Open Thread 172: US Election 2024 Special

Predict the Future of Our Democracy!

Predictions Contest

I will be accepting election predictions in the comments until 8 am ET. Offer them in this format to 2 decimal places (placeholder example):

Trump: 47.90%
Harris: 48.54%
EC: Harris 257 - Trump 281

Rules: There will be separate winners for the popular vote and the EC results. The winner of the popular vote will be the contestant with the smallest difference from the final results for Trump and Harris added together. The winner of the EC vote will be the contestants who get the correct number of EC votes for each candidate, or are closest to it (if there’s a tie the winner will be the one with the best prediction of the popular vote).

Prizes: The two winners get a lifetime comp to EHC.zone. In the unlikely event this contest blows up despite its late hour (>50 participants), each winner will also get $50 in ETH to their wallet. You will also be acknowledged in the next Open Thread which will gain you immense prestige.

My Prediction

I decided to stick with my Kamala victory prediction from July, although it’s now obviously much lower confidence. Trump is truly Teflon.

Popular Vote: I don’t want people clustering around me so I will update with my popular results prediction closer to the deadline here and in a comment.

EC: Harris 270 - Trump 268 (X).

We will see how I do relative to my past US elections predictions (all correct except 2016 but I gave Trump much higher chances than average).

Endorsement (FWIW)

I endorse Kamala Harris in the swing states (to defeat Trump), and Chase Oliver elsewhere (most aligned).

I wrote a 7,000 word article explaining why. There’s also a short video for the audio-visual crowd (X, YouTube).

AK Trivia: My past endorsements - 2024: Kamala; 2020: Trump (unenthusiastic); 2016: Trump (MAGA chud); 2012: Obama; 2008: Obama; 2004: Kerry; 2000: Gore.

Reader Poll

Additional Comments

I will be traveling tomorrow (Leipzig) so I probably won’t be Tweeting or commenting much. So just to get in some last words:

1) I agree with the consensus that this election is going to be close.

2) By far the likeliest two scenarios are either a Trump or a Harris sweep of the swing states. My 270-268 prediction is based on vibes and feels for what a max chaos/entertainment result would be (Elon Musk: “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”)

If the result is 270-268 or something else very close, I expect major shenanigans as the Trump campaign scours for faithless electors. I don’t see a reason why it couldn’t work in principle, in which case it might set off a legitimacy crisis. Fanciful scenario here.

3) I stand by my call that this election will have the greatest gender gap in history due to the renewed salience of the abortion debate after Trump’s judges repealed Roe v. Wade, as well as the disturbing normalization of misogyny on the fringes of the Republican coalition (e.g. Tateism is both far more popular and far more extreme than anything I can recall from the mid-2010s Alt Right).

4) The Tech Right defection aside, the level of educational polarization is also going to be unprecedented. Smart people are not going to be voting for the party that pedestalizes fluoride truthers and demonologists except for cynical or ultra-rationalizing reasons (apart from Hanania, some great examples in this genre are Max Lott and Samuel Hammond).

5) Increasing educational polarization should have interesting electoral effects that few are paying attention to. For instance, note that the Rustbelt swing states have higher average IQs than the Sunbelt states (Pesta 2023). (The differences are less stark for tertiary educational attainment - though Pennsylvania is distinctly ahead of the rest - but I suspect the correlations are better for IQ than education anyway). Consequently, all else equal, I expect Democrat strength to increase in relative terms in the north and decrease in the south. In the event that there is no sweep, scenarios in which Kamala keeps the Blue Wall and loses the Sunbelt are far likelier than the converse. This is reinforced by continued pro-Trump gains amongst Latinos, which I expect to continue into this election (e.g. see the amusing demographics of the groyper movement… Yes, I know the groypers turned against Trump because he’s pro-Israel and not sufficiently anti-abortion, but they’re just the edgiest edge). So I would be incredibly surprised to see scenarios in which say Kamala wins Arizona and Nevada but loses Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.

Some other thoughts: Trump should do a lot better in California than in 2020. Obviously it’s still a total wipeout for him, but in between Tech Right dissatisfaction and low average IQ - it’s very much a state where the “smart fractions” pull along the rest - and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s margin collapses by 7% or even 10% points (especially since Californians can make protest statements like this without actually contributing to Trump’s chances of winning). This is obviously going to have an effect on the national popular vote share, which between this and Trump’s greater strength relative to 2020 should now be much narrower.

More speculatively, the gap in the Kamala-Trump margin between Florida and Texas will be lower than between Biden-Trump in 2020. Florida is lower IQ and is a scientific desert, and gains prestige as the home base of the Mar-a-Lago MAGA elite, whereas Texas has a much higher Nature Index performance and has even had some actual EHC influx (Austin) while also having imposed a total abortion ban that annoys EHC and women in particular.