By Thomas Fink | November 4, 2024
Photo Credit: Pixabay
University at Albany political science professors Connor Moran and Timothy Weaver differ on whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is destined to be the U.S. president over the next four years. Nevertheless, both academics make their cases as to why they believe one candidate or the other will take the White House, what this election says about the current American political climate, and how history will remember this staggering landmark in American history.
Both Connor Moran, an adjunct professor and doctoral student at UAlbany, and Dr. Timothy Weaver, an associate professor, gave their thoughts on the potential outcome of the presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Interviews were driven by six questions.
The professors were interviewed on Sept. 30 and Oct. 2, respectively. The first question was asked as follows:
“When you look back at all of the presidential election cycles you have followed throughout your lifetime, which ones did you predict correctly, and which ones did you predict incorrectly?”
Professor Moran has previously followed two presidential election cycles in his adult life: 2016 and 2020. He incorrectly predicted a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016. “I think me and a lot of people were wrong about that,” Professor Moran said. “A lot of political scientists had to seriously reevaluate their thinking of the electoral map.”
He explained that he underestimated the impact Republican Donald Trump had in winning the “Blue Wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, citing Clinton’s lack of campaigning in those states. Professor Moran correctly predicted the outcome of the 2020 election after President Trump’s declining popularity and controversial handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Professor Timothy Weaver has followed every U.S. presidential election cycle since 2000, with two incorrect predictions in the 2000 and 2016 election cycles. Professor Weaver believed President George W. Bush and President Trump to be “too unqualified,” and Trump to be “too divisive,” to win over the electoral college.
Professor Weaver explained that a major factor in President Trump’s 2016 victory was his willingness to break with “neoliberal orthodoxy that was bipartisan,” by running against free trade and globalization, appealing to midwestern working class white voters who had historically voted for Democrats, many of whom lost their jobs due to foreign outsourcing.
The second question was asked as follows:
“Do you have a prediction for the outcome of this election? If so, why? How confident are you?”
“I would not bet any money on this election,” Professor Moran said. “This is the closest one I have seen, in general.”
He said that he leans “towards Trump,” but that he “could be wrong.”
He said that the unpopularity of the Biden administration is hurting Harris and helping Trump, particularly with regards to issues such as illegal immigration and the economy.
Professor Moran said that a major factor as to why this election is so difficult to predict is this: in recent years, the polls tend to overestimate the electability of the Democrat while underestimating the electability of the Republican. Although he is predicting a second Trump victory, he said that Harris is mostly likely to win Wisconsin and Michigan.
Out of all the swing states, he said that Trump has the best chance of winning Arizona. He also mentioned the significance of the rightward shift of the Hispanic vote as that ethnic demographic is increasingly becoming pro-Trump.
“If you look at young Hispanic males, it is 50/50,” Professor Moran said.
He also said that young women appear to be going with Harris in large droves, more so than they would have if Biden stayed on the ticket. Yet, he said that may not be all that helpful to Harris as young people “don’t really vote.” On the other hand, he stated that Harris is doing well with another age demographic who overwhelmingly and consistently votes: senior citizens.
Professor Moran also discussed Pennsylvania, which he believes to be too close to call. He said that if Trump wins Pennsylvania, “it’s going to be tough for Harris” to be elected.
Overall, Professor Moran refers to his personal election forecast to be “a very, very, very tentative Trump prediction” on his part.
“My prediction is that it is going to be a narrow victory in the electoral college for Kamala Harris,” Professor Weaver said. “I think it is going to be a very narrow, narrow victory… but my confidence in my prediction is relatively low, that is to say, I’m saying maybe a 60 percent chance of this being the right result. I am not bullish. I think we probably won’t know on the night, and it could come down to one state.”
When it comes to how history would remember a hypothetical Harris win, Professor Weaver said that President Biden dropping out of the race was a smart move, as Professor Weaver believed that Biden was headed for an electoral defeat had he stayed in. He also commented that Harris has re-energized the Democratic Party’s base and reinvigorated voter turnout among Democrats.
With regards to what would be a significant factor to a hypothetical Trump loss, Professor Weaver expects the events of January 6th and Trump’s consistent denial of the 2020 election outcome to be what would ultimately hurt the Republican candidate electorally.
“It is just much, much harder for Trump to put together the kind of coalition that he put together in 2016,” Professor Weaver said. Additionally, he stated that because Trump has become repellant to plenty of voters who are on the political center and the center-right, and the Democrats are enthusiastically unified in voting against him, these factors further illustrate Professor Weaver’s reasoning as to why Trump would not be elected to a second term.
Additional factors that Professor Weaver thinks would lead to a Harris victory are the Democrats pushing a narrative of a fight for “freedom” when it comes to the issue of abortion as well as framing Project 2025 as a threat of right-wing authoritarianism.
Professor Weaver argues that although inflation is still a problem for the Democratic Party, it has decreased from its 2022 spike and has yet to trigger an economic recession.
