A New York Times analyst is betting Trump will win the presidency in November — despite, just days earlier, making a case for how Kamala Harris could snatch victory.
Earlier this week, opinion writer Ross Douthat penned a column entitled “How Harris Wins.”
But just two days later, he revealed he didn’t fully believe his own arguments — and, if he was a betting man, his money would be on the Republican candidate.
He then revealed three warning signs he said had him convinced that Trump had the better chance.
“I think that Harris has a good chance to win in exactly the way that I describe,” wrote Douthat on Friday.
“But if you forced me to place a bet on what will happen, my current expectations are … Trump, not Harris, is the next president of the United States.”
With the caveat that his prediction of a Trump loss in 2016 was wrong, Douthat went on to outline what had formed his opinion.
“First, I think if Harris were on track to win, she would be leading more decisively at the moment,” he wrote. “She has enjoyed an extended period of extraordinarily positive media coverage while the rival ticket flailed around trying to figure out an effective line of attack. She recently had the benefit of her party’s convention, which wrapped up on Aug. 22 and was — in the press, at least — extremely positively received.
“And yet after those two boosts she still isn’t clearly ahead of Trump in the Electoral College race — which suggests that she probably now has more room to fall than rise.”
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Secondly, he said, he expects Trump to perform better than any of the polls are predicting — in the same way he did in 2016.
“I still suspect that pitting Trump’s unique coalition of the disaffected supporters against a Democratic coalition filled with institutionalist liberals who are overeager (especially now that Biden isn’t on the ticket) to tell pollsters how they’re voting creates survey problems that are hard for even the most careful and self-aware pollsters to fully overcome,” he wrote.
“Add in the murmurs from professionals and tea-leaf reading suggesting that the campaigns themselves don’t fully believe the numbers in the public polls, and I’m inclined to mentally add a point or two to Trump’s total in the averages — which again, would push him toward favorite territory.”
And lastly, Douthat wrote that he believes voters were turned off from Biden not just because of his age, but also because many saw him as too liberal. And that is carried on by Harris because of her part in his administration.
“So that’s why I’m still inclined to expect a Trump victory — for now, pending further developments or debate stage drama, and with the awareness that this entire era is still designed to make fools of all political prognosticators," he concluded.
