Regular listeners of The Editors podcast will know that I have spent the last few months answering every request for an election prediction by insisting that the race remained a stubborn toss-up. Over time, my reasoning has oscillated a little, but, irrespective of the minutiae, I have stuck steadfastly to the middle zone, such that, even when I have roved off the literal 50–50 mark, it has never been by more than two points. Today, on the eve of the results, this is still my view. I have no idea what’s going to happen.
This uncertainty is not the product of “herding” or of a wish to avoid being wrong in public, and it has nothing to do with my long-standing refusal to vote for either candidate. Rather, when I combine the polls, my sense of the state of the country, and the feeling in my gut, a large neon sign appears before my eyes. It reads, “I Don’t Know.” Nevertheless, I am inevitably going to be asked to come down one way or the other, so here goes: Gun to my head, I think that Kamala Harris will win the presidency, that the Republicans will win 52 seats in the Senate, and that the Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives.
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