Last night (I'm writing this at 2 a.m.) it occurred to me that after four years of extensively analyzing today's presidential election, the most cowardly act I could now commit would be to withhold a prediction on its outcome. I'll suffer no embarrassment if I'm wrong — yet prodigiously wrong would be to have pontificated on America's ghastly countenance of a criminal charlatan for four years and then, on the last morning of unknowing, join the punditry class by declaring the outcome to be a coin toss. What a shocking, risky prediction, what unexplored depths of insight. What spinelessness.
Kamala Harris will win.
I began with that prediction when she assumed President Biden's role. I have since made known my anxieties and jitters and now I return to where I began. The American electorate has chosen to no longer endure the criminal charlatan who opposes her in this race, and they'll manifest their decision in an unambiguous manner. On the morning of 6 November the vote counting will be incomplete, of course, but every indicator of a Harris victory will be unmistakable.
I anticipate this final electoral map.
This is far from the result that any opponent of the four-flushing, chronically mendacious and overtly psychopathic Donald Trump deserves; a rational electoral map would be solid blue. But ignorance is generational, geographic and damn difficult to alter.
Hence those of you who recall the 2020 presidential result will have noticed the above map resembles Joe Biden's; the final count then, 306 to 232. Hyperpartisanship, not rationality, is what determines today's presidential elections. Someday, perhaps, American voters will recognize a need for reelections to resemble FDR's of 1936 — 523 to 8. Poor Alf Landon picked up only Maine and Vermont, yet even that was a blowout compared to the states that Trump should win.
So there you have it, my prediction, whatever it may mean — which is nothing. Nevertheless, it is an improvement on predicting a coin toss, which is akin to boldly predicting that Trump will declare victory tonight no matter what, that JD Vance will persist in behaving like a jackass, and that House Republicans will be either the majority or minority party in 2025.