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5.14 | 10.08.24
Why does every presidential race lately get described as "the most important election of our lifetimes"? Because it's true. In any election where Donald Trump is on the ballot, Americans are faced with a world-changing choice about whether we want the democratic experiment to continue.
Right now, four weeks out from the 2024 vote, it's totally unclear which choice we'll make, but it's not too soon to be thinking about the possible consequences. This episode walks through four plausible post-election scenarios, with the main outcomes driven by who wins the popular vote and who wins in the electoral college. These are the "Four Valleys"—the Valley of Hope, the Valley of Survival, the Valley of Greed, and the Valley of Doom.
Resources and Related Episodes
Unpeaceful Transition of Power, Soonish, June 24, 2020
Autocracy in America podcast from The Atlantic
Notes
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Full Transcript
[Music: Hub & Spoke Sonic ID]
[Music: Soonish opening theme]
Wade Roush: You’re listening to Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.
This is the last episode I’ll be putting out before the 2024 elections in the United States.
It’s a weird time to be going on the record about anything election-related right now, knowing that it’s all going to be outdated and possibly flat wrong just one month from now.
But this is a podcast about the future.
And I’m supposed to be in the business of issuing predictions about that future, or at least talking about how it’ll be shaped by the choices we make now.
It’s safe to say that the choice we’re about to make between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is going to shape things for a long time to come, and not just for Americans but for the whole planet.
So I do want to say something, if only to explain what I see as the different ways this election could play out.
I think sometimes we focus so hard on the election itself, and on the need for your candidate to win, that we don’t think much beyond Election Day.
It’s like we’re running toward this big cliff that says November 5 and beyond it there’s just a void.
I’d like to try to fill in that void.
I’m a Harris supporter so there’s going to be an ideological valence to some of what I’m saying.
But it’s not really my intention to sway you one way or another.
Today I just want to help you prepare mentally for the potential outcomes and what they might look like.
I think I did that at least once before, back in June of 2020, when I published an episode that predicted months in advance how that election would unfold: namely, with Trump refusing to leave office quietly after his defeat.
Lawrence Douglas: So, yes, I do think that the opportunities for unrest are real. We don't need to overlook the fact that if this is a country whose populace is armed to the teeth. And that it’s very easy to imagine that conflicts, demonstrations and counterdemonstrations end up in violence. And I don't want to say that I would imagine Trump necessarily encouraging violence. But again, it's this kind of dog whistle politics that he engages in, this politics of divide and tear-down. So all you need to do is send out a tweet along the lines of the radical Democrats are trying to steal our victory, and who knows how people are going to interpret that.
Wade Roush: I didn’t foresee that insurrectionists would storm the capital on January 6.
Because how can you predict that kind of rupture in our democracy?
But now we know. It can happen here.
Okay. So, what I want to do in this short episode is walk down the mostly likely paths that this election could follow.
I’m not a pollster so I can’t say which path we’ll ultimately select.
From what I’m reading, right now in the first week of October, it seems like Harris and Trump are pretty much tied among likely voters.
Harris might be slightly ahead in some polls, but by no means is it out of the question that Trump wins.
At this point most people know exactly how they feel about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Those people’s views have been reflected in the polls for weeks, and they’re not going to change their minds.
So everything depends on how many undecided or low-propensity voters turn out to vote and how those votes add up in each of the potential tipping-point states, meaning Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.
There’s even an unlikely but possible scenario where Harris and Trump each get 269 electoral votes and the election gets thrown into the House of Representatives.
So, once again, for the third presidential election in a row, it feels like the nation is balanced on a knife’s edge.
Except—maybe that’s the wrong metaphor. A knife has only two sides, and you eventually end up on one side or the other.
This election presents us with a seemingly binary choice between a Democratic candidate and a Republican candidate.
But in reality, there are more than two ways this election could turn out.
If you’re looking for a better metaphor, maybe it’s like we’re positioned at the top of a mountain peak, or what complexity scientists might call a local maximum, and we’re surrounded on all sides by valleys, or local minima.
And the question is which valley we’ll roll into once gravity takes over.
I think there are at least four possible valleys.
The impetus that kicks us down the hill into one of these valleys will be who wins the popular vote and who wins the electoral college, and by how much.
