All forecasts are listed with probabilities.
-
98%: The Democratic nominee will be Kamala Harris. Anyone who could mount a serious challenge to Harris has already endorsed her. She has a massive fundraising advantage. No one has any incentive to run against her, and the only people pushing for a floor fight right now are the political reporters who want to cover it.1
-
100%: The Republican nominee will be Donald Trump. Duh.
-
75%: Democrats will win the electoral college. Democratic over-performances in 2022 are widely attributed to two things: the Dobbs effect, and the fact that Republicans stood by Donald Trump after he led an insurrection. Kamala Harris is well-positioned to take advantage of both these things. Her only weakness is her polling numbers, and frankly, I do not believe the crosstabs we’ve been seeing.
Anything can happen before November, of course, which is why this is only at 75%.
-
80%: Harris’s running mate will be a white guy. Remember how nervous the Obama campaign was about racist backlash?
-
55%: Harris’s running mate will be Josh Shapiro or Mark Kelly. Obvious reasons. I’d imagine Kelly to be slightly favored, since he pisses off fewer members of the Democratic coalition.
-
5%: Harris’s running mate will be Andy Beshear. Beshear’s electoral success, while impressive, is at least partly attributable to a family brand which does not exist outside of Kentucky.
-
0%: Harris’s running mate will be Gavin Newsom. Read the 12th Amendment, you morons.
-
60%: JD Vance will get outed as a commenter on, or frequent reader of, at least one blog that endorses scientific racism.2 This stuff is quite popular in the circles Vance runs in, and he’s in enough fucked up groupchats that we can probably find receipts.
-
85%: At least one ad will get pulled by a network for being too bigoted. Have you seen the kind of people who staff Republican campaigns these days? They’re incapable of running against a black woman and being normal about it. Or, put another way:
-
80%: Relative to 2020, the Democratic share of the youth vote (ages 18-29) will not decrease by more than 5 percentage points.3 Polling crosstabs, if taken at face value, suggest unprecedented age and race depolarization. Isn’t it more likely that young voters just don’t pick up their phones very much, and the ones who do are kind of weird? The Lizardman problem is also going to be compounded for subgroups with low response rates.
-
80%: Relative to 2020, the Democratic share of the black vote will not decrease by more than 5 percentage points. See above. Young black voters are less solidly Democratic than older ones, but not by a large enough margin to cause the depolarization we’re seeing.
-
I have no idea what’s going to happen to the Hispanic vote.
-
75%: Democrats will outperform the 538 forecast in Nevada. “Ground game” is usually overrated, but Nevada Democrats have one of the best turnout operations in the country, while Nevada Republicans have one of the worst.
Let’s see how I do!
-
Also some donors, but I think they’ve mostly been pacified. ↩︎
-
I’m defining “scientific racism” as the belief that (1) cognitive ability differs across racial groups, (2) this difference is mostly genetic, and (3) these facts should be the basis for policy. For the purposes of my forecast, the website in question has to be very open about it. Unz, Takimag, HBD Chick, and Richard Hanania all count. Quillette does not, nor do mainstream Substack guys who make vague noises in the race-and-IQ direction. ↩︎
-
This can be tricky to measure. I’ll default to Pew’s validated voter survey unless there’s a consensus that another source has better methodology. ↩︎