by Richard Cameron

Vice President Kamala Harris Will Be The Next President Of The United States

National Compass is forecasting that Vice President Kamala Harris will be elected 47th president and her running mate, Tim Walz, will be the next Vice President.  We do not think this election is anywhere near as close as it is being portrayed by the mass media and punditry on the cables, networks and the internet.  There has to be a foundation to this prediction, so we’ll get to it directly.  Before I do, though, one particular has to be established. Election polling, ubiquitous as it is, has no predictive value whatsoever.  It is merely a business – an industrial complex, if you will, that the mass media keeps alive. Outside of that symbiotic relationship, all of it adds up to nothing. None of the factors we will outline will in any way rely on interpreting polling data.

I have devised my own assessment of what I believe is virtually certain, with regards to the electoral map.  And by the way, you yourself, can go to the website, 270 to win, and build your own estimates on how the states will go, Blue or Red.  Two states, I have left in the toss up category for now, are Georgia and North Carolina.  I just don’t have a solid overall sense one way or the other, yet.

So, the factors we have identified as the strong indicators of the outcome of this election, are the following:

1.  Women are energized to vote at a higher rate than men in this election.

While the media, for most of the campaign season has minimized and downplayed women’s reproductive rights issues, the reality is that the abortion question has energized female voters to a degree that is unprecedented.  Anyone who correctly understood the magnitude of the impact that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs, realized that it would be the defining issue that would mobilize women in this election.  The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), released the results of a survey in which they found that abortion rights are the top motivating factor for women 18 to 30.

The results in several states, including typically Republican leaning Red states, that had abortion rights measures on their ballots, have demonstrated a clear trend.  It is not just the majority of Americans in national surveys that support a woman’s right to decide, it is voters in the several states, a majority of women, who have made their stance clear and have pushed pro-choice legislation over the finish line.

Campaign finance data assembled by the election spending collating group Open Secrets and analyzed by the Associated Press, indicates that backers of a new round of ballot measures in Arizona, Florida, Colorado, Maryland, Nevada, South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri and Montana have raised substantially more funding and have far more donors, collecting nearly $108 million as opposed to $14 million for their opponents.  And every abortion rights initiative that has been on state election ballots since the overturning of Roe V. Wade, has been enacted.

We argue that the same voters that put reproductive rights over the top in the 7 states previously, will be joined by women in the 9 states where measures are on the ballot in this election cycle. We also submit that it is illogical to believe that women will not correspondingly vote for the candidate, Kamala Harris, who has championed their prime issue, as opposed to the man whose Supreme Court nominees caused all of the threats to their rights that have emerged.

Even women whose inclinations lean more in the direction of pro-life, have recognized the existential risk that exists when their doctors are intimidated by laws that could result in their being arrested, convicted and imprisoned for saving the life of their patient, should her pregnancy take a dramatic turn for the worse.  If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider the most recent example, within the last two days:

A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms

It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.

The proof is in the pudding.  As of Thursday, Halloween night, the Trump campaign and its orbit are shivering in terror at the news that not only have more than 60 million Americans already cast early ballots, but that women are out in front in the gender column, by 10 percent – 54 to 44 percent.

Complicating matters for the ex-president, are his comments of recent vintage at a rally near Green Bay, Wisconsin,  in which he stated, “My people told me about four weeks ago, I would say ‘no, I want to protect the people. I want to protect the women of our country. I want to protect the women” adding that his advisers said it would be “very inappropriate for you to say. I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.”   I’m not the only one who has observed that “whether the women like it or not”, is chillingly reminiscent of Trump’s storied history of sexual assaults on women and reflects his default orientation toward them. It has not gone unnoticed by the female contingent in this election. This is not resonating with women any more than trashing Puerto Rico has drawn Puerto Ricans into his camp.

The MAGAverse recognizes the signs as clearly as I do, it’s just that most aren’t saying the quiet part out loud, although some are.  “Early vote has been disproportionately female. If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple”, Charlie Kirk,  founder of Turning Point and a close Trump ally, wrote on X.

