Last week, we hosted the best debate of the election. Ben Shapiro is voting for Donald Trump. Sam Harris is voting for Kamala Harris. They spoke for two hours, with Bari moderating, about why. Click here to listen to, watch, or read it.
Today, we’re happy to publish an essay by each of them, in which they distill their closing arguments. Read Sam’s here, and scroll down to read Ben’s, which originally appeared on The Daily Wire.
So, it’s down to the wire. According to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average, Donald Trump is up in national polling—by 0.1 percent. In Georgia, he’s leading by 2.3 percent; in North Carolina, by 1.5 percent; in Pennsylvania, by 0.3 percent; in Arizona, by 2.6 percent; in Nevada, by 1 percent. Meanwhile, according to that same average, Harris is leading in Michigan by 0.6 percent and in Wisconsin by 0.3 percent. Suffice it to say, every single one of these battleground states is well within the margin of error—meaning that a significant polling error in Trump’s favor turns the election into a blowout for him, and a significant polling error in Harris’s direction turns it into a blowout for her.
According to AtlasIntel, Trump is currently leading in all the swing states; according to New York Times/Siena, Trump is behind in Nevada, but ahead in Arizona, and all the other swing states are essentially dead even, with Harris up slightly in Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. The bottom line: Nobody knows anything. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times points out, “Across these final polls, white Democrats were 16 percent likelier to respond than white Republicans. That’s a larger disparity than our earlier polls this year, and it’s not much better than our final polls in 2020—even with the pandemic over. It raises the possibility that the polls could underestimate Mr. Trump yet again.”
The early votes tell us. . . pretty much nothing. They show that the Republicans have done a far better job than in 2020 of getting out the early vote, but those may be high-propensity voters who were going to vote for Trump anyway. Meanwhile, female voters are, indeed, showing up in droves—but the same story applies.
Everyone is now attempting to read chicken entrails. So when Ann Selzer, widely respected as one of the best pollsters in the country, came out with a shocking poll on Saturday that had Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa by three points, Democrats erupted into spasms of ecstasy. At last, here was the evidence that Trump is finally going to be subdued, and Harris will emerge victorious!
But of course, it’s not quite that simple. The poll is pretty clearly an outlier. Emerson has Trump up nearly 10 points in the state right now. And Iowa is a Republican state at this point: The Republican Party has an advantage in registered voters over the Democratic Party of some 173,000 voters.
Bottom line: We should take the Iowa poll with a grain of salt. As Nate Silver says, “Releasing this poll took an incredible amount of guts because—let me state this as carefully as I can—if you had to play the odds, this time Selzer will probably be wrong.”
So, here’s the bottom line: Stop reading chicken entrails and GO VOTE NOW. On Friday, I voted early. And I voted, of course, for Donald Trump.
Now, for the final time, let me explain why.