My 2024 Election Predictions

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, November 04, 2024

 

Regular listeners of The Editors podcast will know that I have spent the last few months answering every request for an election prediction by insisting that the race remained a stubborn toss-up. Over time, my reasoning has oscillated a little, but, irrespective of the minutiae, I have stuck steadfastly to the middle zone, such that, even when I have roved off the literal 50–50 mark, it has never been by more than two points. Today, on the eve of the results, this is still my view. I have no idea what’s going to happen.

 

This uncertainty is not the product of “herding” or of a wish to avoid being wrong in public, and it has nothing to do with my long-standing refusal to vote for either candidate. Rather, when I combine the polls, my sense of the state of the country, and the feeling in my gut, a large neon sign appears before my eyes. It reads, “I Don’t Know.” Nevertheless, I am inevitably going to be asked to come down one way or the other, so here goes: Gun to my head, I think that Kamala Harris will win the presidency, that the Republicans will win 52 seats in the Senate, and that the Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives.

 

My rubric since the Dobbs decision was issued has been that, in this political environment, the Republican Party could probably survive an election with Dobbs looming large and that it could probably survive an election with Donald Trump on the ballot, but that it could probably not survive both of those things at the same time. In this election, the GOP is attempting to survive both at the same time. Donald Trump is still a bad candidate, and, by picking him for a third time, Republicans have continued to shed a huge number of their most historically reliable voters. It is true that the party has replaced some of those voters with others, but, thus far, it has not replaced enough of them to justify the shift. When one adds to this that the mainstream media is a corrupt arm of the Democratic Party and that the voting public is not as interested in this election as political types think it should be, I think one has to hand the advantage to Kamala Harris. If pushed, I would predict that Harris will take the three “blue wall” states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin), and possibly Georgia and North Carolina, too. I expect Arizona to go for Trump, and probably Nevada, too, but I could also see both going the other way.

 

That being so, I suspect that Republicans will have a mediocre night in the Senate and a bad night in the House. This would likely mean that the GOP would win three new Senate seats — West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio — but fail everywhere else (and spectacularly so in Arizona), which would yield a Republican majority of four. The House will be close, but, unlike the Senate, I think it will tilt to the Democrats, who will gain a majority of between five and ten. We may not know the final House results in particular for quite some time.

 

If I’m right, Kamala Harris will enter office as the first president in 32 years whose party does not have full control of the federal government. This would not prevent her from achieving consequential things — I’d anticipate that the border will remain porous, and a few more illegal hundred-billion-dollar student-debt-“relief” orders will be issued — but it would prevent her from enacting much of her legislative agenda (such as it is), force her to extend most of the 2017 tax cuts, forestall her attempt to re-establish Roe via legislation, and put her in the uncomfortable position of having to make good on her obviously fraudulent promises to work across the aisle. Structurally, it would ensure that the filibuster survives for at least two more years, and guarantee that Harris’s disgraceful flirtation with destroying the Supreme Court comes to nothing until at least 2026.

 

And after that? Who knows.