On August 9, 2022, immediately after the FBI had raided Mar-a-Lago, I wrote the following to game out the potential political implications of what had just happened the previous night:
The Red Wave’s been canceled, though Republicans were still far more likely than not to end up clinching a slim majority in the House while the Dems more likely than not would gain a seat or two in the Senate, as well as a gain in state governorships. The door was probably starting to close on Trump “officially” announcing his “not yet official” 2024 comeback run prior to the Midterms, as it seemed like RNC Chair Ronna Not-Romney McDaniel had successfully lobbied him to hold off and not fuck things up for the GOP. Now on Tuesday morning, after the Great Raid on the Orange Caesar’s palace blew up in the news, are there going to be any electoral implications? Does this change anything? Who the hell knows.
Not bragging or anything… Three months later, I wrote these predictions for the 118th Congress:
Joe Biden will not be impeached. We’ve been wrong before and could be again, but on this one we feel pretty goddamned confident. The votes won’t be there if they need to count on noobs, particularly the ones from New York who will be vulnerable in 2024. Same with Merrick Garland. Slightly less confident about DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The border is catnip to the MAGA pussies, might prove to be too hard for them to resist, even though they’ll overdo it and make themselves look like complete assholes.
It is really hard to see what happens to Kevin McCarthy now: He is so fucked it’s not even funny – it’s hilarious. He better be praying for the Dems to squeak out a one-seat majority so he can save face. With at least several House Republicans publicly coming out against him as speaker – before the dust is settled on whether or not they even have a majority – it’s really hard to see him winning the gavel. The Freedom Caucasians have a knife to his throat, a gun to his crotch, and a pot of boiling water over his head.
Missed on the second part. McCarthy did win the gavel, lol.
Now why am I fake humble-bragging about my past wins in the predictions game? (I’ve had more than a few fails since then, mostly on Trump’s legal issues). Because I’m not so confident now.
My calls one day out: Trump wins Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, & Nevada. Wins Pennsylvania too, by 100k or more votes. That nets him presidency. Trump wins Florida by double digits too. Go Vote! Make me look like a genius!
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) November 4, 2024
Certainly not as confident as this fucking jerkoff. But I’ll get to that. First here’s my prediction for when we’re going to know the actual answer to that all-vexing $500 billion dollar question:
I do think around midnight we’ll know who won. Barring that, the second most likely is that we’ll have an extremely good idea of who won. All this “iT’s NoT elEcT10n DaY iTz ElecTIoN DaYS” shit is insufferable because everyone’s trying to manage expectations. If you’re an election official or a Secretary of State, please by all means say that and continue to do so. You already have a hard job and you deserve to be treated with respect and patience (we’ll give a pass to Harris’s campaign too, but they have more agency than they made it sound). The non-public servants, the people in the media saying it might take a while should, at the very least, stop jerking the audience around.
Seriously. The whole fucking mess about knowing who won is actually ON THEM and not the election officials. On Tuesday night when the polls close in Vermont at 7:00 PM Eastern CNN, the AP, NBC, ABC, and all the rest will call it for Kamala Harris by 7:01. They will have zero actual ballot data reported by the Secretary of State and they will still call it within a minute, two max. Why? Because their decision desks will confident that Harris won. Virginia closes around the same time and they’ll take a little bit longer because they want to be a little more sure about it, but trust me – barring a catastrophically bad night for Harris – it’ll be in the veep’s column about 20 minutes later.
Remember this? It wasn’t the Arizona Secretary of State’s office declaring Joe Biden had won Arizona. It was Fox News’s decision desk and that’s a whole freaking rabbit hole to go down right now but in the real official world of vote tabulation, Arizona was actually the final state that Joe Biden flipped. CNN didn’t call it for him until more than a week after Fox News did.
The blowback that Fox News got from their fans is probably a huge reason why the media are pussyfooting around about making calls, wanting to shift the responsibility onto election officials.
Which is a bitch move for three reasons:
(1) Yes, there are a high number of early and mail-in ballots to be counted and in two crucial states, Michigan and Pennsylvania, they can’t be pre-canvassed – meaning no prepping for tabulation prior to Election Day. But there aren’t as many as there were in 2020. There aren’t the same issues with social distancing and COVID safety procedures in a high-pressure tabulating environment.
(2) There isn’t as lopsided a partisan makeup of the early/mail-in ballots as more GOP voters have “banked” their ballots this year. The more evenly-matched early turnout makes a call easier.
(3) This isn’t clerks’ first rodeo. Networks were able to call the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate election for John Fetterman the night of. It’s doable. We can know who won the state on Election Night.
That’s why I’m bullish on knowing who won the presidential race by around midnight tomorrow. Not 100 percent, but well north of 50/50. Having at least a good idea of where it’s going – and if it’s going the way we and our readers want – will do a lot to snuff the oxygen out of any false claims.
Because that’s one thing you can be certain of (SPOILER!).
News flash: On Tuesday night, regardless of what the vote tallies say, Trump will declare victory.
He will claim the only reason he may lose is “vote stealing.”
Undermining the legitimacy of an election is how demagogues destroy faith in democracy.
Kamala for President.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 1, 2024
I feel comfortable making that call. I don’t feel comfortable making another call. But the only thing holding me back is that pride goeth before the fall. I will however hedge like a worm and say I feel pretty good about how it’s going to go. Polling’s a fucking mess but, amid all this endless goddamn insufferable hype about “RaCiAL dEpOLaRiZaT10n” which automatically translates to “DeMs hAv BIG B1G BIGGGG PROBLUMS WITH TEH BLACKS AND LATINOS” is that “depolarization” definitionally means another pole is shifting. This whole fucking circlejerk about Trump’s alleged massive surge in minority growth completely ignores that Harris is gaining strength among white voters. That Iowa poll the MAGA kids freaked out about over the weekend may be the foreshock of a massive earthquake under the MAGA coalition that you can see hinted at in some other major surveys. Even if Harris flips 2 percent of white voters nationally from 2020 that pound-for-pound means more in the electoral college than Trump flipping 15 percent of all Black AND Latino voters nationally.
That 2 percent flip is NOT unrealistic, not with women sick of abortion bans and rapist-worship.
But with less than 24 hours to go, it’s all in God’s hands now. But here’s one last call I fucked up:
Five months ago I had mostly forgotten a leader who I once deeply admired had existed, thought of her as a non-entity. Three-and-a-half months ago I was impressed at least by how she was navigating the political collapse of her boss, and said if she had to take over (which was the only realistic option other than continuing with Joe Biden, fuck everyone who had that moronic fantasy about the Democrats somehow holding a “blitz primary” between Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, etc in under a month) she would at least do no worse than Biden against Trump.
I was wrong. She’s crushed this campaign. Never once made the kind of mistake we can now look back in hindsight as where she missed an opportunity or screwed up this or that. America has never seen anything like it and probably never will again. She rose to the challenge and performed like she was made to win this. You don’t have to believe she can, just look at what’s she’s done since she took the wheel in July. She made this a street fight and she’s this close to ending it on her terms.