“Real Time” host Bill Maher made a bold prediction about who will win the 2024 election following the first presidential debate between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I’m gonna make this a very momentous night with a prediction,” Maher began his panel discussion Friday night. “Because I have the credibility for this prediction, because I had been called a ‘Trump alarmist’ for a very long time. They were wrong, I was right- he wasn’t gonna leave power. But ever since then and since the [Access Hollywood] tape… and he survived that. Every time he’s done crazy s— and gotten himself in trouble, I said ‘No, no. It’s not over.'”
“Tonight I’m saying- I think it’s over,” Maher said, sparking cheers from his liberal audience.
He continued, “Even before we were around, there was a guy named Joe McCarthy in the early 50s, and he had a hold on America… Two or three years, he was the biggest thing, and then it was just- and I feel like ‘eating the dogs,’ we’re at this point.”
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GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson responded by telling Maher, “I do not share your confidence.”
“I know people don’t think that the polls are very accurate. So setting all of that aside, the reality is that people have known Donald Trump and known who he is for a very long time,” Soltis Anderson said. “And when you ask people, ‘Do you need to know more about these candidates?’ With Kamala Harris, they say yes, like three in ten people say ‘I feel like I need to know more in order to make a decision.’ But when you ask that about Donald Trump, only a fraction of voters say that they do. And so people know who he is, and yet he’s still competitive. You look at these battleground states, they’re still 50-50. He’s hanging in there.”
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“It will be tight on Election Day, as always it will. The polls will be tight, and then he’ll lose. That’s my prediction. We’ll see,” Maher doubled down.
Soltis Anderson went on to call Harris a “blank slate” to most voters and suggested progressives are allowing her to get away with sounding like an “RNC 2004 keynote speaker,” pointing to her debate comments about owning a gun and touting the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“I want to push back on your assessment,” Maher told her. “I don’t think anything she’s saying now makes her conservative, actually… I just think this shows how far we’ve moved. Where she was in 2019, in 2020 was super far left, super what we call ‘woke.’ I know people don’t like that term, but okay, that’s where she was. Now I feel like she’s just, like, center left. I mean, I don’t know that fracking, even fracking has to be something that we demean this way. I mean, what we’re trying to do is get the environment to its best place, right?”
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Despite Maher’s own assessment of Harris’ political pivot, Soltis Anderson insisted she wasn’t out of the woods just yet.
“The problem I think she has is that she has so many positions from the past that she has changed a lot on,” the pollster said. “And I don’t think in that debate, she got pressed nearly hard enough on why have you had this conversion, besides this new position is really popular in Pennsylvania?”
