What If It Just Comes Down to Chance?

In a presidential election this close, partisan supporters of both candidates desperately want some indication that things are going to break their way and that their theory of the American electorate is correct. 

Party boosters may be disappointed on November 5 in more ways than one. 

No hard-core Trump or Harris supporter wants to hear this but the election results may not be that decisive and could ultimately come down to chance—a few shifts here and there that produce a victory for one of the two without reflecting some grand voter theory or genius campaign moves. It’s turtles all the way down.

The contours of the election have been clear for a long time now, and if there’s a decisive victory for either Trump or Harris on Election Day it will be relatively straightforward to explain—in hindsight. 

A decisive Trump victory would mean the former president ran up big numbers with irregular and working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines in the most important states while keeping his suburban and college-educated defections to a manageable level. Why? Likely because enough voters rejected the policies of the incumbent administration and got over any trepidations they may have had about Trump’s character and actions as president. 

Conversely, a decisive Harris victory would arise from her amassing huge independent and college-educated numbers in the “Blue Wall” and other contested states, more than enough to offset any white, black, and Hispanic working-class defections. Why? Probably because enough voters got over their displeasure with Biden’s economy and immigration policies—and Harris’s past radical positions—but didn’t overlook their negative feelings about Trump and his behavior as president.

Polls have consistently highlighted these demographic, issue, and personality trends throughout the nearly two years of battles between Trump, Biden, and Harris. If voters behave one way or the other on Election Day, it won’t be hard to explain after the fact.

The maddening reality for everyone involved in this election, however, is that there is no clear way to anticipate which of two decisive outcomes is more likely to happen.

Pundits who confidently proclaim their analysis of the data or proprietary election model can predict the outcome of this puzzle are pulling your leg. They are either guessing or projecting what they want to occur. Maybe something will shift decisively in the final two and half weeks of the campaign to favor one of the above scenarios with more confidence, but probably not since nothing to date has been determinative.

There’s no analytical shortcut this cycle—we really do have to wait for people to vote.

A third very real possibility is that the 2024 election ends up being decided by exceptionally narrow margins in both the Electoral College and the popular vote in major swing states.

Why? No reason really. A Trump or Harris victory in November may not have the big meaning everyone craves—it could just be a few random things in different places. 

Maybe black turnout is down in Philly, Detroit, and Milwaukee while small-town and rural turnout in PA, MI, and WI is better than expected. Maybe the all-important suburban vote ends up more split than it seems and nudges only slightly in one direction. Maybe the economy/immigration and abortion/democracy party priorities cancel each other out and no one issue set dominates the minds of American voters this year. Maybe both the Trump and Harris campaigns end up doing the best they possibly can in all the battleground states, and the numbers—agonizingly for the losing team—end up a tad higher for one candidate over the other for no particular reason. 

In this scenario, no new theory of American politics is vindicated. No serious realignment of voters in either party direction occurs. It’s just another 100,000 or so votes in a few states that determine presidential power for another four years.

This “no rhyme or reason” outcome understandably will be disappointing to a great deal of people on the losing side, and will be rejected by the winning side as they claim an electoral mandate. Uncertainty and randomness are difficult for people to process.

Yet American politics is increasingly shaped by chance in a nation sharply divided between two political parties with a large chunk of people disgusted by both of them. The search for meaning and explanation after the election will certainly commence, but political cryptographers may not unravel any political Da Vinci Code.

The reasons for how and why people vote certain ways in recent times are somewhat confounding and do not match up with known historical, demographic, and ideological patterns in politics. Partisans line up in known ways while the unaligned and disengaged make decisions based on a number of factors including specific issues that may not fit into the traditional left-right spectrum, personality traits, or something unrelated to the campaign messages of Democrats and Republicans.

Americans will have to come to terms with more elections being determined by chance unless something fundamentally alters in our national life to lead voters towards a more unified political direction—or until one of the two political parties figures out how to represent the values and desires of a larger chunk of Americans in more places.

On this development, stay tuned tomorrow in TLP for Ruy Teixeira’s and Yuval Levin’s well-argued case for why both Democrats and Republicans have failed to overcome their weaknesses to build a sustainable majority—or even a convincing case for re-election.