2.  The Democratic party and the Harris-Walz campaign, have a vastly superior get out the vote operation in the states that will determine the winner.

Republicans have a hot mess on their hands in the battleground states.  The Guardian reports, that:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) once envisioned an extensive field operation for the 2024 election, including having about 90 staffers in the must-win state of Pennsylvania.  But the Trump campaign scrapped those plans when it took over the RNC in March, redirecting the focus on field operations to combating supposed voter fraud and pursuing a twin voter turnout strategy of relying on several political action committees and ardent Trump volunteers.

The result has been that the Trump campaign has put fewer resources into its ground game in battleground states, according to people familiar with the matter – and Republican officials have derisively said the Trump operation is more comparable in size to a midterm cycle than a presidential.  the Trump campaign appears to be dwarfed by the Harris operation, which is understood to have roughly 375 staffers in Pennsylvania alone, after Democrats spent years building up its voter turnout efforts in the state that could decide the election.

Elon Musk’s America PAC get out the vote machine on behalf of the Trump campaign, is so jacked up that if it were a car, it would have even more defects and recalls than a Tesla.  The New Republic outlines that, “uniquely in this campaign, canvassers are paid by the door. This gives people a way to hack the system. With no geolocator, canvassers can operate with little supervision, “speed-running” through their list or just playing hooky. Republicans have struggled with this in the past, with instances of volunteers falsifying data and just hanging out in a casino.”

And the Guardian details that an app for the canvassing, “Sidekick”, is a insurmountably flawed apparatus:

The Campaign Sidekick app effectively forces canvassers who have less than 40mbps of internet – sufficient to stream 4K video – to use “offline walkbooks” which have no geo-tracking feature and do not always upload after a route is completed, the people said.  As a result, the Trump campaign and America Pac then have little way to know whether canvassers are actually knocking on doors or whether they are cheating – for instance, by “speed-running” routes where they literally throw campaign materials at doors as they drive past.

America Pac has tried to deter cheating by sending out teams of auditors to trail canvassers, but there is no way to directly audit every offline walkbook – which is particularly high because of the Trump campaign’s focus on hitting low propensity voters.  And even when canvassers legitimately complete a route offline, that data has sometimes failed to upload afterwards, the people said. Since the canvassers are paid by the door, they have to redo their work, wasting time and potentially annoying voters for harassing them twice.

Wired is reporting that the people recruited are telling them that the operation is a dishonest fiasco.  One paid canvasser describes that they had no idea they would be canvassing to elect Trump or for Musk’s campaign apparatus. “After I signed over an NDA, is when I found out we are for Republicans and with Trump,” said the anonymous employee, who said they only heard Musk’s name later in passing.

More dysfunction and ineffective management of the process was revealed when investigative reporters obtained “unusual activity logs” that catalog inconsistencies that occur in the verification procedures for potential voter contacts.  They saw evidence that tens of thousands of door knocks in Arizona and Nevada, for instance, remain dubious based on the unusual activity logs.  In just one example out of many, GPS data showed a canvasser sitting at a restaurant half a mile away from doors he was supposedly hitting in Arizona.

The Democrats, by contrast, are always well organized out in the field and this campaign season is no exception. But it is not the Democrat party alone that is operating with a white hot intensity in the swing states – it has a host of adjunct organizations on the phones and on the street. Because the networks have been so preoccupied with Horse Race reporting, important stories about the get out the vote operations are neglected, thus forcing you to rely on their constant drumbeat of polling analysis which affords no real world insight on what is actually shaping the outcome of the election.  Many people don’t have a sense of what is really driving the results we’ll see on Tuesday night and the next few days after.

Arizona and Nevada, despite the impression that some have from Republican affiliated polling entities that skew the averages, are not in the sort of jeopardy for the Harris campaign, the mass media would have you believe.  Under the surface, the SEIU and their culinary workers, and hotel workers’ unions are executing their most ambitious door-knocking campaigns ever in both Arizona and in Nevada, with hundreds of canvassers, data analysts, and logistics experts blitzing the large metropolitan areas in both states to drive turnout among both likely Democrat voters and some ordinarily low propensity voters.