The third question was asked as follows:
“Do you think it [the election outcome] will be a nationwide victory (in which all swing states are a clean sweep such as the 2008 or 2016 elections) or do you think it will be tight in which the president-elect wins by a close shave (such as the 2000 election)?”
Professor Moran said he believes that the truth could be somewhere in the middle between these two scenarios: he thinks it is quite possible that the president-elect could win all the swing states, but by razor-thin margins.
Professor Weaver stated that he believes Harris will win the “Blue Wall” states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
The fourth question was asked as follows:
“Hypothetically speaking, if you worked on the Trump campaign, what advice/political strategies would you recommend to him in pursuit of a better chance of electability?”
Professor Moran said this hypothetical question is tough to answer because “Trump doesn’t always listen to advice he gets.” Nevertheless, he believes Trump should go into more specifics on policy.
“Just get him to talk about the wall, again,” Professor Moran said. “People care about immigration and that is a policy that Trump has branded.”
He also mentioned that Trump should talk about how he would cut inflation; he believes Trump taking the position of “a tax cut for the middle class would be quite popular.”
“Centrist voters — they care about immigration, they care about the economy,” Professor Moran said. “Trump still has an advantage here and he should actually be doing this [appealing to those voters].”
Professor Weaver answered this hypothetical question by saying that he would advise Trump not to do another debate, to limit his public appearances, to discuss only illegal immigration and the economy, to avoid saying insulting or inflammatory remarks and to shorten his rallies in duration.
“I would wrap him up and let him out for a 20-minute period once every three days, and say to him, ‘You can only talk about the economy and you can only talk about immigration, but do not start talking about Hannibal Lecter,’” Professor Weaver said.
He believes now that four years of the Trump presidency has passed followed by an additional four years of him out of office, Trump is still deeply prominent in the public eye, but he has become more controversial than ever.
The penultimate question was asked as follows:
“Hypothetically speaking, if you worked on the Harris campaign, what advice/political strategies would you recommend to her in pursuit of a better chance of electability?”
Professor Moran believes that Vice President Harris comes across as inauthentic and not willing to take any risks.
“Honestly, I don’t think Harris has run a very good campaign, to be frank with you,” Professor Moran said. “I don’t think she has. I don’t think she’s been tested. I don’t think she’s been going around the media enough.”
Professor Weaver believes Vice President Harris should interact with ordinary people as much as possible to emphasize her policy positions and the benefits they would have for working class Americans. Furthermore, he said that she needs to overcome a particular weakness: a difficulty to coherently deliver rebuttals to right-wing arguments.
Although Professor Weaver too believes that Vice President Harris needs to do more interviews in the traditional media, he believes she should embrace “a different media environment,” such as podcasts, to appeal to demographics she is struggling with, such as young men.
Professor Weaver highlights Vice President Harris’ difficulty with her image, citing her far-left platform during her presidential primary campaign in 2020 as compared with her record as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, which often is at odds with left-wing principles.
However, Professor Weaver stated that he believes she is doing an adequate job moving rightward to the center to appeal to swing voters in middle America, especially with regards to issues such as immigration, taxation, crime and fracking. Furthermore, he thinks that her rejection of far-left politics throughout her 2024 campaign is, at its core, a more “authentic” representation of her actual beliefs.
“I think that she understands that, in a way, for this election and in this moment, her big job is to convince undecided voters who are probably center to center-right… and her strategy is that negative partisanship [anti-Trump rhetoric] would be enough to keep the Left onboard,” Professor Weaver said.
The final question reads as follows:
“What do you think will become of the House of Representatives and the Senate if Kamala Harris wins? What do you think will become of the House of Representatives and the Senate if Donald Trump wins?”
“Regardless of who wins the presidential race, it's looking like both the House and the Senate will be decided by razor thin margins as they have been for the last couple cycles,” Professor Moran said. “I am not convinced either Vice President Harris or former President Trump, if victorious, will have any significant effect on the Senate or House races.”
Professor Moran said that he thinks the Republicans have the potential to win back the Senate in states such as Maryland and Montana.
“There are going to be close [House] races in most of the swing states,” Professor Moran said. “Polling has consistently shown a very slight general ballot Democratic advantage, not terribly far off from Harris's slight national polling leads.”
Professor Weaver’s prediction for what the balance of power of the U.S. Congress would be for the next two years is practically identical to that of Professor Moran’s.
“I think what we’re likely to see is a small Democratic majority in the House and I think what we’re likely to see is probably a one-or-two-seat-Republican-majority in the Senate,” Professor Weaver said. “So, in all likelihood, I think the Democrats will lose the majority in the Senate.”
Professor Weaver expects his prediction to become reality regardless of who the President-elect is. Furthermore, he believes that if Trump wins Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania, it is unlikely that the Republican Senatorial candidates in those states will flip on those Democratic seats.
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