Hippo Outperforms Pollsters

Harris loses, but the consulting class prospers

Moo Deng

A pygmy hippopotamus named Moo Deng outperformed the pollsters by correctly predicting a Trump victory. Virtually all of the professional prognosticators anticipated either a Harris win or a race that would be too close to call on Tuesday night.

Instead, Trump won, and is on track to win every single swing state. 

The pollsters have once again been exposed as little more than a glorified Rasputin class, soothsayers whispering into the ears of the elite in Washington and New York. “US election ‘oracle’ predicts surprise Kamala Harris win,” one representative news article declared on Sunday, referring to the widely touted Selzer poll finding Harris leading in Iowa. Trump has since won the state by over 10 points.

Those Rasputins and their council of fools made well over $1.5 billion from the presidential election, advising and advertising Harris to defeat. Whatever we’ll learn about why the Vice President failed so badly, one thing is clear: her campaign advisors don’t know America. 

Humility seems in order: about the limits of polling, about the Democratic Party’s lack of working class appeal, about Kamala’s performance in the popular vote, and about the major media’s obliviousness. Instead of humility, though, the “strategic” political class are in full-on We Did Nothing Wrong mode.

Last night, when it became clear Trump had won, Washington favorite and liberal columnist Matt Yglesias opined that the Harris campaign’s “ads and the strategy and ‘the campaign’ were reasonably effective.” I live in Wisconsin, a swing state, and the campaign ads I saw on TV were bafflingly out of touch. Instead of articulating how Harris would address, say, the world being on fire (see: Israel, Ukraine, etc.), the obscene cost of living, or how things would be different from Biden, the campaign ads focused on themes like how bad January 6th was and the need to defend democracy. A former Democratic staffer friend of mine told me he complained about this to a Harris campaign official but was told to “trust the data.” 

I’m not sure what data the campaign was looking at internally, but the data from last night tell a very different story. Trump won a majority of voters who earn less than $50,000 per year — a group Biden won handily in 2020. Trump appears to have performed well among Latinos. Harris doesn’t appear to have gotten the youth vote.

Yet according to the strategic political class, there’s nothing to see here.

“Nothing here looks like a story of various campaign decisions or a VP choice or big set piece speeches,” Semafor’s Washington Bureau Chief Benjy Sarlin says. “It's an electorate mad at the incumbent WH's record and expressing it pretty uniformly everywhere, blue and red states alike.”

But it was the Harris campaign’s decision not to differentiate her from Biden, whose unpopularity was clear as day. Back in July, after Biden ended his campaign for re-election, I argued that he would be wise for the president to resign in order to allow Harris some time as president so that she could distinguish herself from his administration. 

That didn’t happen. And when she was later asked on The View what she hoped to do differently than Biden, Harris replied: “Not a thing comes to mind…”

That’s a campaign decision, on her part or collectively.

— Edited by William M. Arkin