According to Ted Papageorge, the secretary-treasurer of the culinary workers’ union in Nevada, his team alone has fielded 600 people: “room cleaners, house cleaners, cooks, and servers…workers talking to workers. We’ve got boots on the ground—an army of workers.” In several recent elections, such all out efforts in Las Vegas has gotten Democratic candidates across the finish line.

In Arizona, UNITE HERE! Local 11 and the affiliated 501c4 group Workers’ Power have partnered to put several hundred union members, working lists of Democrat voters to ensure they carry through with their good intentions.  Susan Minato, the union local’s copresident and chair of Worker Power’s Board of Trustees, describes it as “Moving the yes vote. Identify them and then move them. We have more than 250 people on the ground.” Adding to the ranks and the effort, are hundreds of volunteers supplementing the paid canvassers, blanketing Maricopa County, to convey the urgency of participating in the election to prevent Donald Trump from taking them and the nation backwards.

You have to ask yourself why the mass media – the major papers, the cables, the networks, are not talking about each parties canvassing operations, but instead, constantly hammering away at you with the distorted polling.  The simple answer is that the real election environment does not support their nail biter narratives about this election.

And to sum up the point on this particular aspect – in the latest Gallup poll, 42% of registered voters said they have been personally contacted by Harris’ campaign — including by phone, email, mail and in-person. In contrast, only 35% of voters said they’ve been reached by the Trump campaign, marking a 7-point difference.

3.  Election influencers.

This is not very complicated.  Trump has no endorsers that have any influence outside of his existing political base. Anyone you could name, such as Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, a few marginal NFL athletes, Brett Favre (embroiled in his own malfeasance scandal), some UFC combatants and pro wrestlers, Dr. Phil McGraw, Mel Gibson, Jon Voight, along with Christian Nationalist / Evangelical personalities, have all been baked into the cake from the beginning and all have appeal that is fenced around within the expected voting contingent that Trump brought with him since he won the presidency in 2016.  No surprises and no meaningful impact beyond Cult 45.

Contrasted with that, is the Harris campaign’s embarrassment of riches, the treasure chest of which has been dynamically increased in the last few days and weeks.  Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on the 27th, was the catalyst for a number of sudden endorsements of game changing value.

As you know, the rally featured speakers and entertainers that made comments that were radioactively damaging, but none more than Right wing shock comic Tony Hinchcliffe, whose joke about the island of Puerto Rico being an “island of garbage”, has enraged and energized Puerto Rican voters, who are a potential major factor in several of the swing states.  Subsequent to the MSG rally, celebrities that are household names among Puerto Ricans  in the United States, have not just denounced the racism on display at the Garden, but have stepped forward to endorse Trump’s opponent, Vice President Harris.

One such high visibility individual is recording artist, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio – popularly known to his enormous fanbase as “Bad Bunny”, who has, according to Chartmetrics, 62.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify, 86.6 million followers on that platform, 30.9 million followers on TikTok and 45.7 and 48.3 million followers on Instagram and Youtube, respectively.  The Harris campaign had been making overtures to him for close to a year, realizing that he has as much impact with both male and female Gen Z voters as another mega personality, we will discuss shortly.

Bad Bunny, with his endorsement, has pulled a small army of fellow Puerto Rican icons into his vortex.  In recent days, J Lo, Mark Anthony, Ricky Martin, Luis Fonsi and just two days ago rapper Nicky Jam, flipped his political allegiance, already paper thin with Donald Trump, to Kamala Harris, appearing with her at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Puerto Ricans in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, represent nearly a half a million residents and an enormous pool of potential votes for Harris, due to the backlash from the naked racism displayed in New York last Sunday.  Collectively, the 6 Puerto Rican entertainers, represent close to 390 million followers on just Instagram alone.

