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Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris walks onstage as she arrives for a campaign rally at Michigan State University’s Jenison Field House in East Lansing, Michigan, on November 3, 2024. | Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images This summer, when it seemed increasingly likely that President Joe Biden would drop out of the 2024 race, a pair of questions dominated media coverage and political punditry. Should Vice President Kamala Harris succeed him as the Democratic nominee? Or was there a better candidate out there who could put up a tougher fight against Donald Trump? Some in the party floated the idea of a mini-primary. Ultimately, that open process never happened — Harris and her allies moved quickly to secure the delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the convention, no one stepped up to challenge the vice president, and the Democratic base quickly rallied behind Harris. Since then, there have been, broadly speaking, two ways to view how her presidential campaign has unfolded. One is more skeptical about how Harris has fared. Here she is, running against a twice-impeached, historically unpopular, convicted felon former president – and it’s still a toss-up. Another view offers a more charitable interpretation of the Democratic campaign. After an aging, historically unpopular incumbent president badly damaged his party’s hopes of winning, Harris clawed her side back into a competitive race. She mostly restored the levels of support her party needs among nonwhite, college-educated, and young voters, while holding together a coalition that spanned from former Vice President Dick Cheney to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And she did it as the standard-bearer for an incumbent political party at a time when one of the only hard-and-fast trends of world politics is that ruling parties are being punished in the post-Covid inflationary period. Here’s the case for each perspective. The case that Harris is fumbling The contention that Harris should be performing better is predicated on what some see as the unique awfulness of Donald Trump. With Biden out of the race, it’s now Trump who is the historically unpopular presidential candidate, whose campaign’s ground game is virtually nonexistent, who has been consistently outspent by the Democrats, and whose closing weeks have been filled with chaos and late-breaking scandals. The argument that Harris has underperformed tends to rest on two different charges: that she has played it too safe and that she has played it too vague.  The “safe” charge relates to her perceived pivot toward the center to court moderates and disaffected Republicans. Progressives argue that this has cost her support and energy from the political left. Her embrace of Liz and Dick Cheney, for example, recently reignited criticism from the anti-war left and speculation that it could backfire with Arab American voters.  The same critique has been made regarding her stance on Gaza. Harris’s refusal or inability to distance herself from the Biden administration’s position, with the exception of a few nods to Palestinian suffering in speeches and on the debate stage, has lost her support from the left flank. Zooming out a bit, critics point out that Harris’s centrist pivot on the campaign trail reflects a bigger problem: that Harris has never been clear about why she wants to be president, what she actually believes in, or where she stands on certain policies. She’s avoided explaining changes in policy positions and avoided talking to the press, opting instead for friendly settings, alternative media, or influencers and content creators on social media.  Just this week, an Axios report offered the latest instance of Harris’s avoidance strategy: When asked about Harris’s stance on 12 policy matters she had previously supported — like ending the death penalty at the federal level, eliminating the Senate filibuster, or providing reparations to Black Americans – the campaign declined to comment. And so, on the eve of the election, Harris remains neck-and-neck with Trump — whose favorability ratings are now the highest they’ve been since he left office, despite millions spent in advertising against him. The case that Harris is beating expectations The more positive assessment of Harris’s campaign holds that, given where Harris started and what she’s facing, running neck-and-neck is a feat, not a failure. As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn has written, the national environment in general is one with all the ingredients for a Republican landslide and a conservative cultural rebuke. Americans really dislike Joe Biden. They are upset with the direction the country is heading. Republicans have an edge in national party identification. And Republicans tend to have an edge on most of the issues that seem to matter to voters, specifically the economy and immigration. Gallup recently framed it this way: “Nearly all Gallup measures that have shown some relationship to past presidential election outcomes or that speak to current perceptions of the two major parties favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party.” That dynamic is true around the world for parties in power. Voters have been consistently punishing incumbents in nearly every democratic election held this year largely because of dissatisfaction with both pandemic response and the ensuing economic crises brought on by inflation and rising global interest rates. That was true for the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, which was swept out of power in the summer; in South Africa, where the African National Congress party lost its majority for the first time; in France; in Japan; in Germany; in India (to a degree), and most recently, in Botswana. To the north, Canada’s incumbent Liberal Party is mirroring much of the last year of American politics: the party has been trailing the Conservative Party in polling for months, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing similar internal pressure to step down before his party heads for electoral disaster in a little less than a year.  It’s also not clear that there was any position Harris could take on Gaza that wouldn’t cost her support from some part of the Democratic coalition. Some of Harris’s moves appear to be paying off. Yes, she has moved her platform to the right on the issues where Trump has an advantage — crime and immigration — while moderating or compromising on others. But that has, in turn, opened up a big-tent ideological coalition. Her focus on personal freedoms (predominantly abortion rights) and democracy has given her a significant boost among Democratic partisans and moderates. In the final polls of the cycle, Harris has managed to largely wipe out Trump’s advantage on the economy and make inroads with those who view immigration as a top concern: The final PBS/Marist poll, for example, found Harris and Trump tied on the question of who voters think would better handle the economy.  And among subgroups, she’s leaned into the gender gap, increasing the levels of Democratic support among women voters to a historic margin, while restoring levels of Democratic support among young voters and nonwhite voters that Biden was drastically underperforming among. Additionally, she’s done that as she boosted her favorability ratings into the positive single digits when those started nearly as bad as Biden’s when the president was at his lowest this summer. All told, Harris’s defenders see a candidate who, despite an unfavorable national environment, has given her party a chance — a far better situation than Democrats found themselves in when Harris took over the nomination just a few short months ago.

