I recently noted that Democrats appear to be genuinely panicking about the election because Kamala Harris isn’t where she needs to be for them to feel confident of victory. They’re definitely not taking the election for granted and plan to fight hard (and probably dirty) until the very end. Unfortunately, I’m worried that Republicans are not.
And that could make a difference.
According to political analyst Mark Halperin, many in the GOP are convinced that the 2024 presidential election is already over and that Trump is going to be reelected president. Newsweek reports, “A significant number of Republicans have declared the presidential race ‘effectively over,’ agreeing with Halperin that Trump will ‘checkmate’ Vice President Kamala Harris with a combination of four to five swing states, the analyst said Tuesday on independent television platform 2Way."
Reading this nearly gave me a heart attack. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of reasons for conservatives to feel more confident about the 2024 election than they did back in 2020 or 2016. Trump is performing better in the polls today than he ever was in the two previous elections, and on top of that, early vote numbers look promising, too. But I fear that this overconfidence could lead Republicans into a serious misstep before Election Day.
Related: Tim Walz Wouldn’t Have Said This if He Thought Kamala Was Winning
“Trump is going to lock up the Sun Belt states, probably all four, but at least three. And then he's going to win Pennsylvania, and that checkmates [Harris]," Halperin said during a stream on the 2Way television platform.
However, Halperin himself acknowledged the uncertainty of such predictions.
“[The Republicans saying this] may be wrong,” he admitted, “but there's a not insignificant number of them who are quite confident of that. And the data they've seen on the absentees and the early votes and the voter registration … makes them more confident.”
"There are not an insignificant number of Republicans who say the race is effectively over," says @MarkHalperin. "That, as I reported a month ago, Trump is going to lock up the Sunbelt states, probably all four, but at least three. And then he’s going to win Pennsylvania, and… pic.twitter.com/fs4XTtDskL
— 2WAY (@2waytvapp) October 8, 2024
The problem here is that confidence is not the same as a guarantee. While Republicans may feel reassured by early data, there’s a fine line between being confident and becoming complacent.
As I’ve said before, this kind of overconfidence has backfired in the past — on Republicans and Democrats.
In 2012, Republicans were completely convinced the polls were skewed to favor Barack Obama, and that Mitt Romney would easily win. We all know how that turned out. In 2016, the overwhelming consensus of pollsters was that Hillary Clinton had the election in the bag. It was a big “oops” on her part to be so confident in victory. And frankly, 2020 was another overconfidence situation: because the polls were, in fact, off in 2016, Republicans believed they’d be off again, and Trump’s support is always underrepresented in the polls, yada, yada, yada. Little did we realize just how desperate Democrats were not to repeat the same mistakes they made in 2016.
I generally feel pretty good about this election, but I'm not kidding myself into thinking that Trump has it locked up. I really hope the GOP isn't taking this election for granted, either.