Then there is Beyonce, who appeared with Harris at her rally in Houston.  She singularly has a following of 314 million on Instagram. And earlier this week, Beyonce’s fans, known collectively as the “Beyhive”, organized a massive call out campaign, under the moniker, “Beyhive For Kamala”, touching all of the swing states to remind fans of Beyonce to not only register, if they have not already done so, but to make sure their ballots are delivered to polling stations.

A new study by Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation,  found that celebrities do play an influential role in promoting civic participation.

“While some polling shows that people claim they aren’t influenced by celebrity voices when it comes to politics, more rigorous evidence indicates that these voices are incredibly powerful,” according to the Harvard study.  When celebrities urge their fans to mobilize, the study identified that nonprofits report markedly greater numbers of online voter registrations and poll worker sign-ups.  “Celebrities are uniquely positioned to empower everyday Americans to use their voices and exercise their civic rights.  Celebrities are an unparalleled force in American culture, informing what we buy, what we wear, and what we talk about. With their significant influence and reach, they are powerful advocates for social and political causes.”

Within the last few weeks, an avalanche of notable public personalities from various arenas, have clearly signaled their support of Kamala Harris, including Oprah Winfrey, Bruce Springsteen, LeBron James, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlemagne Tha God, Jon Bon Jovi, Megan Thee Stallion, Lady Gaga, Quavo, Eminem, Stevie Wonder, John Legend, Michael Keaton, Sheila E., Cher, Patti LaBelle, James Taylor and Charli XCX.

The most prominent of all, has been the cultural behemoth, Taylor Swift, with her vast numbers of fangirls, the “Swifties”. Swift has amply demonstrated her capacity to influence her fans to become civically engaged.  Even before her endorsement of Harris, she prompted thousands of followers to navigate to an online platform that facilitates voter registration.

And since the endorsement, Swifties have been mobilized in reaching out to like minded potential voters, the most recent example, within the past week, being “Swifties for Kamala”, which launched a fandom mail program targeting low propensity voters in Pennsylvania.  “Our mail program is taking what Swifties for Kamala has been doing through social media, volunteer events, and in person activations, to our community’s mailboxes and ultimately to the ballot box,” Swifties for Kamala campaign manager Annie Wu Henry said in a press release. “We are offering encouragement, information and a call to action all wrapped up in a welcoming, star-covered envelope.” According to the release from the group, more than 250,000 mail pieces have been sent to encourage voters in Pennsylvania to support Harris.

Another segment of election influencers, not associated with the sports, Hollywood or entertainment industrial complexes, are the vast array of ex members of Trump’s administration that have openly and strongly denounced him in the starkest of terms, ranging from his former White House Chief Of Staff, General John Kelly, who said Trump met the definition of a fascist and recalled the former president expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler, to General Mark Milley, former head of the Joint Chiefs Of Staff, who told author Bob Woodward that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”                                       

Then there are current and former GOP elected officials in each of the battleground states, that have stepped forward to denounce Trump and throw their support behind the Vice President. Prominent Republicans like Liz Cheney, who not only enthusiastically threw her support to Harris, but has also joined her in campaign stops, is giving permission to the very segments of the electorate that voted for former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley during the primaries, to vote for the Vice President.

4.  The Enthusiasm Gap

In its most recent survey, Gallup asked voters: “Compared to previous elections, are you more enthusiastic than usual about voting, or less enthusiastic?” The share of Democratic voters who said they were “more enthusiastic” was at 77%, whereas the share of Republicans who answered the same way was just 67%.

READ MORE: ‘The entire electoral pool has changed’: Top GOP pollster says Harris may deliver Dem trifecta

When comparing the 2024 result to past elections, Democrats in particular are even more motivated to vote in 2024 than they were in 2008, where 76% of Democratic respondents said they were “more enthusiastic.”  Republicans are also registering more enthusiasm in 2024 than in 2008, though that margin is smaller:  In 2008, 61% of Republican voters were more excited to vote, whereas that share climbs slightly to 67% in 2024.

An additional notable metric from Gallup’s survey found that while Republican voter enthusiasm was at roughly the same level this year as it was in 2020 (66% four years ago compared to 67% today), Harris is seeing a higher share of enthusiasm from her base than President Joe Biden had, as Biden registered at 75% compared to her 77%.

