Your Scary 2024 Election Risk Recap
The big things that could go wrong.
The presidential election is about three weeks away. The conventions are done. The endorsements are done. The debates are done. In some states, voting has already begun. This is the time when people bite their nails, and wring their hands, and say their useless prayers.
I do not make predictions about exactly what will happen in presidential elections, because I don’t know and neither do any of the people who do make predictions. If I had to bet money I would bet that Kamala Harris will win, though there is still clearly a significant chance that she will lose. The fact that I think that should be taken as worthless, analytically speaking. Most people formulate their own predictions based on walking around their neighborhoods and talking to people they are friends with and looking at Facebook posts. This is useless. High quality national polls are the only worthwhile pieces of predictive information that you can get. Still, as we have seen in recent elections, polling averages a few weeks out can be far from the eventual vote counts in the handful of swing states that will decide the election. In elections, as in most things, it is much more useful to just work for the outcome you want than to waste all your time in trying to predict what that outcome will be.
Though we can’t predict the future, what we can do is to lay out the risks. I thought it would be useful, as we approach the finish line, to do a little recap here of the risks that we need to worry about— in particular a few that I have written about here at How Things Work in the past year. There are four that stand out to me. “Risk” here is defined as “something that could unfortunately result in Trump taking office in January.” Risks are things that are worth thinking about because they can be managed and mitigated before they bite you. You will notice we have not done much, if anything, to mitigate the following risks. There’s still time! Sort of.
The Electoral College. Most people think of the Electoral College as a feature of our system, rather than as a risk. This is a mistake. Anything that has caused the loser of the popular vote to nevertheless take office as president in two of the past six presidential elections is a risk. A crazy risk! An outlandish flaw! Insanity! Nothing will change about this before Election Day, obviously. But what can be “done” about it is to elevate the need to abolish the Electoral College to prominence after Election Day. This must be made a priority, rather than simply receding into nothingness until next election season, which is what always happens.
How Things Work posts about this: Here.A Stolen Election. We witnessed Trump ineptly try to steal the 2020 election at the last minute, with virtually no real plan, and even that half-assed attempt caused the physical storming of the capitol. He has never stopped claiming to have won the 2020 election. Thus he has genuinely poisoned the minds of a significant portion of the Republican electorate, and, even more importantly, he has created a public space in our politics for cynical Republican elected officials to pretend that there are tons of doubts about the integrity of any election that Trump loses. There is zero question, none, that Trump will once again claim fraud if he loses this election. The important thing will be when the cynical Republicans atop the party—who know Trump is lying, but would happily go along with his lies if it would allow Republicans to win—gaze at the landscape after Election Day and make the judgment of whether they can cobble together enough plausibility and possibility to steal this election for real. The hurdles to doing this are significant, but it is not impossible, and our current Supreme Court means that this risk should be taken very, very seriously. It would have been great if the labor movement had planned to undertake a general strike in the event that this destructive possibility comes to pass. They haven’t. Still, there is time to make a plan about where and how you will hit the streets in the event this risk becomes real.
How Things Work posts about this: Here.A Big War. Three weeks is probably enough time for Israel to do something so aggressive that it provokes Iran to unleash its full power in response, at which time there would be significant pressure from pro-Israel politicians here for America to send troops to support Israel’s war. Each passing day makes it more unlikely that that entire chain of events will happen before Election Day, but don’t rule it out. This would prompt Harris, in particular, to throw her full support behind the war, which would have awful consequences even if she wins the election. Ugh.
How Things Work posts about this: Here and here.Disillusionment With Harris on the Left That Results in a Trump Victory. This risk should be understood as one that Democrats fully and completely own themselves. In order to keep this short we can define this mostly as disillusionment over Gaza. Biden has blood all over his hands, and Harris could have made it clear that she will make a different choice, but she hasn’t. And she also told the Uncommitted movement to, in essence, go fuck themselves, and the Democrats didn’t allow a Palestinian to speak at the convention. In addition to the human atrocity of what our government supporting, this has created a significant chance that a portion of voters who would normally vote for Harris are so sickened by all the dead children that they just stay home. If this is how Harris ends up losing, well, she will have to look hard in the mirror. What a terrible reason to usher in fascism. What a waste.
How Things Work posts about this: Here and here and here, among others.
In addition to the risks above, any of which could cause Trump to win, there is one other long-term risk that is going to persist after this election that we should all be thinking about:
Realignment of the Parties, For the Worse. Republicans do not give a shit about the working class, but they do see a political opening to portray themselves as a “working class party” and win votes. Polls tell us that that effort is having a disturbing amount of success. One reason it is having success is that the Democrats have been happy to accept the support of big money in tech and other industries that sees them as a more stable bet than Trump’s Republican Party. Going forward, there is a risk that disaffected center-right Republicans migrate permanently into the Democratic Party and make it even more hostile to the goals of the left. (The more the Democrats center organized labor, by the way, the stronger and less vulnerable to this trend the party will be.) This is a risk that I think will be made more likely by a Harris victory. So we gotta keep worrying about it. Sorry.
How Things Work posts about this: Here and here and here and here, among others.
Normally this is where a writer says, “So make a plan to go vote!” And, sure, yeah, vote. But more importantly, please unionize your workplace and build a strong labor movement to balance out the fuckery of our political parties because the capacity of the Democratic Party to fuck things up is bottomless.
Good luck to all of us!
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If you’re wondering where the hope is in American society, please check out my book “The Hammer,” which is about how the labor movement can save this country (and why it hasn’t, yet). If you’re in the Springfield, IL area, you can come out and hear me speak about this tomorrow night at the annual Mother Jones Dinner. I’ll also be speaking at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan on Sunday, November 3.
At Flaming Hydra, I wrote about what I would do if I was in the woods. Wow. Very interesting.
Want to donate to disaster relief with a labor movement twist? You can donate to the AFA disaster relief fund here. And you can donate to support the striking Boeing workers here.
Wow. Hard to rap my head around the comments, although one of them reads like a right wing Republican scam; "economy slowing regulations", really. Anyone who truly believes there would be no difference between a Trump or Harris win on affecting Gaza or our ability to organize against a continued right leaning, Neoliberal Democratic Party is living in never-never land.
I want to add an additional risk: the general public (including labor) continues to ignore down ballot and off year elections. These candidates don’t appear out of a vacuum (for the most part), and more importantly, given how the US elected government functions, neither does the US Congress.
Part of why we are in the place we are in, is because people wring their hands about presidential elections and know fuck all about anything else. Trump et al are symptoms of decades of declining attention to anything outside the presidency.
Don’t give a shit about Harris? Fine. But you better give a shit about who are your US legislators and your state legislators. Many of whom are also on the ballot this year.