*For this post, I’m back to being a one-man editing team. Please excuse any typos. This post was also originally written on November 9th, 2024 in the shadow of the election results, but I was delayed in posting due to personal commitments.*
This is going to be an atypical post for The Real Question. For the first, and maybe only, time I will be posting raw observations and opinions as opposed to my typical analysis-based posts.
Really, this post is born out of the need to not have the last post of the year be an incorrect election prediction.
Vice President Kamala Harris will not be the 47th President of the United States.
If you are coming here looking for the reasons why that statement is true, all I can tell you is that it is too early to know for certain. Some election narratives you might have heard since Election Day will pan out to be true and some will be blatantly false. Therefore, I will have to return to this topic next year.
First, let me address the obvious. As a Harris supporter, I’m disappointed, hurt, and scared, and I know I’m not alone in those feelings. However, over the past few days, I’ve also felt myself gaining resiliency and feeling the support of those around me.
While the election is lost, the battle for the policies I believe in and to maintain democracy in the United States will go on. And the only way to lose those greater fights is to become resigned, apathetic, and silent. And that’s not going to happen on The Real Question.
Next, let’s address the obvious again. I was wrong about this election. The case for a Harris victory appeared to be objectively strong but ultimately didn’t pan out. I will do my full prediction review at a later time. However, I think I can rule a few things out.
It wasn’t me just being optimistic or hopeful. The 2024 Election Scorecard and polling analysis reasoning is sound and well cited. It has been nagging at me for days whether I lost objectivity (a sin in strategic assessments and strategy making), but I think my approach overall still forced me into objectivity. And I even wrote openly on scenarios that I didn’t like but had to assess. Additionally, insiders and experts with different political leanings missed as well.
Historical and close elections are categorically difficult to call. If the election was merely historical (e.g., black woman nominee, assassination attempts, incumbent dropout, etc.) or close (e.g., Biden vs. Trump, Ossoff vs. Perdue), I think it would have been easier to spot warning signs for Harris. But the confluence of these events made it harder to determine what was real.
107 days of Harris was not enough data. Relatedly, the Harris campaign was very short. And I think this element alone warrants further study in two ways. First, this likely disadvantaged Harris, especially in the popular vote. Second, I think this threw predictions and strategic assessments out of whack. We all had to speed up our analytical processes and act with far less information on a nominee than we’re used to, including seeing them perform in the primaries as a campaign preview.
My strategic assessments rely on campaigns acting rationally. In the aftermath of the election, I’m starting to see reports about Biden’s/Harris’ internal polling. These reports leave me scratching my head. We’ll likely revisit this in depth and with citations later, but I’ll summarize briefly.
Democrats appeared to know how badly inflation issues were hurting our candidates, how the voters preferred a change candidate, and how little reach the preserving democracy message was getting. And I can’t immediately spot a major strategic adjustment the campaign made to address this besides kicking Biden out of the race. Even the Republican response to this data mystifies me but to a less extent than the Democratic response.
I am not privy to that information, and it isn’t easy to gleam from the media polling. The campaigns have an information advantage that I expect to see in their strategy overall. If they do stuff that doesn’t make sense, then it is a “garbage in, garbage out” situation for my current methodology. This will be easier for me to spot next time now that I know what I’m looking for. But it certainly led me astray this time, and it cost us a crucial election.
Lastly, where do we go from here? Let me first answer as a Harris supporter to my fellow Harris supporters and Democrats first. All is not lost, and electorally things are not looking as bad as they seem. Trump will do some scary things that we don’t like in office. We’ll have to brace ourselves for that and resist in the ways that we can. Let’s stay safe and stay together.
As far as The Real Question is concerned, I haven’t lost confidence in my political analysis. I’ll be further dissecting this election and doing other writings on political strategy to get sharper and maybe influence some of this questionable Democratic campaign strategy making. But don’t worry, I’ll still be writing about business too.
Overall, I’m 3-1 in election predictions, and trust me, that record would be better if I had published my Georgia 2022 predictions. Ultimately, the plan is to learn and get better from this.
This moment reminds me of a song that we used to sing in my home church, specifically at a critical time in my personal life. “I don’t feel no ways tired. I’ve come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. And I don’t believe He brought me this far to leave me.”
The Real Question will return in the new year.
