David M. Shribman
“What Lies Beneath” is a 2000 horror film starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. Today we examine what lies beneath the 2024 drama that now stars former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Indeed, subterranean factors could prove the difference in the presidential election — an unusual and widely unknown factor. Nobody who was looking at the 2000 election — which came more than three months after the launch of “What Lies Beneath” — would have predicted that complex ballot sheets in Florida, plus the presence of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader on ballots in Florida and New Hampshire, would send the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore into 36 days of agonizing overtime — or that the outcome of the election would be determined by the Supreme Court.
Some of the subterranean factors this time lie right under the surface and are broadly recognized, such as the potential power the abortion issue might hold (advantage: Harris); the effect of the immigration issue, which the Trump team has employed in more than 100,000 television advertisements in seven swing states (advantage: Trump); and the possibility of lengthy legal battles to determine the outcome in highly contested states (advantage: nobody but CNN, MSNBC and Fox). Any of them could affect the ultimate outcome.
But other factors lie deeper beneath the surface and are worth keeping in mind as you join the endless conversations about this election. They include:
— Ballot measures. The effect of the presence of policy questions on ballots in presidential years is one of the least-understood factors in American politics, though there is reason to believe that high-profile ballot measures could affect turnout, which in turn could affect results in the four states where voters will confront abortion questions. Voters, even in generally conservative places such as Kansas, have consistently backed abortion rights measures since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the question to the states.
This year, abortion questions will be on the ballot of both Arizona and Nevada, both considered swing states in the 2024 election. Supporters of abortion rights will be flooding the airwaves in both states, with $15 million worth of ads already purchased in Arizona and another $11.9 million in Nevada.
Hardly anyone regards Florida as a swing state, yet there is not only an abortion measure, but also a marijuana legalization question on the state’s ballot. It is remotely possible that those could combine to produce a surprise in Trump’s home state.
A 2001 study published in the Journal of the American Political Science Association of the effect of ballot measures on turnout in high-profile midterm elections by the University of Washington’s Mark Smith found that effects were “larger than those of a close Senate race and roughly equal to those of a close gubernatorial race.” A separate, older study (1981) published in the Western Political Quarterly by the late David H. Everson of the University of Illinois, Springfield suggested that the effects on voter turnout were greatest in the South, which conceivably could affect the Florida results, where the Republicans haven’t drawn the votes of more than 52% in the past eight elections.
— The perils of polling — and their effect on the Electoral College. There are growing suggestions that Mr. Trump is improving his position over 2020 in several states, including New York and six of the seven swing states. That may be inflating his national polling results, which could have the unusual effect of having him make a better showing in the popular vote but a worse showing in the Electoral College. For years, political scientists and pollsters have agreed that the Electoral College provides Republicans with an advantage, which is how Trump (2016) and Bush (2000) won the election while losing the popular vote.
That may be changing. Harris’ advantage in Michigan, for example, is one-fifth as large as Joe Biden’s lead at this time. If that holds, Harris would still win Michigan, and Trump would have a heftier popular vote. Applied nationally, Trump’s performance in polls could possibly suggest that the race is razor-close when it isn’t.
Then again, Trump could lose the popular vote while winning the election. What lies beneath isn’t always easy to perceive.
— Trump Fatigue versus Harris Inexperience. These are two powerful forces, their effects equally unknown.
Kamala Harris didn’t serve a full Senate term and has been vice president for less than four years. Until recently, she was widely unknown. Few presidential nominees in modern history — perhaps Wendell Willkie, the business executive who was the Republican candidate in 1940 — have had such little prominence before becoming a finalist for the White House. The Trump team is playing this card, and doing so hard. But when Richard Nixon, a fabled poker player in his Navy years, tried this gambit against John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, it flopped. Kennedy’s innate appeal prevailed.
The Harris-is-inexperienced card, cheekily played by the only president in American history never to have won any other election or served in the military, is matched by a card that the Harris campaign doesn’t even need to play. Could the election come down to the notion that the American people are simply exhausted by the chaos and contention Trump’s nine-year presence in American politics has produced?
National exhaustion has been a factor at least twice in modern times. In 1920, Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio, far less well-known than either Trump or Harris, invented a word, “normalcy,” that propelled him to the presidency. He ran against the exhaustion the American people felt after World War I and the bruising fight over American entry into the League of Nations.
Then, in 1946, when the country was exhausted from World War II, Republicans transformed 435 separate House of Representatives and 37 Senate races into a national referendum on one question: “Had enough?” Those two words were power enough to permit the GOP to win majorities in both chambers, picking up 56 House seats and 13 Senate seats.
There’s no question the country is exhausted. Two out of three Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center said they were exhausted by politics — and that poll was 14 months ago. The question is whether the country’s voters are exhausted by inflation and immigration (advantage: Trump) or by bedlam and upheaval (advantage: Harris).
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
