Kamala Harris Is Unlikely To Win

If you're going to replace Biden, do it with someone who will win

Kamala Harris is now as good as guaranteed to be the Democratic nominee. The betting odds have her at 92%, she’s been endorsed by everyone who might conceivably run against her, she’s secured enough electoral votes to win, and the second most likely nominee according to the betting markets is Michelle Obama, who has made it clear over and over again that she has no interest in politics. We are not having Gavin or anyone else—Harris is pretty much sure to be the nominee.

I was guessing the nominee would be Biden. I was, it turns out, completely wrong about this. It seems Biden didn’t want to drop out till the end, but I underestimated the competency of the Democratic elites in ousting Biden, and failed to realize that a concerted effort of Pelosi et al could oust a nominee. Pelosi comes away from this sounding pretty bad-ass—to quote one Politico article:

“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” said one Democrat familiar with private conversations who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”

This is now the second mistaken prediction I’ve made about Biden—the other one being my prediction that he’d do fine in the debate. This should cause you to take me a bit less seriously, though hopefully my pretty good forecasting record, combined with most of my subject matter expertise being in non-forecasting domains should mitigate the extent to which this occurs (the number four forecaster on Manifold is also a big fan of the blog—so hopefully that also mitigates these concerns somewhat). Nonetheless, I got stuff wrong, and when people get stuff wrong you should generally take them less seriously.

I think ousting Biden was clearly the correct choice. Biden was a massive underdog in polls and prediction markets, his brain had turned to goo sometime in the last year, and he was fundamentally incapable of running anything resembling a functional campaign. I’m pretty anti-Trump, so I’m glad that the guy who was almost guaranteed to lose to Trump has been replaced.

But I’m discouraged that he’s been replaced with someone else who will also probably lose to Trump. The betting markets—which are highly reliable—estimate that Harris has only about a 1 in 3 chance of being the next president, despite being pretty much guaranteed to be the nominee. Of all the people who might have been the nominee, Harris was the second most likely one to lose.

Harris is, like Biden, relatively unpopular. Voters, for good or for bad, find her to be quite unlikeable—too stiff, too willing to spit out phrases like “what can be, unburdened by what has been,” not the kind of person they’d like to grab a beer with. Harris is, like Hillary and Desantis, not liked by the voters, seeming, in the minds of many, similarly wooden and awkward.

Trump is up 1.7 percent nationally against Harris. Remember, if the Democrats win by anything less than 2 percent, they’ll probably lose the Electoral College, as Clinton did in 2016. If it’s tied, or even if Democrats are slightly ahead in the popular votes, they will lose. For Harris to win, she’ll have to be up 5ish% on election day relative to where she is now.

It’s certainly possible that she’ll do this. The betting markets say 1/3 odds that she does. Things with 1 in 3 odds happen about a third of the time. She’s certainly not completely doomed. But her odds aren’t good.

Now, perhaps if she does well in the debates, that would cause her to gain a bit of ground. But she’d have to do really well. Biden went down around 4% between the debate and the present. Harris would thus have to have a groundswell in support as substantial as the collapse in Biden’s support after it became clear to the American people that he couldn’t say words. It’s hard to imagine how this would happen, even if Harris has a good debate performance (which I expect her to—I think she’s a better debater than Trump).

Harris will be saddled with the accomplishments of the generally unpopular Biden administration. While she has an advantage over Biden of being able to say words—even combined in vast assemblages known as sentences—it’s hard to imagine this giving her enough of a boost to make her victorious.

Her odds are a lot better than Biden’s. Trump is unpopular, Harris is smart and good at debating, and hasn’t done anything wildly terrible. She’s younger than Trump and better at speaking fluently (just as Biden declined a lot relative to his 2020 self, Trump declined as well, though, of course, much less). Now that she’s the nominee, she might become more popular.

But often nominees become less popular. When the ire of the Republican party became squarely aimed on Hillary Clinton, she became less popular. Clinton was much more popular early in the primary than late in the Primary—she went from up around 10 percent in the national polls, to only up 2ish percent.

And the polls, even at this early stage, look bad in the swing states. She’s down in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and all the other swing states. If the Democrats were serious about winning, they shouldn’t have picked a candidate who is losing in all the Swing states. They should have picked someone like Newsom, who the prediction markets expect to win.

Yes, Newsom was down in the polls. But Newsom hadn’t begun campaigning yet and is more charismatic than Harris. As Bill Maher notes, while people call Newsom slick as an insult, we want someone slick. No one has been calling Biden slick. Slick is what people call you when you’re good at talking but they don’t like you. We want someone who talks good :).

I’m all for replacing the guy with mashed potato for brains. But don’t replace him with the person with mashed potato for likeability (I’ll confess, that one made more sense in my head). If we’re serious about beating Trump—and we should be—then we should nominate someone who is likely to beat him, rather than someone with a 1 in 3 chance of beating him.

The Democrats have not learned the lesson of nominating Biden. Replacing an unpopular candidate may be messy and politically difficult, but it’s necessary if you don’t want to get crushed. Nominating Newsom or Whitmer or Pritzger or Shapiro would be a much better bet than nominating Harris.

The Democrats need to recognize that they’re down. The race isn’t a toss-up—they’re losing in every swing state, where both nominees are known. You want variance when you’re losing. And while Democrats are in a much better position than they were when Biden was the nominee, they’re in a much worse position than they could have been if they’d taken a gamble. While a messy primary would have been a bit embarrassing and costly, it would be the best shot at beating Trump.

If Democrats are serious about Trump being a threat to Democracy and harming millions of people, they should act like it. They should be willing to take risks to win, even if those risks might embarrassingly blow up in their faces. They shouldn’t have just ousted the current president who can’t form a sentence, but also his roughly equally unpopular vice president.

To be clear, I’d have no problem with a president Harris. I think Biden has been a fine, though not great, president, and she’d be similar. But I do have a problem with a president Trump, and I don’t want to give the election to the party of animal torture, overturning elections, disastrous immigration restrictions, and existential risks, because the Democrats aren’t willing to take winning seriously.