Alejandra Caraballo,  a Harvard Law School clinical instructor at the university’s Cyberlaw Clinic, posted the Gallup poll on the social media platform Bluesky on Thursday. She opined that Harris is being underestimated by current polls, as she believes pollsters are consistently under-sampling women voter turnout in November.

“I fully expect her to win by 4 and I’ll take the over,” Caraballo wrote. “The polls are seriously missing something along gender lines and it’s distorting the results. I’ve dug into crosstabs on state level polling and gender is completely off.  The gender breakdown makes absolutely no sense,”  referencing a recent YouGov/CES poll. “Kamala doesn’t win women in any age group. But Biden won women by 9 and they made up 56% of the electorate. They even have young men being more Democratic than young women.”

We also cite Harris’ large scale address to the nation at her Washington D.C. rally last week on the Ellipse, where final estimates arrived at an attendance figure of 75.000.  This while venues Trump has held campaign appearances at, are a fraction of the capacity and have shown thousands of empty seats.

5. Money $$

This one’s pretty simple.  Kamala Harris has raised over a billion dollars and the majority of the money is from small donors.  Harris, according to Politico’s Jessica Piper, remains “dominant” in terms of fundraising. “Kamala Harris’ fundraising operation has been so dominant that she has brought in more new donors than Donald Trump every single day heading into the final stretch of the election,” Piper explains. “The vice president’s financial advantage is well-known, but most of the attention has gone to the candidates’ respective money totals.  That money has allowed Harris to build up a much greater campaign apparatus than Trump, while the former president has had to rely more on outside super PACs for support.”

Piper also points out that donors, “reflect the most engaged supporters” in a political race. And that point is brought home by the fact that Harris has 7 million small donors. The majority of the funds that Trump has collected, despite all of the incessant blitzing of his followers email accounts, has been from wealthy patrons looking for a new round of tax avoidance from the Donald.

The funds that have been raised, add up to a stark advantage over Trump’s campaign and affiliates, in practical terms, not just in providing resources to field operations, but also to blitzing the airwaves with high impact, targeted advertising.

Semafor reporter David Weigel reports that the advertising is driving the message home about Harris’ plans to put policies in place to give working and middle class people a boost, as opposed to more tax avoidance for the wealthy.  “This has been the long story of the Harris paid media campaign — just grinding on this economic message (anti-price gouging, Medicare covering home care, etc.) for months as different shiny objects hit the news cycle,” he argued.

According to media tracking firm AdImpact, reservations for Harris and the leading super PAC supporting her, are on track to spend nearly $175 million more than Trump’s campaign and the leading super PACs supporting him by election day. Harris’ campaign has outspent Trump’s on advertising by 2-to-1 since she entered the race on July 23.   Here’s just one example of the ads, late breaking voters are seeing in all of the battleground states:

6.  Early Voting Is Telling A Story (and it’s not good for Trump / Vance)

As we mentioned previously, Trump’s hopes of animating the underperforming male voting cohort of the electorate, is the equivalent of erectile dysfunction and no amount of ugly misogyny and racism is proving to be the Viagra he needs to get these low propensity dudes to cast ballots in the numbers he needs to pull off a victory.

In Pennsylvania, which is the big prize for either party in dominating the electoral vote map (19 electoral votes), a key metric is first time, newly registered voters. Although we do not know the actual ballot results, we do know the party registration, gender and the voting percentages and new Democrat female voters are outperforming Republican male voters by a substantial margin. As of October 28 – 18,629 Republican males have submitted ballots, but Democrat females have submitted 33,874.  These are the sorts of numbers that Kirk was making note of.

But it’s not just the female vote that is giving GOP operatives acid indigestion, it’s a cohort of the electorate that has in elections past, been a strong factor for the party – the over 65 contingent.  Registered Democrats account for about 58 percent of votes cast by seniors, compared to 35 percent for Republicans, Politico reported on Thursday. The over-65s have cast nearly half of the early ballots so far.

