Post-election analysis of the 2024 US elections

Donald Trump has been declared the next president of the United States. These apparent election results came as a surprise - as indicated in my previous analysis I only gave Trump 30% chance of winning. Inevitably there has since been a deluge of explanations of why Trump won, why Harris lost, and which predictions were the best and worst. Here are a few further thoughts without much elaboration.

Single outcomes are a very bad way of measuring the validity of prediction models. It is well-known from studies of stockmarket prediction and trading that you will almost always have some predictions close to the true result but that is usually not consistent over time. The case of the stopped clock that is right twice a day is helpful in understanding this. My view: the outcome itself does not tell us much about which models and predictions were well-founded and which were not.

Even though Trump appears to have won the popular vote, the extent of his electoral college victory (currently 295 vs 226, but likely to extend to an even larger gap) is misleading in relation to how tight the result is. If Harris had received 82,000 more votes in Michigan, 30,000 more in Wisconsin, and 150,000 more in Pennsylvania, Harris would currently have a winning 270 electoral college votes and Trump would have 251. That’s only 262,000 votes out of a current total of over 140,000,000: about 0.2%. These are very thin margins…

What both these points imply is that the many lengthy explanations of why Kamala Harris was rejected by voters or why Trump was embraced should be taken with a pinch of salt. Only in specific states might those stories matter, but they are usually either generalised to the national level or entirely anecdotal.

Very thin margins also make manipulation much easier. I only recently discovered that Trump received funding from Palantir, one of the few companies that can be said to be a corporation intent on advancing dystopia. It has extremely sophisticated covert capacity relating to data gathering, processing and manipulation. From that alone one can be reasonably confident Trump could have had access to the capacity required to meddle with the election results - directly or indirectly.

In relation to my own predictions, nothing that has transpired has changed my basic conviction that Trump would not be allowed to win unless that was approved of by a large enough proportion of what I call ‘the establishment’ and Trump calls ‘the deep state’. From this it follows that either the Trump camp or/and some who favoured his victory interfered to facilitate that, or the ‘deep state’ has figured out some way to get Trump to serve their agenda. If Trump somehow managed to win despite opposition among this powerful grouping, rather than somehow being useful to them, I would be surprised if he even makes it to his inauguration nevermind the end of his term.

The preceding paragraphs might sound overly conspiratorial, but it is useful to situate them in relation to one of the worst national security ‘failures’ in US history: in which the Secret Service failed in very elementary ways that faciliated an assasination attempt that seems to have failed by only a centimetre or two. Trump would not even have been on the ballot.

One of the few genuinely interesting patterns to emerge from the reported results is that Harris lost states where Democrat candidates for Senate won. In essence, she suffered the fate that I suggested was likely for Trump if Harris’s strategy prevailed: that Republicans wooed by Harris would vote against Trump but otherwise still vote for Republican candidates. While the negative result for Harris seems possible, I do find it surprising that the outcome was inverted in such a uniform fashion. There were very few Democrat leaders who failed to endorse Harris despite supposed differences with her, while many Republicans condemned Trump. Of course, we don’t know what kind of information voters actually saw - thanks to the ability to manipulate access in unobservable ways through social media - but it still seems odd.

Another interesting result, which I have not seen remarked upon at all, is that RF Kennedy Jr appears to have ‘accidentally’ taken more votes from Trump than Jill Stein from Harris. Much noise has been made about Stein being the preferred option for progressive voters disillusioned with Harris’s stance on Gaza and Palestine, yet virtually no mention has been made of RFK’s effect on Trump. [As a reminder for those who missed it: RFK was originally going to run as an independent after losing against Biden in the competition for the Democrat nomination, then partially suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump but did so too late to remove himself from many state ballots]

Even some aspects of the Democrat concessions, statements about the presidential transition and the electoral system have struck me as strange. Trump has threatened to bring a wrecking ball to systems of power that have been built over decades and transferred from one handpicked group to another. I just cannot see that happening or being allowed to happen. Moreover, key members of his team - not just Musk who I mentioned before, but also RKF mentioned above and his deputy JD Vance - are people who previously stated that Trump was not of the right character to be president. This also applies to the podcaster Joe Rogan who surprisingly endorsed Trump shortly before the election, despite previously having categorically condemned him and described his own politics as being closer to Bernie Sanders. So many critics so close to Trump seems an unlikely coincidence.

Given all this, in my view the only real explanation for how and why these election results came about will emerge over the next few months in the run-up to the presidential inauguration and then - if Trump is actually inaugurated - in the three months afterwards. It would not surprise me if there are still some sharp twists and turns in the road before the inauguration on the 20th of January 2025.