In Michigan and the US, Election 2024 is all about uncertainty

Don't let anyone tell you they know who's going to win, because even if they think they do, they don't. Not for sure.

Tuesday's election between Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump is a coin toss, a jump ball, pick whatever analogy you like. The polls suggest one of the closest presidential elections stretching at least as far back as 2000, and Bush v. Gore, which required recounts in Florida and a Supreme Court decision a month and a half after the balloting.

A repeat of that isn't out of the question, given how close this election looks to be in a handful of swing states, including Michigan, which will decide the outcome. And there's almost certain to be legal questions raised — unless it is a surprise blowout for one side or the other — in one of the most lawyered-up and litigious campaigns in memory. The presumptive claims of vote-rigging have already started on social media; they'll likely reach a fever pitch over the next several days and extend past the election.

Probably smart to remember, those claims after the 2020 election — promoted by Trump, in an effort to reverse his loss to President Joe Biden — were false, so don't necessarily jump to conclusions forwarded by partisan actors without supporting evidence. And a lot of what is passed around as proof of one thing turns out to be something else entirely.

That goes double for any election night claims that one candidate or another has won based on early vote totals. Absentee ballots will take time — maybe days — to fully count and given how close this election is projected to be, that means a late-breaking change as to who appears to be winning is normal.

"The pre-election polls are as close to 50-50 as we've ever had and we have a narrow group of swing states, all of which are conceivably won by either candidate," said Matt Grossmann, political science professor and director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. "Everyone I talk to is extremely nervous."

You can say that again. Even amid all the big rallies and public pronouncements of confidence by each candidate, this is the election of uncertainty.

Harris backers, like 65-year-old Chris Dolan, of Birmingham, worry that some of the burst in public support the vice president got after replacing Biden at the top of the ticket may have stalled. “I was encouraged when the transition happened from Biden to Harris, for sure,” said Dolan. "She had some momentum. I'm not sure she has that momentum now, it seems too close to call. So that makes me a little bit more apprehensive.”

Kimberly Sadler, 54, of Highland Township, attended a rally with Trump's vice presidential pick, U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, last month in Waterford and said she expects Trump will win but expects it to be a nail-biter. "I think it’s going to be tight but he’s looking better than he did last time, for sure,” Sadler said.

Then you have voters like 20-year-old Evan Hubbs, also of Birmingham, who, as of Friday, hadn't made up his mind. He had been debating between Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but Kennedy has dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump. “I’m fully torn because as much as I want America to be first, I’m not the biggest fan of Trump,” Hubbs said. “I’m a big fan of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a key alliance between the U.S. and Europe against aggression) and international cooperation and he bashes NATO.”

He was still leaning toward Trump.

In terms of getting to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to be elected, Trump's best path to reelection looks like this: Win everywhere he did in 2020, pick up two states he narrowly lost in that election, Arizona and Georgia, and break through with any one state in the Democratic "blue wall" of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. All of them, as of Friday, were within the polling margin of error on average, separated by about no more than 2 percentage points if not a lot tighter than that.

Harris needs to keep the blue wall together; if she loses one or more of those states, she'd likely have to pick up the same number of more traditionally Republican states, like Arizona, Georgia or maybe North Carolina, all of which look like a harder reach.

What's somewhat likely is that all of the swing states — those mentioned above and including Nevada — will move toward the same nominee by varying degrees, which explains why the blue wall states have backed the same presidential nominee in the last eight presidential elections (and all but three going back to 1964). So they could all be won by the same candidate, resulting in an Electoral College landslide.

Or, they could split. With polling this close, that wouldn't be a big surprise either.

Even an Electoral College tie isn't out of the question, 269-269. That would throw the election to a newly seated U.S. House to decide, with each state's congressional delegation having one vote, and it's unclear which party is likely to control the most state delegations in the House.

While that's a long shot, in what has been perhaps the most bizarre, fascinating and in many ways historic presidential campaign in our lifetimes, would that really be that much of a surprise?

How we got here

No matter what the outcome is after the election, there is no doubt that it will have been largely shaped by the amazingly successful — his critics would say infamous, if not criminal — career of Trump in terms of remaking the Republican Party and American politics.

