This Election Isn't a Tossup

2024 Electoral College ratings and the state of the race after the debate.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

With the first and last debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump now having come and gone, the 2024 presidential election has finally entered its home stretch. With the exception of the VP debate in early October—which, if history is any indication, won’t have any impact on the election at all—there are no set major events to get to between now and November. The tickets have been confirmed, the conventions have been held, the debates have been debated and Trump’s trials and sentencings have been delayed and postponed. Absent possible developments overseas, which I will go over later on in this article, all we have left to watch going forward are the polls, which are now more important than ever before.

This has put many commentators in something of an awkward position. For the past number of months, the default mode of political analysis has been to emphasize uncertainty above all else. And this wasn’t ass-covering. It was the correct stance to take. For the longest time, we legitimately did not know what the main dynamics of this race would be or what the tickets would even look like. We didn’t know if Biden would drop out, or who would replace him if he did. When he was replaced with Kamala, we didn’t know how she would be received, what role the conventions would play, how the debate would go or how important it would be. Even those, like myself, who felt that one candidate was in a better position than the other had to emphasize that such analysis was highly theoretical and completely liable to change.

But now, suddenly, without any warning, we are in a position where we truly do know a lot about what may happen in November. If you don’t believe me, just look at history. It was at this point in 2016 that we knew that Hillary wasn’t going to cruise to victory, and that there was something about Trump that kept drawing voters back to him even after major scandals. In 2018, it was evident around now that Republicans had run out of time to stop a blue wave, but that Democratic hopes of flipping the Senate were likely dashed. In 2020, it was clear that Biden had a very real advantage over Trump, and in 2022, there was already a mountain of evidence that we weren’t on track for a red wave that year.

We are in a similar position for this year’s election. When she first entered the race and was still trailing in the polls, I went out on a limb to say that Kamala had enough opportunities ahead of her to already be on track to defeat Trump. Now, it appears that those pieces have come into place. While things look set to be close and not everything has gone according to plan, we have enough information about the dynamics of this race to know that it is Kamala Harris who holds the advantage in the race to 270 electoral votes. Here’s why she’s on track to win, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love Mark Robinson.

The Official Ettingermentum Post-debate Electoral College Ratings. No Tossups.