Sorry Donald Trump, Here's Why the Election May Already Be Over | Opinion

Is the Presidential election already over? Well...not exactly. Not yet. But there's now a real argument that sometime last week, former President Donald Trump got mathematically cooked. We just can't see it yet.

The case: Trump has to win North Carolina to have any significant chance at the presidency. Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson 's pro-slavery-Black-Nazi-porn scandal could tank Republican turnout and make the Tarheel State unwinnable for Trump. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Of course, it's not quite that simple. So, let's take the pieces one at a time.

First, is North Carolina essential for Trump? Yes. Or pretty close to it. According to election forecaster Nate Silver , if Vice President Kamala Harris wins North Carolina she has a 95 percent chance of winning the presidency. Mind you, it is possible to construct Electoral College maps where Trump still pulls out a slim victory without North Carolina. It's just not very probable.

That's why the Trump campaign's acknowledged main strategy has the Tarheel State at the fulcrum. Republicans not-so-privately recognize that if they lose there, the path becomes extremely narrow. So, North Carolina is almost, but not quite, a GOP must-win.

Second, can a gubernatorial candidate meaningfully hurt their up-ballot presidential candidate in the state? Yes. Binghamton University political scientists Amuitz Garmendia Madariaga and H. Ege Ozen studied all the relevant cases since 1960. There aren't that many of them, but the researchers did find "robust and significant gubernatorial coattail effects on [the] state-level presidential vote." Even state legislative races can have these kinds of "reverse coattails" all the way up to the presidential level: one study of 2020 legislative races in swing states, including North Carolina, by Democratic advocacy group "Run for Something" showed an effect as high as 1.5 percent from races four rungs down the ballot.

To be sure, Trump is a political unicorn. He's proved impervious to his own scandals, the kind that would have crushed almost any other figure in American political history (the man is, after all, a convicted felon). And his MAGA people will still MAGA.

But the voters Trump is counting on to win are not all MAGA. Far from it. A quarter of North Carolina's Republican primary participants voted for someone other than Trump just six months ago— 250,000 of them for Nikki Haley —meaning that a massive segment of his vote goal is vulnerable to peeling away. And remember that the case that Trump is sunk doesn't depend on these voters converting all the way to Harris. It depends on the more likely effect that they are turned off enough by the Robinson mess to decide to sit this one out, leading to substantially decreased Republican turnout.

Bottom line: a down-ballot flameout can singe the rest of the ticket under the right circumstances, and prominent Republicans think these are the right circumstances. As one of the top Republican pollsters, Whit Ayres, told Vox "We have few examples of reverse coattails where a down-ballot candidate hurts the top of the ticket. But if anyone could do it, it's this character [Robinson]."

Third, is the North Carolina race close enough that the Robinson effect could put it out of Trump's reach? Yes. Trump won the state by just 1.35 points in 2020 and polling averages show it statistically tied right now, with a gentle slope toward Harris even before last week.

Fourth, is the situation likely to get worse from here for Trump? Yes. As former Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp observed , weakness is provocative. Robinson is surely weak—his campaign staff has fled and the Republican Governors' Association has cut him off from further funding. And the Harris campaign is definitely provoked, already running ads and billboards reminding voters of the Trump-Robinson ties.

They also have a rich library to choose from to build future attacks (Trump dubbed Robinson " Martin Luther King on steroids " and, oddly, said he is "like a fine wine"). Remember, too, that Harris has a lot of resources at her disposal to communicate with, and can blast them at a state that pollsters like the New York Times' Nate Cohn believe is already trending bluer.

So, given all of that, why isn't this a slam dunk already?

The biggest reason is that in this election, the margin of uncertainty is greater than the margin of victory. The North Carolina Republican base could still be remarkably resilient and determined to show up and vote, no matter how low Robinson sinks. Or Trump could lose North Carolina but still find a way to assemble a low probability Electoral College path. Or an October surprise could change the race in all the swing states. Or all the polls could be just wrong enough in Harris' direction right now that we're getting an artificially distorted picture.

Moreover, if the Robinson scandal was a hammer blow to Trump, we can't expect to see a ton of evidence of it in the remaining month of the campaign. Pollsters have made educated guesses about likely voters, and they won't have a reliable way to update assumptions about who will turn out to vote. So, if there is a shift that is based not on a change in voter sentiment, but on decreased Republican turnout, polls may not pick it up.

In other words, there's a good chance that North Carolina is now the Schrödinger's cat of the 2024 election: Trump could already have been politically poisoned there, or not, but we will have to wait until Election Day to find out.

So, no, we can't say that this thing is over. But there's a reasonable case that something has fundamentally shifted in the past 10 days, and that Trump is in way bigger trouble now.

Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host, and former congressional staffer.

The views in this are the writer's own.