From the Opinion Pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression from the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal.

I'm Jerry Baker, editor at large of the journal. If you're not already subscribing to Free Expression,

please sign up at Apple, Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you do, you're listening.

This week, the coin flip election of 2024.

Discussing the differences between the Soviet political system and that of the West,

Nikita Krischoff, the Russian leader who succeeded Stalin, is once said to have commented,

the only problem with free elections is that you never know who's going to win them.

Well, these days, the United States has taken that

democratic uncertainty principle a step further. Now not only do we not know in advance who's

going to win elections. Today we don't even know who's won the election even after it's happened.

The last two presidential elections, as we know, were decided by a few tens of thousands of

votes in a small handful of states out of

well over 135 million votes cast. And if you thought that was close, all the evidence

is that this one, now just a month away, could be even closer. With a little over four weeks

now to go to polling day, the polls suggest that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are locked in

what looks like a simple tie, both in the national polling and in the critical swing

states. According to the real clear politics polling average, Harris has a lead in the national

polls of about 2%. It's effectively a dead heat given margins of error. But more important in the

seven states that will decide the outcome, we have a situation

where Trump leads in three, Harris leads in three, and one, perhaps the most critical of

all Pennsylvania, the race is literally tied.

...