Why I'm Voting For Kamala Harris
Or, my plea to go to a bottomless margarita drag brunch with Steve Kornacki
I want to keep this introduction brief because I think the last thing everyone—myself included—wants to read the day before this election is another think piece or personal essay or a laundry list of everything Donald Trump is going to destroy if he’s re-elected.
For the majority of this piece, I want to look at polling and what it can tell us about this presidential election, the strategy Trump has indicated he will play should he not win the race, and my final thoughts on this election cycle. I picked each of these topics for a specific reason: because I am an avid poll consumer and I want to do something good to negate all the agita they cause; because we need to prepare for a complicated constitutional legal battle without much precedent; and because I am honestly burnt out by this shit-for-brains experience.
This part, though, is just some thoughts I’ve had. It’s not an apology or an effort to convince anyone of anything—I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and I need to excise it from myself. Where better to be earnest than the internet, right?
I voted for Kamala Harris last Tuesday with hope. Since the end of July when Joe Biden dropped out of the race and her campaign began, I have more often than not had a buzzing feeling of possibility that was not there when I voted in 2020. It has reminded me of when I was 10 years old and all of the 5th-grade classes in my elementary school were invited to the all-purpose room to watch President Obama’s inauguration on one of those wheelie TVs.
When you’re 10, you don’t have the vocabulary to describe certain sensations or realizations so I’m helping my younger self out when I say watching the crowd on the screen and watching my teachers in the room with me was the first time I understood what it was like to believe in something that much bigger than yourself. If I’m being honest with you all, this is the first out of the three presidential elections I’ve voted in that I have felt this excited for a candidate…like I have full-on libbed-out on multiple occasions in the past 106 days, including on Saturday night at 11:40 pm.
But, still being honest here, I do understand why some people might still have a hard time voting for her. Harris has said several things while campaigning that have given me pause. I can’t stand ever feeling like I’m being bamboozled or taken for a fool and there have been moments over the past three months when I’ve wondered if I’m walking into a bureaucratic trap by supporting her.
When I sat with myself and I think of how I wanted to use my vote, I wanted to use it in support of something just as much as I wanted to use it against something else. I did not vote for Kamala Harris because I’m a hardcore establishment Democrat, and I did not vote for her as a compromise between the lesser of two evils. I did not vote for her out of fear even though I’m terrified of a future in which Trump is in office again.
I voted for Kamala Harris because I believe in the potential for change. Despite everything this country has irreparably fucked up, there have always been people who have seen the potential and acted in ways to make life here better. She is not our savior and she is not going to be perfect, but I believe she is our best path forward to save ourselves and this world.
Sorry to My Therapist!!! I Read a Lot of Polls and Poll Analysis For This Section!!!!
A couple of weeks ago, my therapist and I were working through my election-related anxiety. Her number one suggestion, in no uncertain terms, was to stop checking the polls. They’re not the most reliable metrics, she reminded me, especially in an election as close and contentious as this.
“You’re so right,” I told her, nodding my head to really emphasize that she was seen and heard. Then we hung up and I immediately went to the New York Times’ poll tracker.
During presidential and midterm election years, I have a toxic relationship with polling which, to be fair to myself, is kind of the only relationship people can have with polling (The Needle, anyone?). Political polling is exactly what it sounds like: random groups of people are asked about their political leanings and the data is then analyzed to make predictions as to how races will be decided. According to Caltech’s Science Exchange,
to avoid overrepresenting some groups and underrepresenting others, factors such as age, race, gender, educational attainment, or region are given more or less weight in the final polling results so the sample more closely matches the demographics of the full population.
How do you know if a poll is trustworthy? Credible polls report their margin of error, which shows how much the result of a poll could vary from reality. Other factors to consider are the poll's funders, the pollster's sampling methods, and the specific questions participants were asked. Also keep in mind that even if a poll relies on a good national sample, it can be difficult to generate precise results about smaller subareas or subgroups. Polling firms who participate in industry transparency initiatives have been found to be more accurate than those that do not.