Now it’s not fun to say this but if you remember one thing from this podcast, it’s that none of these valleys are going to be particularly pleasant.
I honestly think we need to steel ourselves for some very difficult times ahead.
And that starts with being clear-eyed and realistic, and with refusing to look away from a prospect just because it’s unpleasant.
So, let’s look at the First Valley. I’m going to call this one the Valley of Hope.
This is the most optimistic election outcome, from my personal point of view, so I thought we might as well start there.
In this possible future, Harris wins the popular vote and she wins in the electoral college, with margins at least as big as the ones Joe Biden got in 2020.
Now, the tipping point state are the ones where it would change the outcome of the whole election if you shifted their electoral votes from one column to the other.
Again, right now those states are Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.
And the way we get to the Valley of Hope is that in all of these states, Harris wins by such a comfortable margin that there’s no room for Trump and his minions to mount successful legal cases around voter fraud or some kind of miscount of the ballots.
I mean, make no mistake, the GOP already has hundreds of lawyers getting ready to argue those cases, and to make them up out of whole cloth if they have to.
They’re also doing the best they can to create soft targets for legal challenges by changing all sorts of rules around the election at the last second.
The whole goal is spread enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt that they’ll have room in the court of public opinion to lay the groundwork for a Second Big Lie.
And in that effort they’ll no doubt bet some help from judges like Aileen Cannon.
She’s the Trump-appointed South Florida federal district judge who’s been doing her damnedest to get Trump off the hook in the classified documents case.
And of course, there’s a right-leaning majority in the US Supreme Court, and if the election outcome were somehow to land there, the way it did in 2000, there’s no question in my mind that they’d rule for Trump.
After all, almost the entire project of the Trump coalition since 2016, and the one they’ve had by far the most success with, has been to install judges who will go along with their program of minoritarian rule.
But! If Harris’s popular vote margin is big enough in the tipping-point states, then Republicans can file all the specious lawsuits they want and there still won’t be enough votes up for grabs to change the outcome.
Now, if this first valley sounds a little like 2020, that’s intentional.
Trump’s forces had no real hope of overturning the results in 2020, because Biden’s margins were big enough, though just barely, to make challenges to the voting process moot.
But that didn’t seem to matter then, and it won’t matter in 2024.
In three consecutive campaigns now, Trump has said in essence that he’ll only respect the election results if they go his way.
There’s no reason to disbelieve him this time.
So we know pretty for sure that if he loses, there will be lawsuits.
And even if all the cases are frivolous, it’ll take time for the courts to work through them.
I guess what I’m saying is, even in the best case scenario, November and December are going to be a mess.
But with luck, when January 6 rolls around, the 119th Congress, sitting in what will hopefully a heavily defended Capital Building, with Kamala Harris herself presiding, will certify the election for Harris.
If we’re really lucky, the MAGA coalition will be so tired of losing under Trump that the air will finally go out of the tires, and the GOP will start to grapple with how to rebuild itself as a functioning political party.
Now, what a President Harris would be able to accomplish during her first term would depend almost completely on whether the Democrats can keep the Senate and retake the House.
Both of those things look dicey right now.
So even in the Valley of Hope, we could end up with an isolated Harris White House working against a Republican-dominated Congress that may or may not continue to be in Trump’s pocket.
So in the Valley of Hope is where I hope we end up, because it’s the sunniest possible outcome, but we also have to acknowledge that there will be some clouds.
Okay, let’s move on to the second valley. I call this one the Valley of Survival.
This is a scenario where Harris wins the popular vote and the electoral college but by a small margin, or where Trump actually wins the popular vote but Harris wins in the electoral college.
In this valley I think we’d see a repeat of the worst moments of 2020, plus the worst moments of the Bush v. Gore in 2000.
If the outcome were very close, it would give Republican politicians and their lawyers the covery to double down on all their shenanigans from 2020, like challenging the legitimacy of the vote count on a county by county level, or persuading legislatures and governors to name alternative slates of electors at the state level.
Attorneys for the Harris-Walz campaign would fight back, of course.
But the judges hearing all these cases would be under enormous pressure and scrutiny, knowing that their rulings could potentially tip the election one way or send the decision up the ladder to the Supreme Court.