7.  Project 2025 is a stinker and Trump can’t get the stink off of him.  

At this point, Americans are familiar with Project 2025, the over 900-page policy blueprint — also dubbed the “Presidential Transition Project” cooked up by various acolytes within the Heritage Foundation — which lays out specifics of  a radical agenda to commence on the first day of Donald Trump’s hypothetical second term as president. Among a variety of particulars that are broadly unpopular with a majority of Americans – they include effectively banning abortion nationwide, eliminating the Department of Education, and reversing workplace diversity programs in private industry.

Trump has vehemently denied that he knows anything about Project 2025, but the history of his associations with the architects and prime movers behind it, demonstrate that as colossal falsehood. All that has really transpired, is that Trump’s campaign has folded the bulk of Project 2025, into a different bucket, “Agenda 47”.  Same smelly garbage, different packaging.

A clear majority of potential voters oppose Project 2025 as illustrated in the below graph.

And Navigator also reports that:

A plurality of Americans believe that Project 2025 accurately describes what Trump stands for (48 percent agree – 20 percent disagree – 32 percent not sure), largely driven by Democrats (73 percent).  A similar share says Project 2025 accurately describes what Republicans in Congress stand for (47 percent agree – 19 percent disagree – 34 percent not sure).  In an open-ended question asking the impressions of those who have read, seen, or heard at least some about Project 2025, the words, “Trump” and “abortion” have become increasingly cited as associated with it by respondents over the last two months.

8.  Everything Else

There are a lot of other reasons that point to a win for Kamala Harris that may not be as patently quantifiable as what we have covered in items 1 through 7, but fall into the “it stands to reason” bucket.

For starters, 7,059,526 more Americans voted for President Biden in 2020.  The reasons for the over 7 million vote differential in that election were not trivial and it is hard to imagine how Americans who rejected Trump 4 years ago have somehow magically forgotten why they dislike and distrust Agent Orange.  And in this interval, they have witnessed behavior that is even more alarming.  He’s now a convicted felon. He has projected, and clearly so, his intentions to govern as an authoritarian and focus a great deal of energy on using the Office of President to punish political opponents and people he has defined as “enemies of the state.”

And it is not only Trump, that voters from 2020 maintain a posture of distrust and disdain regarding – it is his massive personality cult and their potential for violence, acutely demonstrated on January 6, 2021.  Trump’s extremism and that of his followers, makes swing voters nervous.

Then there’s just the fatigue factor. A plurality of voters are just weary from all of the drama and chaos of Donald Trump and his divisive circus act. Beyond that, yes, it is true that Trump still has a base and still has a static number of voters. The problem is that he has not expanded his base of support outside of hard core Trumpoglodytes. From a societal perspective, there are far too many of them, but from an electoral perspective, there are far too few of them to get him over the top.

Is it really logical to think that after everything the middle electorate has witnessed leading up to Tuesday, that they are going to, in the majority, arrive at the conclusion that Trump is either mentally or physically fit to serve another term?  Every day for the last 9 years has been one in which sensible people ask themselves, “can it get any stranger, can he seem any more demented, can he project anything more outrageous?”, and every day, he does. The most recent being his allusions to Liz Cheney facing a firing squad and General Mark Milley being executed.

And finally, I would argue that Trump himself and his campaign, do not expect that he will win. This is why you see him preparing the ground to once again, claim that the “voting was rigged” and the “election was stolen.” The money that would have been going to a functional get out the vote operation, has instead been funneled in essentially three directions – back into Trump’s own pockets; the pockets of his top campaign operatives and into the bank accounts of squadrons of attorneys, both defending Trump in his multitude of criminal trials and civil suits and in prepping the ground for the same sorts of nonsensical court challenges to the ultimate election outcome that he fears.

I don’t expect to have egg on my face on November 6, the day after the election, when the smoke may or may not have cleared, but anything is possible.  It’s just that not everything is likely and it is just not likely Trump will be returning to the White House, especially since as a convicted felon, he’s not a good bet to even visit without a security clearance.

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