Many people, such as myself, often look to polls as crystal balls that preemptively tell us what will happen on Election Day. There is a rational, sensible part of my brain that understands that’s not true; that even good polling pulls from a select amount of data and, like most analyses, is often subjective to the pollster. Then there’s also a rabid dog in my brain that starts screaming whenever I see a new poll drop.
On Saturday, in the poll heard around the internet, Iowa pollster Ann Selzer released her final prediction with the Des Moines Register that showed Kamala Harris winning the state by three points. For context, Iowa was not a state considered to be up for grabs as Trump won it by eight points in 2020 and nearly ten points in 2016. If you’re not a math girlie like me, “points” represent the percentage of difference between the final vote counts—so Trump won 53.09% of the vote in Iowa in 2020 while Biden won 44.89%, which rounds up to approximately 8% or eight points when you subtract 44.89% from 53.09%. Are you proud of me, Dad?
As for Selzer’s credentials as a pollster, she
has been in the field since the late 1980s, and her track record is nearly flawless—in the past 12 years, she’s only been wrong about the result of the 2018 Iowa gubernatorial race. In 2016, her surveys were the canary in the coal mine: While most pollsters had Hillary Clinton definitely winning the election, Selzer bucked conventional wisdom and found that the Democratic nominee would likely lose Iowa, foreshadowing what would later happen across the country. And when many pollsters in 2020 had President Joe Biden winning the race decisively, Selzer’s final poll hinted at how the election would ultimately be decided by razor-thin margins due to Trump’s strength among blue-collar and independent voters (X).
Now you might be wondering how Selzer got to this prediction when so many polls—if not nearly all of them—have been predicting a near-even split between Harris and Trump. There are two notable reasons why this is happening, along with countless other factors I don’t have the time or space to break down. In elections as close as this one, there is a phenomenon known as poll herding which is when pollsters start “clustering their results around the idea that the race is 50-50 in order to avoid looking like they’re wrong”(X).
Fellow avid pollheads, I’m going to need you to hold my hand when I tell you I’m about to quote Nate Silver for a bit.1 Silver put out a piece on his Substack this past Friday that went in depth as to why there is clear proof of poll herding in this election, explaining that
if pollsters are doing honest work, we should see a lot more “outliers” than we do—even if people love to complain about them on Twitter.
In our database as of this afternoon’s model run, there were 249 polls in the seven battleground states that met Silver Bulletin standards and did at least some of their fieldwork in October. How many of them showed the race in either direction within 2.5 percentage points, close enough that you could basically call it a tie?
Well, 193 of them did, or 78 percent. That’s way more than you should get in theory—even if the candidates are actually exactly tied in all seven states, which they almost certainly aren’t…
This is a clear-as-day example of what we call herding: the tendency of some polling firms to move with the flock by file-drawering (not publishing) results that don’t match the consensus or torturing their turnout models until they do. Some pollsters, like the New York Times/Siena College, don’t do this, and are proud to own their work even when it differs from the polling averages…
Whatever happens on Tuesday, it would be a surprise if there were no surprises.
The other reason why Selzer’s prediction stands as an outlier to the herd is best captured by this comment she made to the Des Moines Register: “‘Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,’ Selzer said.”
In 2020, an NBC News exit poll found that among White women,
43 percent supported Biden and 55 percent supported Trump. About 91 percent of Black women supported the former vice president and 8 percent supported Trump. Roughly 70 percent of Latina women supported Biden and 28 percent supported the outgoing president.
There was little meaningful change from 2016, when the same exit poll showed that 43 percent of White women supported Clinton and 52 percent supported Trump; 94 percent of Black women supported Clinton and 4 percent supported Trump; and 69 percent of Latinas supported Clinton and 25 percent supported Trump (X).2
According to Selzer’s polling,
independent voters, who had consistently supported Trump in the leadup to this election, now break for Harris. That’s driven by the strength of independent women, who back Harris by a 28-point margin, while independent men support Trump, but by a smaller margin.
Similarly, senior voters who are 65 and older favor Harris. But senior women support her by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%, while senior men favor her by just 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%.
