The defining narrative of the 2024 presidential election right now is that the race is a toss-up, and that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have an almost equal chance of winning. It’s not just the polls that make Harris appear to be on solid footing. Perhaps in response to the voluminous number of surveys showing a neck-and-neck race, and believing Trump is too volatile to be elected again, the betting markets – the best single indicator of who people believe will win – now favor Harris by seven points. So Kamala is in a strong position to become the 47th president, right?

Not so fast. Over the last few days, at least three respected political analysts have gone out on a limb by hinting at or outright predicting not just a win for Trump, but a landslide. Are they delusional – and, if not, what exactly leads them to this startling conclusion? Liberty Nation News was bold enough to consider such an outcome many months ago, albeit in a matchup between Trump and Biden, not Harris, but even though the VP appears to be more popular with voters than Biden, the fundamentals of the race have not changed as much as many think.

In his piece for The Hill, entitled: “The ‘scared majority’ could deliver a landslide victory for Trump,” Douglas Mackinnon, a Reagan/Bush-era political consultant and no fan of Trump, cites the mounting fears of voters about what they have experienced since 2020. Alluding to the downward spiral of life in America, he observes that the alarming number of Americans living from paycheck to paycheck are increasingly driven by abject fear. Animated by Harris’s celebrity-drenched appearance with Oprah Winfrey, in which she returned to her pre-debate, cringeworthy words salads, Mackinnon pulls no punches:

“While the entrenched elites from politics, academia … Hollywood and the media who live in bubbles of luxury and protection won’t notice, those Americans have never been more scared in their lives. Not only about their future, but about their present … Those I speak with on a regular basis tell me they have never been so frightened about circumstances out of their control … I predict that there is a reckoning coming in November from those tens of millions of scared voters. And I suspect that reckoning is going to produce a landslide victory for Trump.”

Joining the Trump Landslide Bandwagon

Trump skeptic Douglas Mackinnon is not the only commentator daring enough to predict a Trump landslide. Longtime conservative columnist Roger Kimball, in a piece for Trump-friendly American Greatness entitled “Levitation 101,” cuts to the chase: “Victory for the Democrats will depend on the perpetuation of the illusion that Kamala Harris is in any way a plausible candidate for the presidency of the United States.”

Citing Harris’ “seeping, leaking emission of empty saccharine vocables,” he goes on to argue that “[t]he more she vocalizes (I almost said ‘talks’), the more damage she does to her candidacy. Her embarrassing performance on a ninety-minute livestream exchange with Oprah Winfrey in Detroit a few days ago underscored the problem … Even Winfrey, a prominent anti-Trump Harris supporter, seemed taken aback by her guest’s incoherent flights of flaccid, cringe-making glossolalia.”

Then comes Kimball’s conclusion: “Harris’s campaign will fall to earth before November 5 and – though this is not what the polls currently tell us – Trump will win in something approaching a landslide.”

Fulfilling the ol’ rule of three, there is also a piece just released by popular Substack author Sasha Stone, entitled: “Kamala Harris’ Pitch to Undecided Voters: ‘Just Be,’” and subtitled: “The Queen of Gobbledegook just dropped a doozy.” Stone brings dark humor and sarcasm to the ridiculous Kamala-Oprah event and its utter tone-deafness: “I’m sure an event with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts was a great way to win over undecided Voters. They’re probably out there thinking, I can’t put food on the table, and I can’t send my kid to school without worrying about them coming home and asking for puberty blockers, and what is going on in Springfield? Are we on the brink of World War III? Ah, but the celebrities will help. They will guide me! Yes! I’ll vote for Harris!”

While hinting at, though not directly predicting, a big Trump victory, Stone adds: “Harris sounded like that person who drank too much wine or maybe smoked a joint and is spouting a platitude.” She is not alone in that observation.

An Historical Connection?

Americans over the age of 50 will remember the 1980 election. A president widely viewed as a failure, Jimmy Carter, was running neck-and-neck with challenger Ronald Reagan as October turned to November. And, of course, this was well before the days of conservative talk radio, Fox News, the internet, and social media. The platforms that favored Reagan were few and far between, while big media, far more dominant then than now, were all behind Carter, while depicting Reagan as a dangerous warmonger and right-wing reactionary. It seemed that, despite his many shortcomings – economic stagnation, inflation, astronomical interest rates, consistent foreign policy failures – Carter might well hold on and win a second term.

But something dramatic happened in the last week of the campaign, driven by that famous question posed by Reagan in his single debate with Carter: Are you better off than you were four years ago? It seemed to be a question voters would ask themselves anyway, but it served to frame the election in the simplest terms for voters of all stripes. Of course, by that time, Ronald Reagan had long since introduced himself to the nation, serving two successful terms as governor of California, and nearly unseating President Gerald Ford in a tightly contested GOP primary race four years earlier.

What does the 1980 election have to do with 2024, you might rightly ask? Well, in that final week of the campaign, voters evidently asked themselves the mirror-image of Reagan’s famous question: Do we really want four more years of this? The answer was a resounding no. The dam burst on Carter in the final days of the race, and Reagan accomplished the unthinkable, a landslide of epic proportions, the worst defeat for an incumbent since the Great Depression. Reagan won 44 states, Jimmy Carter a mere six. Voters were not sure what they might get with Reagan, but they sure knew they didn’t want another four years of the misery they experienced under Carter.

So, when push comes to shove, when people enter the privacy of the voting booth or complete their mail-in ballots, alone with their conscience and contemplating the fear-inducing reality of their lives today, will a majority actually pull the lever for Harris? If so, she will defy the full sweep of American political history.