With 60 days left before the election, Donald Trump faces a narrowing path to victory, while Vice President Kamala Harris’ path has only widened.
Trump confronted a similarly daunting challenge in 2016 and pulled it off, despite losing the popular vote by almost 3 million. He wasn’t so lucky in 2020. So what’s different this year?
In 2016, Trump won with 304 electoral votes to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 227—both candidates lost votes to faithless electors—but that margin belied what was a painfully close race.
His victory was built on winning the entire South, Arizona, and the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump won Wisconsin by about 23,000 votes, Michigan by about 11,000, and Pennsylvania by about 44,000. The entire election hinged on just 78,000 votes, likely within the margin created by then-Director of the FBI James Comey’s “but her emails” letter, which was released about a week before Election Day.
In 2020, President Joe Biden ousted Trump by the same 306-232 margin (if you assign those 2016 faithless electors to the states Clinton and Trump won), though Biden’s path was different.
Biden flipped the same three battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those three got him to 279 electoral votes, just past the 270 necessary to win. However, he also managed to flip Arizona and Georgia, each by a hair.
Still, the electoral vote margin obscured what was once again an exceedingly tight race (despite Biden’s massive popular-vote margin of 7 million). Biden won Wisconsin by about 20,000, Georgia by about 12,000, and Arizona by about 11,000. Flip those 43,000 votes and we have a 269-269 tie, meaning that (through a complicated process) state delegations in the U.S. House would’ve picked Trump for a second term. Flip another 34,000 votes in Nevada, and Trump has a clean win.
The Electoral College is an idiotic system.
I’m still waiting for more state-level polling to come in to write a follow-up to the pre-convention polling roundup I wrote several weeks ago. But we have enough to get a general sense of the race.
As I wrote Tuesday, Trump’s campaign has placed significant ad reservations only in Georgia and Pennsylvania, while Harris has all those states covered. That suggests a flailing, confused Republican campaign.
But things are still close! Here’s what the map looks like if you mark states with a less than 1-percentage-point margin as undecided:
With that map, Harris is at 251 electoral votes, just 19 shy of the necessary 270. Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes, would get her there by itself. As would a combination of North Carolina (16 electoral votes) and any other undecided state. Same goes for a combo of Georgia (16 electoral votes) and another undecided state.
Meanwhile, based on his current margins, Trump has only 219 core electoral votes—51 shy of 270. He has to win a lot of states to get him over the hump. Pennsylvania alone gets him to only 238, and it’s a must-win state for him. Trump has virtually no path to victory without it. Beyond that, he has to win at least Georgia and North Carolina (each have 16 electoral votes), which, including Pennsylvania, would get him to exactly 270. Or he needs one of either Georgia or North Carolina, and then Arizona (11 electoral votes) and Nevada (a combined 17 electoral votes).
Obviously, it’s not an impossible task, but it’s a lot more difficult for Trump to sweep so many states, especially since he’s only marginally ahead in Arizona and North Carolina right now.
Complicating things for Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the former independent presidential candidate who recently endorsed Trump—remains on the ballot in Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, despite his efforts to remove himself. Kennedy was funded by right-wing billionaires hoping he would take votes from Biden. However, Kennedy appears to draw more support from Trump than from Harris, and it’s hilarious that Kennedy may ultimately cost Republicans the race. Even 1-2 points that would have otherwise gone to Trump could mean the difference.
We’re still waiting on more high-quality, state-level polling to clarify the state of the race. With the Democratic convention behind us, will Harris’ polling lead—3.1 points in 538 national polling average—be affected? Will the financial disparity between the two parties boost Harris further? Will Trump’s continued cognitive challenges finally unnerve at least some of his supporters? Will next week’s debate move the numbers? So many questions!
But as of now, Harris’ path to victory is much cleaner and attainable than Trump’s.
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