Editors’ Blog

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.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss both campaigns’ closing arguments and the mess at the Washington Post.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

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.

Pretty remarkable. In a moment of unguarded exuberance, Speaker Mike Johnson promised today that he and future-President Trump will abolish Obamacare and bring back the joys of denial of coverage for preexisting conditions.

I want to mention one element of the story we’re now seeing unfold before us. We don’t know who’s going to win this thing or just how either candidate might do it. But what has always been the most obvious way for Harris to win this election is to hold the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. I’ve already discussed with you the issues with the Trump campaign’s decision to outsource its ground operations to super PACs and the way that doesn’t seem to have panned out. But the states themselves aren’t entirely passive players. Or they shouldn’t be. When things are working as they should the national party and the presidential standard bearer’s campaign can plug into a dynamic party organization in a given state.

A pattern that has become more and more clear to me over the last month or so is that to the extent Democrats are outplaying Republicans on the ground a significant part of that is the legacy of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” shenanigans. It’s left a number of these state parties deeply splintered and unable or even unwilling to do the kind of work that keeps a party organization functioning.