As I argued in today’s Backchannel, I believe Harris, win or lose, has run an almost flawless campaign. To the extent that is true, we had a preview of it in that cruelest month, July 2024. I do not think there was a single story published discussing murmurs from Harris world about whether Biden should drop out, what kind of race she might run, anything like that. It goes without saying that that kind of chatter would have been poisonous for the Democrats’ eventual chances. Despite some people’s illusions, Harris was always the only plausible replacement candidate. It doesn’t take a genius to know such chatter would be damaging. But as I argued in the last post, it comes down to execution. It’s not enough for the potential candidate not to be talking, or her top advisors. It’s a matter of controlling every random person who might claim to have insight into Harris’ thinking. That requires a total level of discipline that starts at the top. I suspect it’s only really possible if, as we’ve been told by the people in Biden world, Harris remained absolutely loyal to Biden until the moment he decided to step aside. I don’t want to rehearse that whole question again. But that is a very, very tough position to be in. It would be irresponsible not to be ready for the call to come. But even the hint of preparation for it would be disastrous. It was an accurate preview of the kind of campaign Harris would run.

We’re still pretty much where we were last night on that Selzer poll. It’s hard to know what it means or whether it matters. It’s just one poll. The most interesting day-after analysis I’ve seen centers on the fact that an abortion ban went into effect in the state just in July. And it went into effect pretty clearly against a big majority of the state’s residents. An earlier Selzer poll already showed Iowa much closer than people anticipated. It’s also a state with a lot of white people with college degrees. So there’s some argument that it might be more Harris friendly than people expect. It’s even occurred that picking up some of the ad spend out of Nebraska could be having an impact in Iowa. So maybe those are parts of an explanation. But it seems like folks working in the inside DC publications have fixed on the abortion ban blowback theory of the case. But that in itself is pretty disquieting news for the Trump campaign, to put it mildly. Note too that a lot of these polls we’re seeing now show abortion moving straight to the top of the issue matrix for voters.

As you might expect, the mystery of the GOP ground game and Elon Musk’s late, bulldozer entry into the 2024 campaign has become a fascination of mine even apart from its relevance to the outcome of the campaign. It really seems now that most of Musk’s supposed $150 million contribution to the Trump effort was simply lit on fire. I should note that even by their own accounts not all of that money was slated for ground operations and get out of the vote efforts. Some went to mailers, yard signs and other kinds of advertising. But it’s become one of the hallmarks of this campaign that Trump-aligned canvassers and door knockers are just nowhere to be found really anywhere in the swing states. To be clear, I’m not saying none — like no one has seen a single one anywhere. But what’s wild is that what I’m describing is actually not that far off than that. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina. Even in Arizona and Nevada I haven’t heard much that contradicts it. I’ve just had less visibility altogether.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about it’s kind of hard to know where to start.

The simplest explanation is that there’s a pollster named Ann Selzer. Her home base and speciality is Iowa but she also does national polling. She has a very good track record. For various reasons among data nerds she’s taken on a kind of legendary status in recent cycles, not only for accuracy but also in 2016 and 2020 for releasing final polls that picked up in advance the surprises that came on election day. In other words, she has a record of outlier last polls that are later vindicated by election results. The almost totemic treatment of this poll can’t not be seen as a bit overblown. But Selzer has a very good record. There’s no getting around that.

Her final poll of Iowa, which is of course now a securely red state, was slated to come out at 7 pm this evening. People were eagerly the results to see whether Trump or Harris might be doing better than you’d expect for Iowa. It’s a given that Trump will win Iowa. The question everyone had is whether Selzer’s poll would say Trump’s margin was bigger or narrower than one might expect.

The poll came out and Harris was beating Trump by 3 percentage points. 47-44. No one considered anything like that a possibility. It’s sent a shockwave through election land.

What does it mean?

I’ve tried to write this post a few times. But the information I’m trying to convey is so impressionistic, tentative and tid-bitty that it’s better suited to a stream of nuggets than a structured piece of writing. So I’m going to take the bullet point approach.

• All the standard caveats about no secret information, either candidate could win and it wouldn’t be a big surprise.

• Democrats in high-level campaign positions seem increasingly optimistic about their chances pretty much in spite of themselves. That’s been my sense from the beginning of early voting and that mood has built over the course of this last week. I’d say it’s best described as optimism they’re trying not to express and almost wish they didn’t feel.

A curious thing. There’s a new rush of press stories reporting that Mar-a-Lago is suddenly a bundle of nerves as they see evidence they’re falling short in Pennsylvania. This is certainly why Trump is suddenly going berserk on social media, making freakshow claims that the race is being stolen in PA. We knew that. Meanwhile Trump is suddenly losing ground in betting markets, which for a couple of weeks have shown him to be a prohibitive favorite to return to the White House. This is all very nice to see. But I wouldn’t necessarily see it as some sign of momentum in Harris’s favor.

If you’re watching the latest polls, make a note of something called “herding.” It could be relevant for discussions of polling after the election. The concept is straightforward. In the final days of an election, poll results tend to trend toward consensus. One possibility is that everyone is finally making up their mind and the picture and reality is coming into focus. But that’s not the only possibility. For a mix of good faith and maybe less than good faith reasons, pollsters can become increasingly leery of publishing an outlier poll. There’s a tendency to “herd” together for extra-statistical reasons.

Let’s say you’re five days out from the election and the polling averages say candidate Jones is up 2 points and you’ve got a poll which says candidate Smith is up 3 points. (Pardon may defaulting to anglo surnames.) Everyone has an outlier result sometimes. But do you really want your final poll to be a weird outlier? In the modern era with aggregators, pollsters are often graded on the predictive accuracy of their final polls. So it kind of matters. If you’re a bit shady maybe you just tweak your numbers and get them closer to the average. If you’re more on the level maybe you take a closer look at the data and find something that really looks like it needs adjusting. Maybe you just decide that you’re going to hold this one poll back.

As I mentioned in this week’s podcast, out today, Kate Riga and I are going to be heavying-up on podcasts next week. In addition to the regularly scheduled Wednesday podcast, we are planning to do “instapods” (quick hits lasting 15-20 minutes) through the week. We’re planning on doing the first late on election night. We don’t know precisely when, but sometime late in the evening when we have at least some broad sense of what the results are looking like. And no, we’re not expecting to know a winner at that point. We’re then going to have the regular episode the following afternoon. Then we plan to record late afternoonish instapods on Thursday and Friday afternoons to hit the big developments of the day. If the winner of the election is clear by the following morning, we’re confident there’s still going to be a lot to discuss on Thursday and Friday.

Of course, it’s possible that there will be additional breaking news at any point over the course of the week that might prompt us to do an additional instapod in addition to this schedule.