Would a Big Margin of Victory for Harris Matter?

It is now beyond merely the conventional wisdom to say that the stakes in the 2024 election make it important that Kamala Harris not only win but that she win by as many votes as possible.  I am not sure where or when conventional wisdom becomes dogma, but on this matter of shared belief, we clearly passed that point a long time ago.  But is there anything more than repetition and a vague head-nodding kind of instinct to back up that idea?

In the old days, the logic was that winning candidates not only needed to eke out a victory but to win a Clear Mandate to Govern.  Even before Trump, however, that gauzy notion had already become more than a bit silly.  Most notably, George W. Bush's backers (including Dick Cheney) insisted that he had a mandate coming out of the 2000 mess.  Having lost the popular vote and been bailed out by the Electoral College and the Supreme Court, Republicans still had the gall to insist that "the American people" had voted for Bush's agenda.  Full speed ahead on the Republicans' unpopular agenda!  Meanwhile, Democrats have always been scared of using whatever political capital might have come with reasonably big wins, lest they seem "partisan" or something.

Clearly, the advice for Harris in 2024 is not about any of that.  Kate Shaw, a law professor at Penn, wrote last week that "[a]s Mr. Trump’s rhetoric grows ever more vengeful and openly authoritarian, a great deal turns on the willingness of members of the legal profession to make common cause with him."  Shaw was mostly making important points about legal ethics in that piece, but her premise was that certain worrisome pre-election moves by Republican lawyers "are clearly intended to lay the groundwork for Mr. Trump’s post-election efforts in states where the margins of victory are close."

If the margins of victory are not close, then do our problems all disappear?  The simple and appealing idea is that Harris needs to win by large enough margins in swing states to be able to withstand Trump's inevitable claims that the Democrats stole the election ("again," as Republicans will surely say).  And as above, if normal logic and the rules of political gravity still mattered, it would be easy to agree.  These being such extraordinary times, however, it seems sensible to wonder whether that would still matter.

I have argued for years that Trump would adapt his message to any outcome, and he would surely even claim that wider margins are stronger proof that the Democrats cheated.  But setting that likelihood aside, there will supposedly be some Republicans who will peel away from any attempts to "find" something like 100,000 votes rather than 11,780.  I think it is more than fair, however, to be skeptical that those Republicans exist.

More to the point, the particulars of the coming-soon-to-a-doom-scroll-near-you Trumpian claims of election fraud do not need to be quantitatively specific.  Unlike last time, they will not limit themselves to asserting that, say, "suitcases full of ballots" were stolen, where enterprising reporters might bother to do a quick calculation and discover that the number of ballots in the number of allegedly lost suitcases could not have flipped the election.

We are already getting a preview of this from Trump's most eager liar, J.D. Vance.  Although Vance was rightly criticized earlier this month for his lies in the non-debate with Tim Walz, and especially for Vance's horrifying decision to put children in his home state in physical danger -- and keep them there -- with his lies about Haitians who are legally settled in Ohio, Vance has been mostly out of the news for the last week or so.  His most recent moment of infamy was when he refused five times during an interview with a New York Times reporter to say whether Trump lost in 2020.

But even though Vance's insistent, coldblooded, pathological lying rightly became a political story, the more insidious lie came toward the end of that exchange (with the reporter's questions in bold, followed by Vance's evasions):

Senator, yes or no. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Let me ask you a question. Is it OK that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, which independent analysis have said cost Donald Trump millions of votes?

Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes? I think that’s the question.

Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? And I’ve answered your question with another question. You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.

I have asked this question repeatedly. It is something that is very important for the American people to know. There is no proof, legal or otherwise, that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election. But you’re repeating a slogan rather than engaging with what I’m saying, which is that when our own technology firms engage in industrial-scale censorship — by the way, backed up by the federal government — in a way that independent studies suggest affect the votes. I’m worried about Americans who feel like there were problems in 2020. I’m not worried about this slogan that people throw: Well, every court case went this way. I’m talking about something very discrete, a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020. And more importantly, that led to Kamala Harris’s governance, which has screwed this country up in a big way.

Does that sound like an empirical argument?  Seriously?  Yes, Vance invokes the idea that "independent studies have suggested" that there were "millions of votes" wrongly steered away from Trump.  Note that Vance said "millions of votes" twice, claiming that "studies suggest" that there was some hidden big-government censorship program "that I do think affected things."  So, numbers, sort of.

