My Prediction for the 2024 Presidential Election

A Tsunami of Women Will Turn the Page of History

For the sake of personal accountability and fun, I want to make some specific predictions about the US Presidential election and to back things up with my reasoning.

I predict that Kamala Harris is going to win the popular vote with approximately a 6% margin (52% to 46%, with 1% to 3rd party) and she will win the Electoral College with 326 votes.

Those are definitely bold, out of the box predictions, but here is the logic.

First, every election since Roe v Wade was overturned has resulted in strong turnout, particularly from women. In the early voting in states tracking gender, we’re seeing 54% women vs. 43% men (2% are not known). Moreover, in Pennsylvania around 1/3rd of the Democratic women are women who did not vote in the last presidential election. In terms of motivation, women’s enthusiasm is polling consistently higher than men’s in this election.

In the final week, late breaking deciders were going at least double digits and up to 2 to 1 for Harris. Trump had, by nearly all accounts, a poor closing week that was unfocused, peppered with violent threats and filled with racist moments that alienated Puerto Ricans, blacks, etc. The avalanche of Puerto Rican endorsements has not helped his cause with Latinos. Trump’s rallies were lower energy and sparsely attended in the final days.

I think the Iowa poll showing Harris at 3% ahead of Trump, which made big waves on Saturday, was not a statistical outlier, given the gold-standard quality of the pollster. I think it is an indication of the momentum swing against Trump, particularly with women. In that poll, Harris led Trump in Iowa by 28 points among independent women and by 35 points among women over 65 years old.

I believe that older women, in particular, do not want to see our country torn apart by violence regardless of their political leanings. Trump made it clear in his closing pitches that the violence of January 6th and the extreme polarization of his first term would only be worse if given the keys to the Oval Office again. He threatened internal “enemies,” the media and even fellow Republicans with violence, just in the last week.

Whereas some men are willing to tolerate inflammatory and violent rhetoric, I think women, and particularly older women, are finally saying no to a campaign that has been built on a steroidal and aggressive appeal to hyper-masculinity from start to finish. They simply don’t want a politics that resembles the UFC. They are motivated to protect the rights of their daughters and granddaughters, prevent further violence in speech and deed, and generally have a peaceful and prosperous country.

So women are ultra-motivated, the closing stretch is going badly for Trump, Harris has a more massive warchest, and the Democrats have an incredibly sophisticated get out the vote operation vs. an operation outsourced to paid newbies through Musk.

There is also the Taylor Swift factor and its mobilization of the younger female vote (which does not show up in polls of likely voters and skews heavily to Harris). African Americans are mobilizing in a dramatic way and their latest polls are trending closer to historical norms, with 87% for Harris. Just in Georgia alone, there have been one million early voters who are black and probably 55% of those are women (who are even more for Harris). Statistically, before counting any other non-black votes in Georgia, that gives about a 900K vote head start to Harris. If white women are starting to break for Harris as appears to be the case in Iowa, it’s going to result in a win in Georgia. Georgia estimates they will have counted 70% of the total vote by 8 pm Eastern, which means we could see an early call of that race if the female and black vote surge is as large as I’m anticipating.

In 2020, there wasn’t a great deal of real passion for Joe Biden but more of a visceral disgust with Donald Trump. By contrast, Kamala Harris’ campaign has been electric from start to finish, with massive genuine enthusiasm and an outpouring of sustainable joy. That makes a big difference in getting people to the polls as most people want to vote for something rather than just against something.

While there may have been some minor migration of independent voters to Trump earlier in the campaign season, less partisan-identified voters have seen clearly in the closing weeks that his bad traits are now worse in many ways than the last term. Trump is less focused and more vindicative. All of this doesn’t yet factor in that that he also lost a not insignificant chunk of traditional Republicans such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger with his January 6th insurrection.

I thus think we’re going to see some increase in turnout over 2020 since there is a lot of genuine, real passion now that wasn’t happening then AND there remains the prospect of another Trump term to convince people it’s important to weigh in, plus the Dobbs decision, which was a wake-up for women. I don’t think Trump is going to make up for the voters he has lost, particularly as he’s been targeting low-propensity young male votes and has done little to appeal to women.

Out of 158 million votes in 2020, Joe Biden received 81 million votes and Donald Trump 74 million, with the remainder to third parties. Early voting has already hit 81 million votes, so there are indications of a strong turnout. I predict Kamala Harris is going to get something closer to 87 million votes and Donald will be around 72 million, having hemorraghed some Republican support permanently and losing still more women as a result of Roe v. Wade’s repeal. Adding 4 million total votes for the combined Democrats or Republican candidates is only a 2.5% increase in turnout, which seems plausible given the genuine passion mobilized this time and the motivation of women to protect the rights for the next generations.

To get to my prediction of 326 Electoral College votes will require Harris winning all of the battleground states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona) plus Iowa and the single electoral vote from Maine. This is consistent with something closer to a four point polling error, which I think can be attributed to the gender differences in motivation and the youth (and particularly female) vote that does not yet have a voting history and thus is effectively minimized in horse-race polls.

All of the above has, I believe, been made more likely because Harris has portrayed herself consistently as the underdog, Trump has portrayed himself as the favorite, and pollsters and bettors have reinforced the narrative of a deadlocked election (Nate Silver’s final average is as close to 50-50 as you can statistically get). The perceived tightness in the race, I believe, is more motivating for women because of the repulsion so many feel for Donald Trump as well as their desire to protect women’s rights that they once took for granted. Women have been hustling across the country like their lives depend on it, much moreso than men. They are also better enrollers, so I think far more women are getting their women friends to the polls.

Another factor is that polling has become increasingly complex since people no longer answer phones (1 in 140 I read), which means there is a lot of gerry-rigging of the demographics of polling groups to try to mirror the anticipated electorate. Effectively, what this does is tilt the polls towards the last results and make them resistant to new trends that could shape the race in a different direction. Pollsters have had two elections to study and more accurately model Trump’s support (which means they likely have captured it in current polls) but they don’t have the same dataset to model the higher enthusiasm, turnout and motivation of women in this election in the same way. I think a 4% polling miss on Harris (from 47.8% to 52%) seems plausible to me, given all the above and the possibility that many women may quietly vote for Harris without trumpeting that fact to husbands or friends who are more conservative (the so-called “shy” Harris voter).

Trump supporters have been vocal and publicly aggressive in their support whereas women in particular, feeling the threat of violence and misogyny, are probably more likely to not state their preferences publicly.

In 2020, women were 52% of the vote. This year, they could well be 54% or more based on early voting trends. That extra boost of participation is partially coming from women who did not actually vote last time and,we can assume they are going to heavily tilt to Harris. That turnout edge alone could give her 2-3 additional million votes.

My prediction is thus that Kamala’s victory will be resounding enough to quell attempts by Trump to call it into question as the trendlines will be evident everywhere (including red states) rather than in one or two closely divided swing states.

It’s going to be a massive avalanche of women across our nation that buries Trump politically and that is going to be unmistakeable, even to the MAGA diehards. While Trump will still likely attempt to challenge the vote, I think the energy will dissipate as the magnitude of the collective vote shift sinks in.

Finally, I believe that it is simply time to turn the page and mark a new beginning for our country. I’m really looking forward to showing my five and seven year old girls that they truly can do anything with their lives now. They have been dumbfounded that there has never been a woman President until now.

It is time. Let’s do this America. We’re ready for a President Harris.