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It’s Election Day, which can only mean one thing: bad pre-election takes are on the way out, and bad post-election takes are nearly upon us. We predict fifteen such takes that, if history is any guide, you might hear sleep-deprived reporters and pundits echo on cable news or tap out on X tomorrow—or whenever the result is finally called—depending on whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins and any procedural shenanigans.
If Harris wins:
“Sources close to Trump say that his mood is dark but defiant; he’s hitting the links and talking with friends and advisers on the phone as to his next moves.”
“Trump’s mood” reporting is so 2017, and his defiance should at this point be assumed.
“This is the end of Trump’s political career.” (See also: “Our long national nightmare is over.”)
It wasn’t last time, and it won’t be this time.
“Trump’s defeat will finally spark a serious reckoning within the Republican Party.” (See also: “The battle for the soul of the Republican Party is just beginning.”)
This did actually happen after January 6, 2021—for about five minutes. Otherwise, Trump totally owns the modern GOP, and there is no reason to think that will change anytime soon.
“It is now up to Kamala Harris to fulfill her campaign promise and unite America.” (See also: “Why hasn’t Harris said which Republican she’ll appoint to her cabinet yet?” and “Kamala Harris should help the country heal by scrapping the federal charges against Trump and granting him a pardon for any crimes in or out of office.”)
Swap Harris’s name out for Joe Biden’s, and this sentiment was commonly expressed in the aftermath of the 2020 election. But as we wrote at the time, a president cannot force unity on opponents who refuse to be unified. (Also: promoting “unity” does not require a president to agree with her opponents on every policy all of the time, or to put them in her cabinet.)
“Why isn’t Kamala Harris doing more interviews?”
Expect to hear this if Harris doesn’t make sitting down with Dana Bash a week-one post-election priority.
If Trump wins:
“Kamala Harris should have done more interviews!”
There was a time when this was true. Since then, she has done a lot of interviews.
“Kamala Harris failed to define herself.”
There might be a legitimate critique lurking somewhere here, but at this point, it’s mostly a lazy and well-worn cliché about Harris—one that the media has itself helped to reinforce.
“J.D. Vance was a genius vice-presidential pick, even though the media sneered at him.”
He has had consistently high unfavorable ratings; also, the vice-presidential pick doesn’t matter that much. Vance was selected to spar with the media, and that’s what he’s done.
“In the end, no one cared about Trump’s threats to democracy or January 6.”
A lot of people care about Trump’s threats to democracy and January 6.
“That was President-elect Donald Trump speaking there, pledging to be a president for all Americans and adopting, at least for now, a much more presidential tone.”
If I can promise you’ll actually hear any of these bad takes, it’ll be this one.
Whoever wins:
“[Minor event X] and/or [supposedly monolithic demographic group Y] proved decisive in this election.”
Biden (supposedly) calling Trump supporters garbage? Nope. Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney? Also nope. America is a complicated country and this will be a complicated, close election; even if a certain event or demographic group appears to have made a difference to the result, it will certainly not have done so in a vacuum or against a static baseline.
“Once again, we see a nation that is hopelessly divided between two competing realities.” (See also: something about a Rorschach test.)
Time to retire this cliché and think harder about how this happened and what it means.
“The polls and/or probability models got it wrong.”
Okay, this one might well be true—but there is nothing easier than bashing polls before a proper postmortem has been done on their actual strengths and weaknesses. (The polls were quickly condemned in 2016, for example, but were actually quite good in retrospect.) And pundits have often misunderstood the value of polls—and their much-maligned cousin, probability models—and what they do and don’t claim to show, an especially dangerous pitfall in a margin-of-error race. Ultimately, no one can predict the future.
If vote-counting takes several days:
“[Candidate X] is catching up to [candidate Y] in [swing state Z].”
In 2020, cable networks used this sort of dynamic language (Biden is in the “faster car”) to describe the fluctuating totals as votes were counted. This was understandable but, as we wrote at the time, inadvertently reinforced Trump’s claims that the results were somehow being amended in real time, rather than reflecting the delayed reporting of data that was fixed by the polling deadline in each state. The picture this year might be more complicated than Biden’s faster car due to an apparently less clear-cut partisan divide between advance and day-of voting—a welcome opportunity to scrap this sort of coverage altogether.
If Trump refuses to accept the outcome:
“Trump is on a quest to overturn the result.”
This isn’t Lord of the Rings.
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