Thursday, October 24, 2024

By a Quark


 Twelve days left. Nate Silver thinks Trump will win. James Carville believes Harris will win. No one can say Americans don’t have a choice, but nobody knows who they are going to choose.

According to the polls, it’s become a game of micro-movements. The numbers seemed to be trending for Trump for a while until Wednesday, when they suddenly inched more in Harris’s direction.

As far as the only places that matter in the presidential race, which are the seven swing states. Harris leads in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump leads in Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina.

Trump also leads in Pennsylvania, which combined with the above would prove determinative, but only by such a tiny margin, 0.3 percentage points, that 538 calls it a tossup.

To give you a sense, that means only about 21,000 people who could swing the whole thing one direction or another, which is utterly ridiculous when it looks like Harris is going to win the national vote by around 3 million votes. As a percentage of the electorate, that is 0.0001336 percent.

The smallest known thing in our universe is a quark. And that’s what separates our democracy from chaos right now.

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