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The Triad

Run Your Own Race

Cross country, parenthood, and the kid sports' industrial complex.

Jonathan V. Last's avatar
Jonathan V. Last
Oct 14, 2024
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It’s a holiday and I’ve got a big election-related piece brewing for tomorrow. So after a preamble on the campaign I’m going to switch gears and talk about Life Stuff.

This is probably the last non-campaign related newsletter until Election Day. Steel your minds, my friends.

And your hearts, too.


1. Paint It Black

Over the weekend I thought a lot about my quasi-optimism and with each passing hour it made me more uncomfortable. So let me add a corollary to my thesis that Trump probably won’t overperform his poll numbers this time:

Kamala Harris isn’t where she needs to be.

Since mid-September, Harris has been fluttering around 49 percent. Here is the flat reality: If her national vote share is near 49 percent, she will almost certainly lose the Electoral College.

Harris needs to be over 50 percent and probably needs to be close to 51 percent to have a better-than-even chance of getting to 270.1

If you wanted to be optimistic about Harris, you could pick from a menu of silver linings:

  • >50 percent is within her margin of error.

  • The third-party vote share is likely to be quite low, so she should float up at least a point from where she is now.

  • She could overperform her poll numbers in a more serious and systematic way.

  • Maybe the late break hasn’t come yet and when it does, it will favor her.

  • Maybe the real signal is in the early voter data and not the polling averages.

Some, or all, of these could turn out to be true. But as of right now, she’s not where she needs to be.

We’ll talk about this in depth tomorrow, but I want to leave you with some darkness to meditate on.

We would like to believe that there is some button Harris could push between now and Election Day to raise her numbers. If she said X, or held rallies in Y, or ran Z kinds of ads then she would definitely get to >50 percent.

But what if that’s not true? What if the polls are basically correct and an EC majority of Americans just want Trump?

Cogitate on that and we’ll discuss it tomorrow. For the rest of today, we’re going to talk about something happy.

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61st Annual Mt. SAC Cross Country Invitational Girls Individual Sweepstakes race. (Photo by Scott Varley/Digital First Media/Torrance Daily Breeze via Getty Images)

2. CBA

Yesterday one of my kids ran in the Manhattan College Cross Country Invitational.2 It’s the biggest high school XC event on the east coast, with more than 200 schools and 4,000 runners. As we were setting up her team’s camp, I noticed that about 20 feet away was the team from Christian Brothers Academy.

I want to tell you a story about Christian Brothers (CBA) because it illuminates everything that’s good about youth sports.

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