Think Donald Trump is cruising to victory? You may be in for a nasty surprise

The biggest danger for the Republicans is over-confidence

The conventional wisdom about the US presidential election has taken a sharp turn from the presumed inevitability of a victory for Vice President Kamala Harris to former President Donald Trump having the race in the bag.
With fewer than two weeks to go until election day and early voting already happening in multiple states, Trump’s biggest risk right now might be Republican overconfidence.
Not to pick on anyone in particular, but the influential conservative commentator Erick Erickson is a prominent example. In September he penned an open letter to Trump, warning the GOP nominee, “If you do not win the presidency, the Democrats will probably cart you off to jail”. Erickson added, “I have maintained that, were it held today, you would win the election… The last few days, however, have made me rethink who would win.”
At the time, everyone was talking about Laura Loomer somehow driving the Trump message, a presidential debate in which Harris was perceived to have done well (and which Trump plainly didn’t want to repeat), and the way “vibes” and “joy” had been moving the polls since August.
Now? “Harris is giving up trying to win the White House and, instead, is trying to shore up House and Senate seats,” Erickson wrote on Tuesday. “This is exactly what Bob Dole did at the end of the 1996 campaign.”
Harris is definitely flailing. You don’t make Adolf Hitler and January 6 your closing argument if you believe that everything you were doing previously was working. At the same time, that renewed sense of urgency isn’t exactly surrendering either. Then-President Bill Clinton beat Dole by 8 points nationally and carried 31 states plus the District of Columbia 28 years ago (admittedly in a three-way race). Not even the most bearish political prognosticator thinks Harris is in Dole territory yet.
There are lots of data points that suggest Trump has the edge, but none of them is definitive. The early voting trends look favourable to the Republicans, but Democrats could still surge before non-election day voting ends. Democrats could also see a spike in election day turnout now that the pandemic is in the rearview mirror even for most liberals.
Is that the way I would bet? No, but nothing has happened that eliminates the possibility.
The public polling is basically a push, but there are numerous problems with public polls that limit their predictive power. We’re mostly assuming that, because Trump is so close to Harris nationally and actually leads in all or most of the battleground states this time, a 2016- or 2020-style polling error will cause him to win easily. But what if Trump’s obvious competitiveness in the public polls indicates that the pollsters have fixed their problems? Or what if they made new mistakes trying to correct the old ones and have instead overestimated Trump’s support?
Again, not the way that I would bet, but within the realm of possibility.
The strongest piece of evidence that Trump is ahead is that many people on both sides who would have access to expensive private polling data are behaving as if he is, not least the Harris campaign itself. But internal polls can be wrong or campaigns can ignore them to follow the candidate or top operatives’ gut-level instincts. So we don’t really know that with any certainty.
At this point, a lot of political cliches become relevant. It all comes down to turnout! The only poll that matters is on election day! What matters in an election is getting more votes than your opponent!
All truisms, but the reality is that different political actors have different theories about what the electorate will ultimately look like. Trump thinks the remaining undecided voters might be swayed by Tulsi Gabbard. Harris appears to believe the silver bullet is Liz Cheney. Whomever is right about their theory of the race, or at least closer to being right, will ultimately win.
The main thing that Harris still has going for her is that she has large money and staffing advantages over Trump. Her campaign is being run by people who may not be great at messaging, but are fairly skilled at the mechanics of turning out voters. Trump’s ground game has been outsourced to activists with no proven track record.
That doesn’t guarantee Harris will be more successful at getting her voters to show up than Trump will be. The early voting trends so far suggest either some level of Republican competence or organic GOP voter enthusiasm. But on paper, this is one edge Harris still has over Trump, and it is an important one.
Trump is also more reliant on low-propensity voters than Harris is. It’s also possible that late-deciding voters break hard enough for Harris to erase Trump’s apparent lead in the battleground states.
The main thing is that rank-and-file voters cannot become complacent if Trump is to win. He is probably ahead, but not nursing some insurmountable lead.