His political resilience (and there is frankly no other word to use for a 78-year-old man who not only lost a presidential election but was impeached twice and faces several criminal cases, convictions and investigations and still is running neck-and-neck in the race after, it must be said, two assassination attempts) is as remarkable as his unerring instinct to rouse his base of support with his pugnacity, nativism and grievances against political "elites."

He has been charged criminally with trying to overturn the results of the last election and spurring a crowd of supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying the win for Biden. And polls show close to half of those who will vote by Tuesday still support him, many enthusiastically, in his effort to become the first former president to be reelected since Grover Cleveland in 1892. Most of the Republicans who once raised concerns about him — like Michigan U.S. Reps. Peter Meijer and Fred Upton — are no longer in office.

But antipathy toward Trump, his agenda and his habit of demonizing immigrants and rejecting political norms, runs as high as his support, if not higher. That gives the 60-year-old Harris — who would be the first woman, first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to become president if she wins — a chance.

If Biden, beset by questions about his age and mental acumen after a disastrous debate with Trump in June, hadn't stepped aside as the Democratic nominee in July, Harris wouldn't be here. As it is, she's running a historic campaign that has attempted to mesh the hope and change agenda of former President Barack Obama with Biden's message to middle-class voters that Trump represents an existential threat to democracy. What had felt like a moribund march to Biden's defeat was replaced by huge waves of enthusiasm for Harris, as the party coalesced around her, campaign donations poured in and volunteers began to swarm to her campaign. Her speech at the Ellipse outside the White House last week drew 60,000 people or more.

And it's not just been Democrats; she has made gains with independents and other key voting blocs. Anti-Trump Republicans have endorsed her, like Upton and former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, of Wyoming.

But she still isn't as well-defined by the public as her opponent and Republicans have some clear advantages. One is being the party that is not in control of the White House at a time when Biden has low approval ratings and there is an anti-incumbent mood across Western democracies. Then, there is an issue set that favors the GOP. Illegal immigration swelled on the Southern border after Biden rolled back some of Trump's restrictions; it has been a winning issue for Trump, even as he has misled voters about its impact on crime and other details. COVID-19 shutdowns worldwide led to skyrocketing inflation, which has since cooled, but Democrats, with Biden in office, have taken the blame, despite overseeing an economy that has created millions of new jobs, pushed wages higher and stoked the stock market.

Meanwhile, Democrats have leaned heavily into the fact that it was Trump who appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who voted in 2022 to roll back abortion protections, throwing the issue back to the states, which resulted in Democratic gains in Michigan and elsewhere. They've also worked to tie Trump with a manifesto, much of it written by former Trump administration advisers, to upend the federal bureaucracy and rebuild it around their ultra-conservative agenda. Trump has attempted to distance himself from both issues but he ran as a strict abortion opponent before and some of the so-called Project 2025 positions are ones he has articulated himself.

Which set of issues has the edge at the end? Don't know. Not yet.

"Looking at (how voters describe) party ID, direction of the country, this should be the easiest presidential election for Republicans to win since (former President Ronald) Reagan's reelection (in 1984)," said David Dulio, political science professor and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Oakland University. "And it's not. It's a toss-up."

That's Trump. Given his divisiveness, it seems the election will come down to which nominee is better able to get their voters out. That's favored Democrats in some recent elections, but when Trump is on the ballot, his base has, over two presidential elections, turned out in droves. And Harris may have to contend with some Muslim and Arab American voters, as well as some progressives, who are angry enough at the Biden administration for not demanding an immediate Israeli cease-fire in Gaza and an arms embargo that they refuse to vote for Harris, even though Trump is, if anything, more supportive of Israeli authority.

In a state like Michigan, with a large Arab American and Muslim population centered in and around Dearborn, that could affect the outcome. Will it?

Who knows?

"People need to be ready," Dulio said, "for any outcome."

What will it mean?

The much larger question than "who will win the election," of course, is "what will that mean to our country?" And that, as with any presidential election, is so complicated by other factors as to be uncertain, too.

Give either nominee the election and his or her party a majority in the U.S. House and a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate, and that president could conceivably do a lot. (The last time that happened was in 2008 and the result was the Affordable Care Act and the Troubled Asset Relief Program to fight the Great Recession.) Even a simple majority can help: Trump was able to pass the 2017 tax cuts with a Republican Congress and Biden managed to win passage of a bipartisan infrastructure bill, the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act.