It is clear, however, that the Trumpists have figured out that they need to have a non-falsifiable story that gets past the pesky fact that Trump's lawyers in 2020 continually lost in court because they could not provide evidence without committing professional suicide.  You see, the Vance-endorsed reason for all of that is that there is an entirely different timeline, a counterfactual history in which the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was common knowledge.  In that strand of the metaverse, Trump would have won easily.

That move is only a bit removed from the other easily debunked claims by Trump's lackeys, such as the idea that "Pennsylvania's courts never ruled on the merits of the election fraud claim." Similarly, the case brought by Texas's Republicans to throw out votes in states that Trump lost -- a suit in which now-House Speaker Mike Johnson's filed a laughably bad amicus brief -- was also based not on how big or small the margin of victory was.  They targeted Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where the margins of Biden's wins were 81,660, 11,779, 144,188, and 20,682, votes respectively. Notably, the margin in Pennsylvania was more than 1 percent (1.2) and in Michigan almost 3 percent (2.8).

One might object here that I am highlighting what Trump and Vance will be willing to say to justify a loss of any magnitude, whereas the true issue is whether other people will buy their insane claims.  Specifically, we need to know whether there are people in key positions in swing states who will be willing to believe -- and act on -- such lies.  Supposedly, larger margins for Harris will cause some such people to back off in embarrassment.

I can only say that there is zero evidence that anything within even the most optimistic range of winning margins for Harris would be enough to scare off anyone in the Republican cinematic universe from signing on to Vance-like unfalsifiable "arguments" about how the Democrats -- and big tech, and the liberal media, and every other scapegoat (almost surely including George Soros, for one reason or another) -- stole the election from Trump.  For them, it will not be about verifying specific numbers.

Two caveats are important here.  First, the number of states that Trump needs to flip will in fact matter.  That is, if Harris wins big in the Electoral College, that will make it harder for Republicans to undo the results.  No, that is not a contradiction.  Losing Arizona by 20,000 or 200,000 votes does not matter to Trump's prospects, but having to flip multiple states -- such as in 2020, when he had to flip at least three states -- makes things much more difficult.  Next week, I will write a column going into depth on all of that, but the simple point is that Trump's post-election strategy will not be a matter of winning some number of votes but will instead ride on state-by-state challenges that are each a binary matter.

Second, even though I believe that my analysis here is correct, I of course understand why Harris and everyone who supports her would continue to say: "Let's win big and remove all doubt!"  As get-out-the-vote strategies go, it only makes sense to try to convince people not to stay home even if the polls in their state seem to be trending in Harris's favor.  "We need to win by a lot" translates to "every vote might count, so vote."  So, good for them.

This is especially important because it is possible that Trump could win the vote counts in enough swing states to be declared the winner outright.  I am not saying that he would win those states "fair and square," given how aggressively Republicans have amped up their voter suppression machines nearly everywhere in recent years, but with the rules being as they are, he might receive more votes in enough states to win the Electoral College as an unchallengeable legal matter.

This is especially possible given the nearly inexplicable hesitancy of some people to vote for Harris.  In this clip from a recent union-led information event in Michigan, for example, one participant (who appeared to be about 30 years old and White) who is presumably a union member, said this: "I'm undecided because I just haven't, haven't seen enough of it yet. Um, I need to pay closer attention and do more independent research before I make my judgment."

So yes, just as some people wanted to "do my own research" on vaccines, now we have guys who are clearly trying not to admit out loud at a union event (covered by the national media) that they are going to vote for Trump saying that they are on the fence because they want to know more.  Maybe I am being too cynical, and maybe that man and other people are soon going to weigh the pros and cons of the two candidates.  But if there are working-class guys in swing states who say that they just need more information, I suspect that they have all of the information that they need and will either break for Trump or have already decided to do so (while getting the attention that comes with being an "undecided voter.")

If there are enough Trump voters for him to win at the ballot box, then the Democrats will fold quickly, and the future fascist dystopia will begin to unfold.  I continue to predict, however, that the election will run pretty much like last time, with the only question being the number of "extra" states that Harris wins.  And when that happens, the ferocious onslaught from Trump's supporters -- where "ferocious" describes not merely aggressive lawyering and media saturation gaslighting but also physical threats and actual acts of violence against Republicans who are in positions to flip their states to Trump -- will not depend on the size of Harris's win in each state.

A win in a state is a win in a state until it is reversed by any means necessary.  Winning is the only thing, no matter how ugly Trump has to become in getting there.