We’re at a weird moment in what has been a weird election season. And despite the many weird events, the polls have been relatively steady. Harris got a bump for replacing Biden on the ticket and it seems maybe a slight one after last week’s debate. The major campaign events are probably over, other than rallies and other candidate-driven events (and the VP debate, which promises to be… something). One result of this is the usual tension between poll-watching and “horse race” coverage, and news that engages with the substance of what the candidates actually stand for and would do. Such coverage has yielded a mixed bounty of reporters trying to strike the correct tone about Trump’s connection to Project 2025 and increasingly unhinged remarks about immigrants, alongside complaints that Harris hasn’t provided sufficient policy details. This frustrating moment in the election cycle brings to mind media scholar Jay Rosen’s admonition that journalists should cover election by addressing “not the odds but the stakes.” It’s a good guideline, and I repeat it often. But there’s something else bugging me as a political scientist: it seems like all of us writing about the election are struggling to think about how the odds and the stakes are connected.
When it comes to what political leaders – former elected and appointed officials – are doing, there’s a clear connection. More than 100 Republican officials have endorsed vice president Harris, including former vice president and veteran of Republican executive branch politics Dick Cheney. But despite a stream of non-mainstream statements and behaviors from the GOP ticket – not softened, as they were in 2016, by a standard-issue Republican like Mike Pence or the uncertainty of what a Trump administration would actually be like – the polls are close. The stakes are high, and the odds are… hard to determine.
In lieu of being able to resolve this problem, I can offer a few thoughts about what’s going on and why it matters. The first is the matter of the Electoral College. If the winner were determined by the national popular vote, things would feel somewhat less uncertain at this stage – Harris’s lead mostly remains within the margin of error, but has been consistent. While acknowledging that the campaign would likely be different absent the Electoral College, it adds a wild card element that undermines the logic of how we usually talk about politics. It’s true that we have a pretty good, but imperfect idea of which states will be competitive and determine the outcome. It’s also true that we have a great deal of polling from those states, though sometimes with a higher margin of error than national polls. And the election outcome now looks like a coin flip, from that perspective. All the usual critiques of the Electoral College apply here, but the main one is that it’s really allowed one party to run an explicitly minoritarian campaign, which disrupts our collective sense of how the stakes and the odds are related. That a presidential candidate could embrace something most people hate and still win violates a lot of mental schemas about how politics works. And yet, it could end up being true in this instance.
Another potential angle is that what Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan call “the other divide” has never been starker or more important. I’m not entirely sure that we know that politics in 2024 are shaking out this way, but there seems to be a stark divide between people who are highly engaged and worried about concepts like democracy and rule of law, and those who pay occasional attention to politics and remember Trump’s presidency as one of prosperity and good times. Not all of the stakes of the election come down to these more abstract and structural concerns. But they’re clearly more important to some people than others.
The final bucket of things is something I would identify as “2016 hangover” – a lingering sense among Trump opponents that he has a built-in political genius or advantage. That his demagoguery attracts majorities, and that his 2016 victory revealed some fundamental truth about America. This was evident after the assassination attempt before the RNC back in July – lots of talk online about how Trump’s victory was inevitable or that he would gain a huge bump in support. Instead, very little – for either candidate – seems to change things very much.
The difficulty of tracing the relationship between the odds and the stakes contributes to a deeper sense in American politics that there are crucial disconnections between politics and policy, and between the mechanisms of accountability that ordinary citizens have and the actual levers of power. There’s been an unsettling coexistence of normal and abnormal politics for more than eight years now. This kind of uneasy stagnation is where instability is born.
You shouldn't juxtapose a projected result in an electoral college competition with that of a popular vote battle when neither of the two leading parties have been competing to win the popular vote. We cannot know how a popular vote race would have played out.
Our problem is the "Electoral College". Always has been. It creates minority rule and general dissatisfaction.