I’m not a political scientist or a pollster or much good at clue-based games. But what I think we’re seeing is a significant shift, primarily among white women of all ages, towards Harris and the Democrats that may not be represented yet in the aggregate.
Just a shot in the dark as to why this might be: according to a Pew Research Center survey from May of this year, “63% [of Americans] say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.” One respondent to Selzer’s poll shared that
“I like her policies on reproductive health and having women choosing their own health care, and the fact that I think that she will save our democracy and follow the rule of law,” said Linda Marshall, a 79-year-old poll respondent from Cascade who has already cast her absentee ballot for Harris.
The registered Democrat said she identifies as pro-life but doesn’t think anyone should make that choice for somebody else.
“I just believe that if the Republicans can decide what you do with your body, what else are they going to do to limit your choice, for women?” she said (X).
Why am I telling you all of this? Because I’m feeling a little hopeful and I wanted to share it. Polls often cause me so much anxiety but for the first time this year, they’re tentatively showing positive shifts in regions and demographics often thought to be sure bets. Yes, it’s terrifying to wonder if everywhere and everyone will be up for grabs in elections going forward (for example: New York State’s legislature is very close to losing its Democratic supermajority).
But it’s also a little bit exciting to think that people have this much capacity to change. And, if truly nothing else, it could be a great opportunity to bully pollsters into being more like Ann Selzer.
Now onto the bad stuff!
The Fact That the 1800s Have Any Role In This Conversation Makes Me Physically Uncomfortable
Candidly, this is the section where I will make a case for Harris by way of making a case for voting against Donald Trump. True, that’s kind of the ethos of this entire newsletter, but I want to be upfront with you about why this section is here. This shit is so brilliantly terrifying and to know that a candidate was actively planning for something like it is something that cannot be undersold.
Back in September, I saw a TikTok from lawyer and content creator Daria Rose explaining the Trump Campaign’s strategy to use the Constitution to have the House of Representatives decide the election:
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In case you haven’t read the Twelfth Amendment ever in a while, it states that
the Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States…
There are 538 electors across the country and candidates need to amass 270 of them to win the election—aka the Electoral College. In order for a state to pledge their electors to a candidate, local and state officials need to certify the results which is formally confirming to the federal government that the elections in their states were free and fair.
As Daria explains, these officials
can essentially just go rogue. Their defense for this would be that there was fraud on some level...This is happening: a recent Rolling Stone article found that there are at least 70 officials in key swing states that are 2020 Deniers with a history of pro-DJT radical conspiracies…As Mark Elias, one of the main lawyers for the VP Harris team, put it, and I quote: “I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify in November.”
If a state refuses to certify results—their officials argue to the board of electors and the secretary of state that they have enough evidence of fraud—that could lead to neither candidate reaching 270 electors or an Electoral College majority.
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What happens then? You’ll never believe it—the Twelfth Amendment lays that out, too:
The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice…
The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice.
So the president will be elected by the House of Representatives which currently has a GOP majority and is run by People’s Most Haunted Man Alive, Speaker Mike Johnson. Look, I know how out of left field this strategy sounds but it does have a precedent: we very briefly talked about the 1824 Election in our wide-spanning overview of partisanship in America, which saw the end of the Era of Good Feelings. In that election, four candidates from the same party ran against each other, somehow all on different platforms. No candidate reached a majority of electors so the House had to decide with each state delegation getting one vote, and that is how John Quincy Adams became president.
I hate to say it but unfortunately, I can’t help but appreciate good drama, even when it’s from my least favorite people—this is far more creative than having the Supreme Court decide the election. The fact that there is not only historical precedent for this move but also Constitutional protection??? However, it also shows that a key difference between the Trump Campaign in 2016 and the Trump Campaign now is that the people in his orbit are far smarter and will be far more effective at executing their harmful agenda.
Ok but why should this make me vote against Trump by voting for Harris?
If Harris wins by a large enough margin in the Electoral College, it will be harder to enact this plan. Even if one state refuses to certify the results, if she carries enough electors elsewhere, this whole thing will be a moot point.
