Your Emotional Support Historian

As I’ve noted on Bluesky, one of the hazards of being a scholar who works on modern American politics is that when this nation goes through an important presidential campaign, especially one with high stakes, there’s a constant stream of friends, family members and, of course, random people on social media who all approach us with a desperate need to be reassured that Everything Will Be Alright.

And look, I understand the instinct and I certainly lean on other experts when the moment presents itself. But you have to understand that, for a political historian (or most of us anyway), this is actually a pretty awkward problem.

For one thing, making predictions about the future is not something we’re trained to do. As I like to joke when I’m invariably put on the spot with these kinds of questions at a lecture or panel discussion, my professional training is in the field of hindsight. All my work is looking backward with the evidence, not making guesses without it.

Second, if there’s one thing political historians like to do, it’s holding up the people in the past who made confident predictions and mocking the ever-loving hell out of them. Seriously, it’s sort of a running theme for a lot of us. Just this semester alone, in my lecture course on mid-twentieth-century America, I’ve mocked the Yale economist who predicted stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau” just before the bottom fell out of the NYSE in 1929; I’ve mocked the Literary Digest pollsters who only contacted people who had telephones but confidently concluded that FDR would lose the 1936 election instead of winning every state but two; and I’ve mocked the Newsweek roundup of fifty political scientists who agreed to a man that Tom Dewey would win in 1948. I know I live in fear of becoming a standard punch line in future lectures, and I’m sure others do too.

And third, a lot of us don’t make predictions because we got over our skis once and learned the hard way. On Election Day in 2004, I remember watching a senior colleague of mine assure everyone that the early exit polls were a sure sign that John Kerry was a lock. I remember thinking that was unwise, and sure enough, he caught hell for it after the race was called. But even I, who had played it much more cautiously than that, still got blowback. The closing polls had suggested Bush was really going to wallop Kerry, and I said to some colleagues that I wasn't so sure and thought it would be closer. It was! But one of those colleagues took what I said as a guarantee Kerry would win, and admonished me in the halls the next day: “Kevin,” he said with betrayal, “you were wrong!” (A really fun thing to hear the year before you’re coming up for tenure in a department that hadn’t tenured an Americanist in decades. Anyway.)

As a result, I usually try to offer nothing that can be construed as a prediction, because I know it’s only going to be held against me. (Just last week, a colleague told me she had been mad at me for eight years because I suggested Clinton would win in 2016. I usually just say “we’ll see!” but after the Access Hollywood tape I might have ratcheted that up to “looks pretty good?” Lesson learned.)

All this is a long way of saying, yes, I get why you’re looking to historians for reassurance here, but right now we’re really as much in the dark as the rest of you.

The predictive models and the polling aggregators range from deliberately misleading to perhaps just inadvertently misleading, which means that we can’t really trust any of these predictions. This is true in any election, but this campaign it’s especially so. Neither candidate fits the “traditional” model for their party in a variety of ways and there are countless running battles over ballot access that could impact the already slim margins more.

Now, my gut sees all sorts of signs that make me think Harris might have an edge, despite the closeness in the polls. I could point to a lot of things here: Democrats have a huge advantage in small donations (which is usually a good indicator of enthusiasm at the base); the GOP has outsourced its GOTV efforts to idiots and grifters (who might be conning conservatives); and the post-Roe landscape makes me wonder if we’re missing a surge in young women who are out for righteous retribution.

But that’s all my gut, and again, that’s not how we work. Maybe that’ll happen, but maybe I’m missing even bigger factors on the other side. So I’ll fall back on “We’ll see!”

But!

While all the points above lead me to conclude that I cannot make a confident prediction about this coin flip of an election, the very same points lead me to believe no one can make a confident prediction.

You’re going to be swamped in the next two weeks with a lot of scientific-looking predictions, made confidently with things that look like numbers and charts that seem to suggest something or other. My professional advice is to ignore them. They’re either made in bad faith, or wishful thinking, or simple incompetence, but the odds are they’re going to be wrong.

But the surety is that they’re just a prediction. They’re at best an educated guess about what might happen, but more likely an uneducated wish casting to try and make something happen.

The actual results will depend on which side mobilizes more voters to come out an support their candidate on (or before) Election Day. Don’t let yourself be paralyzed by people who assert that they know what’s going to happen.

Act yourself and make it happen.