has warned of an “unprecedented rise” in threats against election workers. Some localities are responding by putting workers behind bulletproof glass and equipping them with panic buttons.

Add in the fact that many states have tightened the rules on voting that could cause confusion on Election Day, that both parties have invested heavily in legal teams to contest the vote, and that social media—with the help of Russia, Iran, and other state actors—will likely amplify misinformation and disinformation, and the potential for a chaotic and deeply divisive and possibly problematic vote count runs high. Hovering over all of this is the threat that political passions could spill over into violence.

That is not an outcome anyone wishes to see. But even if we avoid it, Election 2024 could deepen America’s political divisions and make it harder for whoever wins to pick up the pieces and address the country’s significant challenges.

Campaign Update

Retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, who led U.S. Special Forces from 2003 to 2008, endorsed Harris in a New York Times op-ed that posted last night. McChrystal, who was a visiting military fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1999-2000, based his endorsement on the relative characters of Harris and Trump. He argued that “to turn a blind eye toward or make excuses for weak character from someone we propose to confer awesome power and responsibility on is to abrogate our role as citizens. We will get—and deserve—what we elect.” He added that “Ms. Harris has the strength, the temperament and, importantly, the values to serve as commander in chief. When she sits down with world leaders like President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, representing the United States on the global stage, I have no doubt that she is working in our national interest, not her own.” There is a lot going on there between the lines.

The recently revived Republican effort to move Nebraska back to a winner-take-all allocation of its Electoral College votes is once again dead. Republican state Senator Mike McDonnell announced on Monday that he opposed changing the state’s allocation rule so close to Election Day. His decision meant that Republicans didn’t have the thirty-three votes needed in the state legislature to overcome the filibuster that Nebraska Senate Democrats were guaranteed to launch. With Nebraska sticking with its rule of awarding one electoral vote to the winner of each of its three congressional districts, the prospect that Election 2024 could produce an Electoral College tie plummeted.

The U.S. Supreme Court last Friday rejected a request that it overrule a decision by Nevada’s state Supreme Court to bar the Green Party from appearing on the state’s ballot in November. The Nevada court held that even though the Green Party had relied on the language the Nevada Secretary of State’s office provided, the language was incorrect and invalidated its ballot signature petitions. The U.S. Supreme Court did not explain its ruling. The court decisions were good news for Democrats, who worried that an appearance by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein would divert votes from Harris in a critical battleground state.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to hear Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s petition that his name be taken off the state’s ballot. The court has pledged to render a decision as “expeditiously as possible.” If that decision goes in Kennedy’s favor, Wisconsin election officials will have a substantial logistical problem on their hands—they have already sent out absentee ballots with Kennedy’s name listed. Kennedy’s lawyers are proposing that election officials cover up his name on some four million ballots. Not only would this be a Herculean and error-prone task, modified ballots could jam the machines used to count votes.

While Kennedy is fighting to get off the ballot in the Badger State, he is fighting to get on it in the Empire State. He asked the U.S. Supreme Court this week to put his name on the New York state ballot after New York courts bumped him off it last month because he was not a resident of the state as he claimed. Kennedy’s move seems intended to help Trump in the Empire State by possibly siphoning votes away from Harris. New York state has already begun printing its ballots.

What the Candidates Are Saying

Trump unloaded on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at a campaign event in Mint Hill, North Carolina on Wednesday. Trump blamed Zelensky for causing the war by not having “given up a little bit” of territory to appease Russian President Vladimir Putin. In Trump’s view, “There was no deal that he could have made that wouldn’t have been better than the situation you have right now. You have a country that has been obliterated.” Trump also argued that Democrats are “not going to be satisfied until they send American kids to Ukraine, and that’s what they’re trying to do.”

Trump’s anger looks to have been triggered by the fact that Zelensky visited a munitions factory in Pennsylvania with the state’s Democratic Governor, Josh Shapiro, an appearance that Republicans denounced as an implicit and inappropriate campaign event for Harris. Trump told the North Carolina crowd that the “president of Ukraine is in our country and he’s making little nasty aspersions toward your favorite President, me.”

Not surprisingly, Harris took note of Trump’s comments. She and Zelensky made short remarks yesterday after the two emerged from a meeting at the White House with Biden. She did not mention Trump by name, but made it clear that she thinks he is echoing Putin’s talking points:

Zelensky wisely declined to respond to Trump’s remarks.

Despite his pique at Zelensky, Trump met the Ukrainian president this morning at Trump Tower in New York. The two men gave brief remarks to reporters before the meeting. Trump vowed to “work with both parties to” end the war in Ukraine, saying that he had “a very good relationship” with both Zelensky and Putin.