That’s not a fun place to be for any judge. And it also tends to create the conditions for messy and often grossly politicized rulings, like the ones we saw in the 2000 election.
In this second valley, the legal wrangling could easily drag into December or even January.
And the closer we got to January 6 or January 20 without a winner, the more pressure the Supreme Court would feel to step in
Now let’s imagine that after all the legal cases get resolved and after the state legislatures and members of Congress have their say, Harris comes out on top, and actually gets sworn in.
Even then you have to keep in mind that election controversies are like lighter fluid for the MAGA movement.
Any serious legal tussle over the result would reignite Trump fever and become the founding mythology for a Second Big Lie that would be even more toxic than the first.
So even if she were able to take office, Harris would start out her term severely weakened.
She’d be attempting to preside over a country where at least half the voters were convinced Trump had won and that they were once again being denied representation.
Whether she could accomplish anything substantive after that would depend, again, on the makeup of Congress, but also on her ability to wade into the battlefield of public opinion and broker some kind of peace agreement.
Her main job would be to hold the country together until the next big reckoning.
Joe Biden sort of did that. So maybe she could too.
Now obviously I’m not looking forward to another four years of gridlock and uncertainty.
But I think it’s a realistic possibility.
And it’ll continue to be a possibility, maybe even a probability, until we can muster the political will to end Trumpism once and for all and rebuild a working democracy,
Only then will we have the focus to tackle other big problems like climate change and the affordability crisis in housing, education, healthcare, and child care.
Okay, the Valley of Survival is not a fun place, but at least in that future Harris is the president.
The Third Valley is what I call the Valley of Greed. This is the valley we might end up in if the election is very close, but slightly in Trump’s favor rather than Harris’s.
Here Trump loses the popular vote but wins in the Electoral College, or he wins both the popular vote and in the Electoral college but by a narrow margin.
In this scenario the Harris campaign would be starting out a disadvantage, and they’d have to decide whether to contest the outcome.
Traditionally, this is the moment when Democrats choose to concede, the way Al Gore did in 2000 and the way Hilary Clinton did in 2016.
Now, conceding might be the gracious thing to do.
It might seem patriotic to say that you don’t want to put the nation through the prolonged trauma of a contested election.
But I’m not sure that always leads to the best outcomes for the country.
Personally I’m convinced that if Al Gore’s lawyers had been a little smarter or had fought a little harder in 2000, they could have made sure that that election was decided by actual voters in Florida rather than by five members of the Supreme Court.
And look, If Trump’s lead in popular vote this November is narrow enough in key states, it really could leave room for legal challenges by the Harris campaign.
Lord knows the Trump campaign has been working as hard as they can to stack local election boards with pro-Trump commissioners, and to push through last-minute rule changes that make it harder for people in Democratic-leaning districts to vote.
Democratic lawyers are already getting some of those changes overturned.
And I don’t see any reason why they should stop playing hardball if the election is extremely close.
I’m not saying it would actually work.
And I’m definitely not saying that Democrats should be laying the groundwork to tell their own Big Lie.
I’m just saying that when it’s only Democrats who ever turn the other cheek, the country ends up being ruled by Republicans, whether or not they have majority support.
But to get back to the Valley of Greed.
In this scenario Trump would have the post-election advantage, and he would probably wind up as President.
The question then is about how much damage he’ll be able to do in his second term.
He wouldn’t be starting off with a ton of political capital in the conventional sense, because he’d be coming off a narrow electoral victory, and at least half the population would be deeply opposed to his agenda.
His ability to act would also be constrained to some degree by Congress.
If Democrats can keep the Senate and retake the House, or if we end up with another divided Congress, Trump would be hobbled from a legislative standpoint.
Conversely, if Republicans have a trifecta, meaning control of the House, Senate, and the White House, then obviously Trump would have a lot more runway legislatively.
But I’m not sure any of that stuff about political capital or Congressional majorities makes much difference, because that’s not really how Trump governs anyway.
He doesn’t care about passing laws or getting things done. He only wants to grow and protect his own power and wealth.
Now I’m not going to belabor this point, because plenty of other commentators have been doing that.
If you want a reminder of just how far down the road to totalitarianism we’ve already traveled in the Trump era, check out an excellent podcast from The Atlantic called Autocracy In America.