A lot of that, however, depended on getting bipartisan buy-in, especially in the Senate. That is certainly not a given.

If the rival party of the president controls one or both chambers of Congress, she or he is not likely to get much done if it's viewed through a strictly partisan lens. To a great degree, both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue will be looking to score political points on the other.

All that being said, though, we can try to look at some tendencies of the two nominees, their public statements and their records.

That record is far shorter in Harris' case, especially since as vice president she has been a part of Team Biden and not calling the shots. Certainly, she has staked out a more centrist position as vice president, and as the nominee, than she did when she ran for the White House herself in the 2020 Democratic primary. At that time, she initially ran as a progressive alternative to Biden; since then, she has moderated her positions. Given that record — and the fact that she has courted support from Republicans who have broken with Trump — there is reason to believe she would try to balance certain centrist goals (controlling illegal immigration on the border, while arguing for a path to citizenship for those here legally; supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia) with other more progressive ones (raising taxes on corporations and wealthier Americans, enshrining abortion rights nationally). She has already said she will bring GOP consultants into her orbit. She has also called for programs to help small businesses and first-time homebuyers and urged a crackdown on price gouging.

She has campaigned as a pragmatic alternative to Trump but has not forcefully split from the Biden administration. There is no reason to believe she wouldn't continue many of its policy goals.

But there is no question that, if Harris wins, she will be pushed by the more progressive wing of her party to take stronger stances on foreign policy, environmental concerns, voting rights protections and more.

Trump is a different kettle of fish.

For the last several months, he has been making campaign promise after campaign promise, upping the stakes — and the suggestion that he would reimagine life in the U.S. — extraordinarily. Mass deportations of undocumented immigrants at a scale never seen in the country (with little detail on how it would be carried out and the impact it would have on tax revenues and consumer prices). Huge tariffs on imported goods (again, with only his assurance, which goes against accepted economic theory, that it won't raise consumer prices). Slashed governmental regulations and even lower taxes on corporations. Tax breaks on overtime, Social Security benefits, tips and auto loans (with no explanation of how the lost federal revenue will be made up).

Trump's best argument for his program is that, as president, the economy boomed — a trend which began when Obama was president — with strong stock market gains and job creation until March 2020, when COVID-19 hit.

He also has vowed that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine would be stopped, though he doesn't say how, and he has argued that he will continue to challenge allies who he believes have taken advantage of America's wealth. He has said regulations intended to spur the production and sale of electric vehicles would be rolled back, leaving in question how domestic automakers will compete globally in the future. He will bring prices down, he says, by pushing more energy production — meaning drilling for oil and natural gas — at a time when greenhouse gases are causing climate change. He has said he would restrict transgender people's participation in sports and gender-affirming care for federal prisoners.

As with Harris, some of this agenda — all the tax cuts, for instance — would have to rely on Congress passing it.

Certainly, Trump in his first term attempted to follow through on many of his stated campaign promises on immigration, trade and health care, though he often ran into interference from the courts, Congress, or the laws that govern the executive branch. A move to get rid of parts of the Affordable Care Act failed. But he renegotiated the free trade deal between the U.S., Canada and Mexico as promised (though he says it's inadequate now) and substantially stiffened immigration policies.

The big question in a second Trump term would be, what would he do without the prospect of a third term (from which he is barred by the Constitution)? What would he hope to be his legacy as president? And how would he attempt to follow through on his bolder promises, if at all?

Depending on the outcome this week, we may find out.

On a beautiful fall day Downriver about a month ago, Kenneth Seymour, 53, of Taylor, sat in his backyard enjoying a beer as the sun went down contemplating how he might vote. “I really am so torn on that,” he said, adding that while he leans conservative, he's "not a Trumper." “It’s just the bickering and the pride and arrogance of it all. It really just turns me off.” He bemoaned disinformation, out-of-touch political elites and a general atmosphere of hostility and fear.

“People acting like it’s going to be the end of the world if their political party don’t get in there," he said. "I can promise you, it will not be."

Seymour has since decided who he's voting for. He prefers not to say who he picked.

Contact Todd Spangler: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter@tsspangler

(The headline was updated in this story.)

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: In Michigan and the US, Election 2024 is all about uncertainty