Sorry, Donald Trump, here’s why the election may already be over | Opinion

Are the presidential elections over? Well… not really. Not yet. But now there’s a real argument that sometime last week, former President Donald Trump was mathematically cooked. We just don’t see it yet.

The case: Trump must win North Carolina to have any meaningful chance at the presidency. Mark Robinson’s pro-slavery, black-Nazi and pornographic support scandal for gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson could dampen Republican turnout and make the Tarheel State unwinnable for Trump. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Of course, it’s not that simple. So let’s take the pieces one at a time.

First, is North Carolina necessary for Trump? Yes. Or quite close. According to election forecaster Nate Silver, if Vice President Kamala Harris wins North Carolina, she has a 95% chance of winning the presidential election. Remember that it is possible to construct Electoral College maps in which Trump still has a narrow victory without North Carolina. It’s just unlikely.

This is why the acknowledged core strategy of the Trump campaign is based on the Tarheel State. Republicans, not very privately, realize that if they lose there, the path will become extremely narrow. So North Carolina is almost, but not quite, a must-win state for the GOP.

Second, can a candidate for governor significantly harm his presidential candidate in this state? Yes. Binghamton University political scientists Amuitz Garmendia Madariaga and H. Ege Ozen examined every significant case since 1960. There are not many of them, but the researchers found “a strong and significant effect of the governor’s mantle on state-level presidential voting.” ” Even state legislative races can have this kind of reverse tail all the way down to the presidential level: One study of 2020 legislative races in swing states including North Carolina by the Democratic advocacy group Run for Something found that the effect is as high as 1.5 percent from races four rungs lower in the voting.

It must be admitted that Trump is a political unicorn. He has proven immune to his own scandals, the kind that would crush almost any other figure in American political history (the man is a convicted felon, after all). And his MAGA people will still be MAGA.

But not all of the voters Trump is counting on are MAGA. Not at all. Just six months ago, a quarter of North Carolina GOP voters voted for someone other than Trump — 250,000 of them for Nikki Haley — meaning much of his electoral goal could be missed. And remember, Trump’s defeat does not depend on voters switching to Harris. This depends on the more likely result of Robinson’s mess discouraging them enough that they decide to wait out the debate, leading to a significant drop in Republican turnout.

The bottom line: Under the right circumstances, a voting pause can derail the rest of a ticket, and prominent Republicans believe those are the right circumstances. As one of the top Republican pollsters, Whit Ayres, said Vox “We have several examples of reverse coattailing, where a candidate who did not receive a vote hits the top of the seat. But if anyone could do it, it would be this character (Robinson).”

Third, is the North Carolina race close enough that the Robinson effect could put Trump out of reach? Yes. Trump won the state by just 1.35 points in 2020, and polling averages show it’s currently a statistical tie, with a slight tilt toward Harris even before last week.

Fourth, could things get worse for Trump from here? Yes. As former Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp noted, weakness provokes. Robinson is certainly weak – his campaign staff defected and the Republican Governors Association cut off his further funding. And the Harris campaign is clearly being provoked, already running ads and billboards reminding voters of the Trump-Robinson connection.

They also have a rich library for crafting future attacks (Trump called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids” and, oddly enough, said he was “like fine wine”). Also remember that Harris has plenty of resources at her disposal to communicate with, and she can throw them into a state where pollsters like New York TimesAccording to Nate Cohn, the color is already bluer.

Considering all this, why isn’t this a slam dunk anymore?

The most important reason is that in this election the margin of uncertainty is greater than the margin of victory. North Carolina’s Republican base can continue to show remarkable resilience and determination to show up and vote, no matter how low Robinson falls. Or Trump could lose North Carolina but still find a way to arrange a low-probability Electoral College path. Or an October surprise could change the race in every swing state. Or all the polls might just be wrong in Harris’ direction right now, where we get an artificially distorted picture.

Moreover, if the Robinson scandal was a blow to Trump, we can’t expect to see much evidence of it in the remaining month of the campaign. Pollsters rely on educated guesses about likely voters and have no reliable way to update assumptions about who will vote. So if there is a change that is not due to a change in voter sentiment but to a decline in Republican turnout, polls may not detect it.

In other words, there’s a good chance that North Carolina is now the Schrödinger’s cat of the 2024 election: Trump may or may not have already been politically poisoned there, but we’ll have to wait until Election Day to find out.

So no, we can’t say it’s over. However, there are reasonable indications that something has fundamentally changed in the last 10 days and that Trump is now in much greater trouble.

Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host, and former congressional staffer.

The views contained in this article are those of the author.