One interesting dimension of the “Wedgewood Polls” story I discussed last night is that Republican leaders are latching on to it as evidence that all the polls are fake or at least wrong. Normally you might see this as part of election denial or setting the stage for questioning results. Maybe it’s some of that. But this looks much more like trying to prevent the bottom from falling out in an already bad situation. If your core partisans think the election is already lost a chunk of them just won’t show up to vote at all. And that’s how you can take a bad election night and turn it into a disaster.
Here’s a tweet from this afternoon from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) …
As I’ve argued in a number of posts, polls are no more than indicative for all the reasons we know. But the actions of the parties can be more convincing, especially in the last couple weeks. Late this afternoon the White House announced that President Trump will be going to Mississippi to hold a rally on Monday. There is no way that happens if Republicans don’t think there’s a real chance that Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) could lose. That doesn’t mean she will lose. I’m not predicting and I don’t think she’ll lose. But they think it’s possible. So it must be close.
It’s important to understand the calculus behind a decision like this. You depress the morale of your partisans when you do something like this just as it would for Democrats to see a Democratic president holding last week of the campaign rallies in Massachusetts or Maryland. (It’s the same demoralization you’re trying to prevent when you tell partisans they shouldn’t believe the polls.) But you decide that you’ve just got to do it because the risk of losing is too high. Tonight Trump is holding a rally for Sen. Darline Nordone Graham in South Carolina and all the same logic applies there. (Trump won South Carolina by 18 points in 2024 and Mississippi by 25 points.) As you’d expect, money from both parties is following Trump to these states.
While all this is happening we still seem to have very close races in Texas, Iowa, Alaska, Kansas and other states. Just as I was writing, Fox released a poll showing Texas tied at 49% a piece. That’s not meaningfully different from recent 2 point margins for Talarico. But it’s a reminder that while we’re talking about seats that only move in a historic tsunami, a lot of the states that get Democrats to 51 seats are still razor close. Different states have different dynamics. Candidate quality matters. But it certainly looks like the map is expanding rapidly. And we see that most clearly not from what anyone is saying or from the public polls but from what campaigns and party committees are doing — and where they’re sending their top people.