Trump again declined to provide specifics on how he would strike a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

Trump also used the North Carolina rally to accuse Iran of plotting to assassinate him and suggesting Tehran was behind the two recent attempts on his life. No evidence linking Iran to either attempt has surfaced publicly, and the available evidence suggests that neither attack was part of a broader plot. Officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence briefed Trump on Tuesday on the threats that Iran poses to him personally and to his campaign. In July, the FBI arrested a Pakistani man with ties to Iran for attempting to hire a hit man to assassinate American politicians. Neither intelligence officials nor law enforcement officials have said whether that plot targeted Trump or if evidence of a new plot against him has emerged. Trump told the crowd in North Carolina that “if I were the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case, Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens.”

At a press conference on Monday in Smithton, Pennsylvania, Trump was asked about claims by economists that his proposed tariffs will raise prices. He responded by making the point I made in last week’s post, namely, that he can raise tariffs without asking Congress for its blessing:

Trump’s claim that people who know business “support” tariffs is true for those industries that stand to benefit from tariffs. But industries that depend on imports or are vulnerable to retaliatory tariffs feel differently.

What the Pundits Are Saying

Bruce Stokes of the German Marshall Fund provided a short overview of where the American public stands on foreign policy on the eve of the election. One of the findings is that three-out-of-four Republicans say that the United States should be less involved in solving problems overseas. But the trend in that polling question is even more interesting. The percentage of Republicans saying that the United States should be solving problems overseas grew under Trump and fell under Biden. That suggests that Republicans are not necessarily turning inward, but they are only interested in being active abroad when a Republican sits in the Oval Office. Call it “contingent isolationism.”

The Washington Post mapped out eight possible routes by which Harris or Trump could win the presidency. The easiest path for Harris, based on current polling, is winning all the states that now lean Democratic and winning the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Conversely, all of Trump’s paths to victory, based on current polling, require him to take at least one of the Rust Belt battleground states.

P. Michael McKinley argued in Foreign Policy that former Trump administration officials are exaggerating his foreign policy successes and downplaying his failures. McKinley contends that Mike Pompeo, Robert O’Brien, H.R. McMaster, and other Trump administration alumni are looking to “reassure a broader audience that a second Trump presidency would be more mainstream than many fear, and, by extension, to present his first administration as one of successes which restored American leadership on the international stage. Having served almost three years in the Trump administration as ambassador and senior adviser to the secretary of State, I can say that both contentions are wrong.”

David Sanger and Julian E. Barnes write in the New York Times that foreign interference in the U.S. election is likely to surge now that Election Day is less than six weeks away. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of their reporting is that China, Russia, and Iran, which all wish to see U.S. power diminished, have different, and to a degree, conflicting objectives with their interference campaigns: “While the Russians make little attempt to hide their support for former President Donald J. Trump, the Iranians… desperately want to stop him from returning to office.” China, however, “seems uncertain which candidate it detests more. So, for now, Beijing is focusing on local races, conducting influence operations that have the potential to undermine public faith in the basic democratic process.”

I sat down with my colleagues Alice Hill and Varun Sivaram on The President’s Inbox to discuss the climate challenge that the next president will face. One of the things we discussed is that the importance of climate change as an issue varies by age. As Varun noted, polling shows that “voters care way more about costs and inflation than they do about climate. By the way, the notable exception is among eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds. The top foreign policy priority is climate change.” Neither candidate, however, is stressing climate change on the campaign trail.

What the Polls Show

Gallup reported this week that a review of “nearly all Gallup measures that have shown some relationship to past presidential election outcomes or that speak to current perceptions of the two major parties favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party. Chief among these are Republican advantages in U.S. adults’ party identification and leanings, the belief that the GOP rather than the Democratic Party is better able to handle the most important problem facing the country, Americans’ dissatisfaction with the state of the nation, and negative evaluations of the economy with a Democratic administration in office.”

The Campaign Schedule

The vice-presidential debate is four days away (October 1, 2024).

Election Day is thirty-nine days away (November 5, 2024).

Electors will meet in each state and the District of Columbia to cast their votes for president and vice president in seventy-seven days (December 17, 2024).

The 119^th U.S. Congress will be sworn into office in ninety-eight days (January 3, 2025).

The U.S. Congress will certify the results of the 2024 presidential election in 101 days (January 6, 2025).

Inauguration Day is 115 days away (January 20, 2025).

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this post.