Editors’ Blog

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.

If you’ve followed my thinking on this you know I’ve long had a pretty low opinion of political betting markets. Their user base tends to lean right, with the built-in bias you would expect that to cause. They’re also prone to manipulation. But the biggest problem is that, in my view, they’re largely derivative of polls and the press narratives. Garbage in, garbage out. I will simply note that the wild gyrations all of them have been doing over the last three or four days provide, I think, some backing for my argument.

I’ve told you a few times about Professor Michael McDonald’s early vote analysis. He has a paywalled final analysis of the early vote in North Carolina. The upshot is that by conventional early vote analysis, Donald Trump appears poised to win North Carolina. That wouldn’t be a surprising result either on the basis of history or the current polls, which show a dead heat race with the slightest advantage to Trump.

But McDonald also notes that it is an unusual cycle with conflicting signals. The polls look more favorable to Harris than the numbers in the early vote. Actual votes matter more than polls of votes, by definition. But this is a reminder of what early vote analysis is based on. We’re largely going on party registration and limited demographic markers as a proxy for voter intention. Those will generally point in the right direction, except when they don’t.

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.