But this scenario doesn’t count as a full apocalypse, because if Trump didn’t feel empowered by a large electoral majority, and if he were opposed at every step by a robust resistance movement, which I certainly hope he would be, then he’d probably hunker down a bit domestically.
He would do everything he can to shut down the existing legal cases against him, insulate himself against future legal jeopardy, and take revenge against his political enemies.
And that’s a project that’s mostly focused inward.
Remember, Trump is a fundamentally lazy, disengaged, and scatterbrained person.
A Trump who regained the keys to the White House, but without a mandate, would become a classic kleptocratic ruler, concerned mainly with protecting and enriching himself and his family.
He probably wouldn’t bother to embark on an out-and-out crusade to terminate the Constitution or dismantle democracy.
Instead he’d settle for a series of lavish summit meetings with his pals Vladimir Putin, Kim-Jong Un, and Xi Jinping.
To the extent that he had any political goals, the main one would be to get JD Vance gets elected president in 2028, in order to ensure that he, Trump, would continue to get velvet-glove treatment from the government after he goes back to Mar-a-Lago.
Now there’s no question that this whole scenario is bad for the nation and the world.
Any scenario where Trump gets elected probably means the end of the road for Ukraine as an independent nation, just to cite one example.
But my guess is that Trump would spend most of his time enjoying the petty rewards of power.
In short, things could be even worse.
And that brings us to the Fourth Valley, or what I call the Valley of Doom.
This is what could follow an election where Trump wins a convincing majority in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
This is the only scenario where there wouldn’t be a protracted legal battle after the election, because Democrats would probably feel honor-bound to respect the results, even if they knew they were playing by the rules of a dying system.
So. If Trump somehow returns to office with a real popular mandate, and especially if he has both the House and the Senate behind him, it’s like that his followers in the Far Right would feel empowered to start remaking the country along the lines they’ve spent years howling for.
They’d be able to follow through on every promise and every threat they’ve ever made.
In very short order we’d probably get a national abortion ban.
And that would lead to an attempt to undo the entire so-called woke agenda, including the remnants of affirmative action and private-sector DEI and ESG initiatives.
There would be an attempt roll back LGBTQ rights, including gay marriage.
And the MAGA right would want to make life as difficult as possible for gender-nonconforming kids and trans adults.
They’d also press forward with their nativist program, deporting or locking up millions of immigrants, whether they’re here legally or illegally.
They’d withdraw from our most important alliances and they’d leave our peer democracies and former friends to fend for themselves.
They’d dismantle agencies that do the critical work of government but which they see as overly bureaucratic, including the Department of Education and the EPA.
They’d repeal the Affordable Care Act and leave regulation of healthcare to the states and the free market, as if that worked well the first time around.
They’d disinvest in renewable energy and redouble fossil fuel production.
They’d install military leaders who wouldn’t hesitate to deploy troops domestically to put down the inevitable resistance movements.
And they’d try to bolster their existing majority on the Supreme Court.
And remember, folks, Sonia Sotomayor is 70 years old, and even now there’s an argument that she should step down, while the Senate is in Democratic hands, so that President Biden can name a younger replacement.
All of this might sound too alarmist.
But look, I’m not making this shit up.
I’m just repeating what the MAGA right itself has very clearly said it wants to do, in documents like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
But here’s what I’m most worried about, in the Valley of Doom scenario.
It’s not all this policy stuff.
It’s that Trump and his followers would feel free to take the country in the direction of the world’s other autocracies, like Russia and North Korea and Venezuala, where the state is basically synonymous with its leader.
The once-proud Republican party has already been remade in the image of people like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
And my concern is that if it wins power again, that party would try to remake the country and its election rules to keep Democrats out of power forever.
They’d certainly stack the courts to keep opponents from challenging them.
And they might even decide to throw out the Constitution.
Especially that pesky 22nd amendment limiting the president to just two terms in office.
What I’m talking about is really the end of the United States as a functioning democracy.
And along those lines, there’s one possibility within of this Valley of Doom scenario that’s even more difficult to think about but is still absolutely possible.
Remember how I remarked earlier that saying the election is balanced on a knife’s edge might not be the best metaphor?
Well, there is one apt thing about it, which is that a knife can end up slicing you into pieces.