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“Decision desks” use data, statistical models, and on-the-ground reporting to understand which candidate is leading where. | Lorenzo Bevilacqua/ABC via Getty Images Come Tuesday night, millions of Americans will be glued to their TV screens or refreshing their browser windows to see the latest election returns, all in anticipation of a final race call. (Though we might won’t know the next president until days later.) Counting ballots can take a while, but news organizations don’t necessarily need to wait for every cast ballot to be counted before announcing a winner. They’re often able to declare who won without the full returns, thanks to the work of teams colloquially known as “decision desks” — groups of political scientists, statisticians, pollsters, and reporters who use mountains of data, statistical models, and on-the-ground reporting to understand which candidate is up where, and how likely a candidate is to win a given precinct, county, or state.  Given the doubt that former President Donald Trump has sown over the past eight years, both about the election process and the media, it’s worth understanding in detail how the processes of projecting and calling election results work, and why consumers of news should trust those results.  “Remember that we don’t elect anybody,” Anthony Salvanto, who as CBS News’s executive director of elections and surveys, oversees the network’s decision desk, told Vox. “The voters do that. Elections officials are reporting the vote, and what you’re getting from us and the networks is our analysis of what they’ve reported, as well as our first-hand reports from talking to voters.” How exactly do news organizations figure out who’s winning? To figure out who won an election, news organizations like Fox News, CNN, the Associated Press (AP), and others use a combination of data from election officials, statistical modeling, and polling and surveys of voters.  Raw vote counts come in at the precinct, county, and state levels, and these help decision desks both ensure voting is in line with their expectations and to make decisions on tight contests. Those expectations are shaped by statistical models based on history and other voter information, like geographical location, gender, age, and more. This year, there are two main systems that news media will rely on for their projections.  The AP and Fox News use a system called AP VoteCast, which debuted in 2018 and has been used in every national election since. In a shift from past practice, VoteCast doesn’t rely on exit polling, and instead uses large-scale online surveys of registered voters who are chosen randomly from a probability-based sample, in an attempt to get the most accurate information from the most representative sample. A different method is used by the National Election Pool (NEP), which provides data to ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News. The NEP relies on Edison Research to conduct three types of surveys: Election Day exit polls, in-person early voting exit polls, and polls of likely voters to capture data from those likely to vote by mail, Rob Farbman, executive vice president at Edison Research, told Vox. (AP and Fox News used to be part of this group, but left after the 2016 election.) (Decision Desk HQ, a private company that contracts with news organizations including the Economist and The Hill — and Vox.com in 2020 — doesn’t use voter surveys, and instead it relies on a proprietary statistical methodology to project winners.) Each outlet and agency creates their own criteria for interpreting these results.  Sometimes, that can lead to one decision desk getting ahead of the others, like in 2020 when Fox News’s decision desk head Arnon Mishkin called Arizona for President Joe Biden much earlier than any other news source, including the AP, or when Decision Desk HQ called the race far ahead of other experts.  Overall though, when it comes time to make a call, “Our decision team will examine all of the models we are running, consult with the networks’ decision teams, and consider any possible data issues to ensure that the possibility of our call being incorrect is sufficiently small,” Farbman said.  “We generally will not make a call unless we are 99.5 percent confident in the call.” Similarly, the AP doesn’t call an election until “we are confident that there’s no chance the trailing candidate can catch up,” according to David Scott, the AP’s vice president and head of news strategy and operations.  The combination of inputs allows the services to accurately understand who has won each of the around 5,000 elections taking place this year, from the presidential race to local contests and ballot measures. And they can do it quickly, without having to wait on election officials to count each vote. That’s true even in the case of a tight race (like the presidential race is expected to be), though calling those is a bit more complicated.   “If you get a very close race, then you’re looking at where the outstanding vote is, the vote that hasn’t yet been reported, and you’re looking at the kind of places that the outstanding vote is from,” Salvanto, of CBS News, said. “You’re looking at whether it is a mail vote or Election Day vote, if there are any differences in the patterns that you’ve seen by ballot type.” Along the way, news organizations keep viewers up to date as the polls close and votes come in, showing the public the data that’s being used to make the calls is accurate. “We will tell you if our models show that it’s a toss up or that it’s leading one way or the other,” Salvanto said. “We will show you, in real time, where the counted vote is coming in — from which counties, which areas of the state, and where it’s still outstanding, where we know there are registered voters, and we know there are still reports to come, so that the viewer can see the whole picture, the way that we see it.” Of course, these methods aren’t perfect. Very occasionally, news organizations call a race wrong. The most dramatic instance was in 2000, when news networks initially called Florida for Al Gore. Errors do happen — decision desks are made up human beings, after all — but when they do, organizations work to correct them as quickly as possible. Still, mistakes are incredibly rare, so come Election Day (and the days after) you can be confident you’re seeing the real results. 

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