Let’s face it: We knew that Harris would win back in August

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”
— Richard Feynman

It’s fundamentally about the polling. It’s about the stuff we were talking about every day. Over and over again, the polling told us what was going to happen.

The polls showed Biden losing (and even the hints that came out from Biden’s internal polling seemed to show that).

Then we had the debate and Biden looked *AWFUL*. There were a number of post-mortems after the debate and they ranged from “Biden lost badly” to “How dare you imply that Trump would make a better president?” to (my favorite) “It was a tie.”

Biden is too old. We don’t know that Biden can handle it. Biden seemed lost. Biden seemed confused.

If you could replace Biden before the convention, we knew that things could turn around. Biden went from being the one freakin’ guy who could be relied upon to win against Trump in 2020 to being the one freakin’ guy who was going to lose to him in 2024.

Thankfully, Biden decided to drop out.

The debate over whether it’d be Harris or whether there’d be an open convention was quickly squashed by Biden’s full-throated endorsement of Harris.

And Harris did her best to demonstrate that she was *NOT* too old to campaign against Trump, she was *NOT* going to be confused, and she was *NOT* going to look lost out there. All of the attacks that were scoring hits against Biden suddenly became liabilities! Trump is too old! Trump looks confused! Trump looks lost!

And it was the debate where Harris pretty much eviscerated Trump in front of the country.

Did you see what happened to the polling after the debate? Over and over, Harris inched up. She looked good. She gave a couple of softball funsies interviews when she needed to and demonstrated not that she was this or that other trait, but that, compared to Trump, she was preferable. She was more charismatic, more pleasant, and had more big profile names endorsing her. Everybody from Michael Moore to Dick Cheney were in agreement: I’m With Harris.

This was the tip of an iceberg. If Cheney was okay with Harris, how many people who were okay with Cheney suddenly relaxed and thought “well, I can just say that I agree with the Republican party” (and meant the one they voted for in the oughts)? You can claim to be “Undecided” to your friends but, when you’re alone in the booth, you can vote your conscience.

The polling kept telling us that this was going to happen but the newspapers, to make money, had to run with it being a close horserace and running stories about this or that awful thing happening to sell papers. “If it bleeds, it leads” and the one thing that was never bleeding was support for Harris in the polls.

Sure, there were awful things happening far away: conflict in the Middle East (a perpetual headline), conflict in Russia (a perpetual headline), and hurricane season all over again. But the aid was given to the states, the various conflicts going on far away didn’t embroil us beyond sending old equipment that we didn’t use anymore and new equipment that we really wanted to field test to our *ALLIES* who were fighting against powers that were our regional opponents.

And anybody looking dispassionately knew that this was a stable equilibrium that we could keep going indefinitely when Trump would get in there and shake everything up and who knows how bad things could get?

Maybe a competent Republican could have put up a meaningful fight against Harris… but not Trump. He’s just offputting.

Allan Lichtman’s “Keys to the White House” point to a Harris victory, according to Lichtman and he’s used them to correctly predict the outcomes of each presidential election from 1984 to 2012. (2016, man. The keys didn’t work on 2016.) In 2020 they started working again and Lichtman says that they’re unlocking the White House for Harris currently.

The polling of the Decideds are pointing to Harris and while there are still Undecideds, and while there is still a margin of error, the polls are, probably and in aggregate, correct. The keys point to a Harris victory. The main problem is that there are too many people psyching themselves up and psyching themselves out because it’s fun or because of high neuroticism or something. The debate was fine. The vice-presidential debate was fine. (If anything, the vice-presidential debate demonstrated how refreshing it was to see a normal Republican arguing with a normal Democrat again. No Trump weirdness.)

Everything is fine.

Calm down. Take a deep breath.

Seriously. You’ll be able to say that you saw this coming if you weren’t currently so busy fooling yourself.