But the problem is that there have already been a handful of troubling news stories coming out of at least two of the key battleground states. In Georgia, voters from Cobb County “who requested absentee ballots on time but did not receive them on time due to the county’s failure to mail them promptly” were denied an extension by the Georgia Supreme Court (X). Originally, a lower court ruled “to extend the absentee ballot acceptance deadline after equipment issues and high application volumes,” but “the Republican National Committee and Georgia Republican Party's lawsuit led to the reversal of the extended deadline by the state’s highest court, with a split amongst justices in the decision” (X).
Similarly, journalist Tess Garcia shared on her Instagram story that although her absentee ballot was sent back to Michigan two weeks ago, it still hasn’t been received or processed. She later posted another story with accounts from others in the state who have found themselves in a similar position.
This gives the Trump Campaign and his supporters the first steps they need in order to cry fraud and potentially set this strategy in motion. Michigan has 15 electoral votes and Georgia has 16 and without either state in play, it becomes very hard for both candidates to cross the 270 threshold:
This section freaked me the fuck out to write. I watched the amazing efforts of organizers in Georgia—some of whom I get to call my friends!!!—turn the state blue in 2020. I know people who now cannot vote in this election because of these decisions. To vote for Harris—especially in any of the above states—might not be exactly what all of us want to do. But to vote against Trump and all of the people he now has in his corner expertly designing the most diabolical plans for him should be a far easier thing to do. I don’t want to fearmonger because that serves no one, but I also don’t want to find out what else he and his cronies have up their sleeves.
If you still feel conflicted about supporting Harris for any number of reasons, I want to emphasize that I get that feeling. But know that your vote is not the only thing you can do to exercise your power and stay in alignment with your morals.
This Could Be the Start of Something New…?
Heading into this week feels weird, not least in part because Daylight Savings Time still somehow exists??? (In case you need another reason to vote down ballot, the Senate passed the Sunshine Protect Act in 2022 but the House, which the GOP has led since then, has yet to bring it to a vote.)
I want to do more without preaching or catastrophizing or bullying or being generally unpleasant. I want to doomsday prep but I also want to celebrate and go to Amor Loco’s bottomless margarita drag brunch with Steve Kornacki. I want to cocoon with my friends and family so that no matter what happens, we’re safe and warm and autonomous.
I’m sure there are other people who also feel every single emotion in rapid succession just as I’m sure there are some reading this who feel at ease somehow. I’m sure there are people who, like my mom, have wanted to vote for Kamala Harris since 2019 just as I’m sure there are people who don’t want to vote for her at all.
This section was going to be far more expansive with resource links to organize within your community and to continue advocating for causes you care about on and off the ballot. In the process of researching all of this, I actually found and signed up to volunteer with my neighborhood’s organization as a member of its Government Committee. I wanted to write it as a guide for anyone who feels conflicted, angry, or scared—basically anything short of being in the mood to go to Amor Loco’s bottomless drag brunch with Steve Kornacki—but I personally have been conflicted, angry, and scared a lot over the past few days and it felt disingenuous to hobble something this important together without the time and care I could offer it.
I don’t have any resounding wisdom or set point at the end of this piece today. I don’t know what this week is going to look like or how I’ll feel at the end of it. This is the first presidential election we’ve gone through together here at E4P and while I don’t feel like I did my best this time, I really hope there’s another one in four years when we can try this again.
Early voting has already ended in most states but there is still time to vote if you haven’t already!!! Make sure you know what’s on your ballot and make sure you take care of yourself this week!!!
To the uninitiated: Nate Silver, of 538 fame, has been a polarizing figure in political polling…to say the least. In 2022, he notoriously Tweeted that “Eric Adams would be in my top 5 for ‘who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden?’.”
Of course, exit polling is not the most reliable form of data collection, but nearly every source of measurement found white women have been a little too overenthusiastic when it comes to voting for Trump in the past two elections.
https://open.substack.com/pub/billionairbear/p/when-the-door-shuts?r=1g5bw0&utm_medium=ios