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Twenty, twenty, twenty-four hours to go, I wanna be sedated.” —The Ramones

The closing week of the 2024 presidential election is perhaps as close to what schizophrenia feels like as the non-afflicted will ever experience. Or at least that’s how it’s been for me.

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“Nobody knows anything” was screenwriter William Goldman’s pithy summary of filmmaking — and the same goes for this election. That’s why I’ve spent the last week wildly oscillating between confidence in Donald Trump’s inevitable victory to existential dread over Kamala Harris’s with a few pauses along the rapidly sliding scale between the two.

Here’s why:

The broader betting markets showed the race narrowing all last week. Trump started with a nearly two-to-one advantage that, by Friday, had shrunk to roughly 52/48. This morning, Trump is back up, 55/45.

The one question nobody knows how to answer — not if they’re honest, a quality in frighteningly short supply — is whether pollsters have finally figured out how to properly enumerate Trump’s support.

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Frank Luntz says he’s given up on the polls and is looking at turnout:

Rather than continuing to dissect fresh polling data, he is trying to figure out what turnout will be and is watching how many young women in particular will show up, he explained.

If that demographic makes up a bigger share of the overall electorate, then that’s great news for Harris and it may “propel her,” Luntz said.

Early voting data shows that Pennsylvania has seen a surge in Democratic women who didn’t vote in 2020 but are casting ballots in this cycle. But in Arizona, Republican men are leading the new voters heading to the polls early.

So Trump has lost Pennsylvania, right?

Well…

Virginia is close enough (a sign of a Trump landslide!) that The Donald campaigned there this weekend. But North Carolina is so close (Harris is winning!) that he’s holding four rallies there in the closing days.

Care to join me in the schizo ward? Thorazine will be served at 5 p.m.

If we’re on the Trump landslide side, the map could look as red as this:

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But if everything breaks Harris’s way, we could be looking at a sea of blue.

My poor liver keeps telling my brain we’re on the cusp of something so close that it won’t take much cheating to take us from a close Trump win like the one below to a close Harris win if the magic mail-in ballots flip any one of the battlegrounds.

As I said, nobody knows anything. Or everybody knows everything but at least half of it is wrong.

At night, I find that the brandy helps — and so do The Ramones. 

Recommended: The Internet Is Getting Flushed Down Orwell’s Memory Hole

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