What if the presidential race isn't all really that close after all?

U.S. Vice President and democratic candidate for U.S. president Kamala Harris is joined on stage with her chosen running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz during a campaign stop in Detroit on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024. Photo: Mandi Wright / USA TODAY NETWORK

“The race is too close to call” is the wallpaper of this year’s presidential campaign. It’s the background for every story, and it’s the mantra of both campaigns. Kamala Harris goes one step further, insisting that Democrats are the “underdogs” in the race because the Electoral College favors Republicans.

But there are a few hints that the race may not turn out to be quite the nail-biter that the last two races were. That’s not to say that Harris is headed for a landslide, but there’s a decent chance that she will win by a comfortable margin, leaving little doubt that Donald Trump lost. (Not that Trump will accept losing.)

The conventional wisdom that the race is tight relies upon polling. Because the Electoral College unduly weights small rural states, winning the popular vote isn’t enough. You can rack up a larger margin of victory in California than all the votes combined in a small rural state, but the Electoral College count won’t change. As a result, the race is coming down to just seven states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia.

In several of those states, the race is indeed neck and neck. In Nevada and Arizona, polls show Harris and Trump in a virtual tie. The same is true in North Carolina, but those polls were from before anti-LGBTQ+ Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s penchant for trans porn and pro-slavery comments came to the fore last week. Now Democrats believe that the news will depress GOP turnout, boosting Harris’ chances of winning the state.

Trump shows an edge in Georgia, where his supporters are trying desperately to pre-emptively steal the election for him. But in the remaining states, an average of the polls shows Harris with a two or three percentage point lead.

The polls could be off, of course. Harris’ lead is within the margin of error, meaning that if the election were held today, Trump could very well end up on top in those states. Trump’s supporters aren’t always easy to find for surveys, as Hillary Clinton’s campaign discovered on election night in 2016. Still, pollsters have reworked their models to account for that issue. Plus, as a reminder: if anything, polls in the 2022 election cycle underestimated the performance of Democrats.

If Harris were to win in the states where she’s currently ahead in the polls, she’d have 270 electoral votes, exactly enough to win. If she picked up North Carolina, she’d have 16 more electoral votes. Nevada and Arizona would add another 17.

But the polls show a few other issues that point to bad news for Trump. Harris is showing a rise in how favorably people view her. Now more people view her more favorably than not, a remarkable change from when she became the presumptive nominee. In part, this is due to Trump’s failure to present an effective counter to how Harris defines herself.

Indeed, Trump’s campaign is the other part of the story. Even by Trump standards, the ex-president is running a truly crappy campaign. Trump is holding far fewer rallies than before, and when he does, he’s holding them in places like New York state, where he has no chance of winning.

Moreover, far from the disciplined campaign that Republicans promised this time around, Trump’s campaign has devolved into a morass of infighting and impulse. Instead of hammering Harris for inflation, Trump and J.D. Vance, a bad campaigner in his own right, are lying about Haitian immigrants and getting called out for it.

Trump has also brought back such characters as Corey Lewandowski, who was canned from Trump’s 2016 campaign after was accused of assaulting a Breitbart reporter. (A Trump donor subsequently accused him of sexual harassment.) Then there’s Laura Loomer, the homophobic influencer who is so extreme that even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) actually begged Trump to dump her.

Perhaps Trump thinks that he is motivating his base to turn out. But he doesn’t have the ground game to make that happen. Republican activists in the swing states say that there is little work being done to turn out infrequent voters. And even in states where Trump should have a solid lock, he’s showing signs of weakeness. A poll this month found that Trump was ahead in Iowa by just four points. He won the state by nine points in both 2016 and 2020.

Meanwhile, Democrats are bursting with enthusiasm for Harris. Translating that enthusiasm into turnout is work, but having people excited in the first place makes the work a lot easier.

None of this is to say that Harris has the election in the bag. Far from it. However, Harris is in a far better spot than Trump at this point. We’ll have to wait and see how the last six weeks of the campaign play out, but it may not be that much of a surprise if Harris is able to claim victory a lot sooner in the evening than everyone is preparing for right now.

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Originally published here.