Even if Trump wins, there are still going to be a lot of blue states where a majority of people voted for Harris.
And it’s hard to imagine that the folks in those states will just knuckle under for the sake of decorum and allow Trump to plunge all 330 million of us into a new autocratic age.
There’s another option that might seem increasingly attractive, which is for people in blue states to declare that the Constitution is not, in fact, a suicide pact.
They could decide that it’s time to fix the structure of our government once and for all to get rid arrangements that protect minoritarian rule and enable demagogues to take power.
I’m talking about things like the electoral college and the filibuster and lifetime supreme court appointments, and the Citizens United decision that brought so much dark money into politics, and the power of state legislatures to decide who gets to vote.
I don’t know how such process would play out, but it would probably involve forming of coalition of states pressing for fundamental democratic reform.
In other words, it could less like a civil war and more like a constitutional convention.
It would be painful and disruptive, no doubt, but it might be the only way to route around the existential threat posed by Donald Trump his ilk and keep the American experiment from failing once and for all.
Okay. Deep breath.
This tour of the four valleys was not what you’d call fun.
When someone like Donald Trump is on the ballot, it can be scary to think through all of the possible post-election scenarios.
But we need to think about the future, or we’ll be stuck like toddlers, always acting with no understanding the possible consequences.
Beyond the crisis of democracy, we have a bunch of other very hard problems in front of us, from inequality to the global rise of autocracy to climate change, and so we need to start voting like grownups.
Now in reality, there are probably way more possibilities than just the four I laid out.
But what’s for sure is that come November 5, the suspense is going to be over.
We’re going to forced off our mountain peak of indecision and we’re going to roll downhill into one of these valleys.
It’s a cliché at this point to say this is the most important election of our lifetimes. Because people definitely said that in 2008, and 2016, and again 2020.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
And look, we can blame a lot of this on Donald Trump.
As long as he’s still a force in politics, then I can’t think of a higher priority than keeping him out of the White House.
And that makes every election where Trump is a candidate the most important election of our lifetimes.
Maybe once he finally leaves the scene, we’ll be able to have some normal elections again, where we don’t have to worry that one of the candidates is going to blow up our democracy.
But right now we do have to worry.
And right now we can still choose which of the four valleys we want to end up in.
So let’s choose wisely. Okay?
[musical interlude]
Soonish is written and produced by me, Wade Roush.
Our opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay, and all the other music in this episode is from Titlecard Music & Sound in Boston.
Soonish is a proud member of the Hub & Spoke Audio Collective, where we use different lenses like art, history, politics, and technology to ask what it means to be alive today, and where we stand for the idea that independent voices are more important than ever.
Right now I’d like to point you toward two amazing Hub & Spoke shows.
One is The Rabbis Go South. It’s a limited run series produced by documentary filmmakers Amy Geller and Gerald Perry, and we’re presenting it as part of a new project called the Hub & Spoke Expo.
It’s the true story of 16 rabbis who traveled St. Augustine, Florida, to help Dr. Martin Luther King in a brutal battle to help desegregate the city.
[audio clip from The Rabbis Go South]
The series premiered in September and you can catch new episodes every week through October 28, at hubspokeaudio.org/rabbis or wherever you get your podcasts.
The other show I want to mention is Nocturne, from my brilliant friend and colleague Vanessa Lowe.
It’s a hauntingly well produced show that’s all about what happens under the cover of darkness. Vanessa started the show 10 years ago this month, and to celebrate she just rereleased a fantastic early episode called Into Under Through Again.
It’s about a solo walk that Vanessa took one night at Point Reyes National Park in Northern California.
[audio clip from Nocturne]
It's such a personal, honest, immersive, and pulse-quickening episode. It’s just one of Vanessa’s best. I hope you’ll listen at nocturnepodcast.org, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And one more thing.
I heard somebody say once that time is a flat circle.
So to go back to where we started, let’s talk about the election one more time.
I can’t believe anyone who listens to this show would consider sitting out this election. But just in case you haven’t registered or haven’t made a plan to vote, please do it now.
There’s great information about how to do that at votesaveamerica.com. That’s votesaveamerica.com.
Okay, that’s it. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back with a new episode…soonish.
