The only clear trend we’re seeing tonight, early but seems widespread, is Trump outperforming his numbers in rural counties compared to 2020. What Dems will need is a counter-trend in suburban counties. We would expect that counter-trend. But we haven’t seen it yet or haven’t seen it clearly yet because we have very few suburban counties that are done counting. A lot of these rural counties just count much faster. It seems like we’re likely to see red areas getting redder, blue areas bluer, etc.
We already seem to have pretty good evidence this is a high turnout election. We knew it would be high by recent historical standards. The question was whether it might top 2020 or whether it would be between 2016 and 2020. My sense is that it might end up being higher than 2020, which was the highest turnout in over a century. As to whom that helps, that’s less clear. My gut tells me that’s good for Harris. But that’s no certainty. Remember that Trump’s strategy is relying on low propensity voters. By definition, the higher the turnout the higher the percentage of occasional (low-propensity) voters. So there’s definitely a very reasonable theory that it might help him. We don’t know. For now I think we can just say there are lots of signs of high turnout. So we could have another presidential election that is the highest in modern history. Who it helps I don’t think we can say yet.
Today I’m very interested in your reports from the field: turnout, slices of life, anything and everyone. I want to see and hear about what you’re seeing.
We’re already starting to see from the states releasing good real-time data that Election Day isn’t going to be as red as you’d expect based on 2020 or 2022. That’s not so much good for Democrats as simply what we should expect based on seeing more Republican and less Democratic early voting. As we’ve discussed, the relationship between early and Election Day voting tends to be largely osmotic: more Republicans voting early means fewer available on Election Day. Not complicated. The differences that determine election outcomes are going to be very marginal ones. One of the weird things about early vote counting mania this year is that people somehow get the idea that whole chunks of the electorate somehow just aren’t going to show up at all. That never made any sense.
We are going to be here a while today. And when I thought about writing today’s Backchannel, a standard post didn’t make sense to me since anything you receive in the late afternoon will be immediately dated. So I thought I’d write a simple cheat sheet of ways to watch election results tonight — if you’re into that sort of thing — and how to get as much signal and as little noise as possible. You’ll know many of these things. But I’m just putting them here in one place.
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