The last week or the two of the campaigns couldn’t have gone much better for the Harris side: While the VP played huge rallies studded with A-list talent and made a surprise appearance on SNL, the Trump team stepped on rake after rake. From the Puerto Rico garbage comment (and accidental prolonging of the news cycle with attempts to shift anger to Democrats) to Trump’s pronouncement that he will protect women “whether they like it or not” to musing about his comfort with journalists being shot, his extremist inclinations have dominated the coverage.
Democrats’ “nauseous optimism,” as the internet has christened it, crescendoed with the famous Ann Selzer Iowa poll showing Harris a shocking three points up in the deep red state on Saturday.
But while Democrats have rejoiced in the late-campaign vibes, the forecasting models still show a virtual tie. A slight polling error in either direction would be the ballgame. Whether Harris’ strong close will manifest in electoral reality will be unveiled Tuesday.
In the meantime, follow along with our coverage here:
On the eve of the 2024 election, there’s little I can use this platform to say that will relieve the collective bubbling, ulcer-forming acid in all of our stomachs, so here’s a more digestible tale — though RFK Jr. would not refer to it as such.
This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
In public remarks, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims about the threat of widespread voting by “illegal aliens” and noncitizens in the 2024 election.
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.
The great secret and poverty of campaign reporting is that the majority of it is based on reading the polls or the eventual result and then writing a story of the campaign to match that outcome, predicted or real. Every losing campaign is run by idiots and vice versa. With that reality in mind, I wanted to share some opinions in advance of the results. I think Kamala Harris has run an almost flawless campaign. Many people think a great campaign is made up of a great strategy, or perhaps a great speech. The truth is that campaigns are almost all down to execution. That’s particularly so in an early 21st century American presidential campaign, when the main constituencies and issues are chosen in advance and not by the candidate.
An upstart city council or even House candidate might upset the status quo with an outside-the-box campaign or set of issues. Presidential campaigns don’t work that way. Presidential campaigns are won by energizing and mobilizing key constituencies, shaping the issue agenda in your favor and having more days on offense than defense. On the constituencies front, that means base and reach constituencies. On issues, it’s mostly about raising the salience of issues where a majority agrees with you. Above all, it’s about not making mistakes. It’s also about running a campaign of the quality that you force a lot of mistakes by your opponent. As I said, it’s mainly about execution.
Donald Trump slogged through the final weekend of his third presidential campaign as the Republican Party nominee demonstrating in blatant ways nearly every facet of the misbegotten character that makes him unfit for public office at any level.
He mimed stroking and fellating a microphone on a rally stage in Milwaukee. He talked favorably of the press corps in attendance taking bullets intended for him at a rally in Pennsylvania. He said he should have never left the White House after his 2020 election defeat, contemplating a coup by intransigence. He bizarrely claimed that the counting of votes should be over by 9 p.m. on election night, thus stoking anew bogus election fraud conspiracies centered on the time it takes to count votes.
It wasn’t that long ago that the most persistent challenge Republicans in public life presented to reporters, watchdogs, and the sanctity of the English language was disguising their unpopular, often cruel, and elaborately expensive policy preferences under layers of double talk, misdirection, and word play. With Trump it is all undisguised. Perhaps we can count that as small blessing.
On the margins of this campaign, Trump and his surrogates have muddied the waters around health care policy, Medicare, tariffs, and taxation. Political reporters still fall for this gamesmanship. But where it counted most – trying to soften the edges of Republicans’ brutal abortion policies – the political press was largely on point and unfooled.
For the most part though, what you see with Trump is what you get. It is why his defeat will be so cathartic and represent a genuine repudiation of the man and his movement. It is also why a Trump victory would be so devastating. As unfathomable as a Trump win would be after the last decade of Trumpism and especially the past three weeks of his careening, unhinged campaign, it remains a real possibility.
History will show that we knew everything we needed to know. Ignorance will be no excuse.
Obama On Trump
Former President Barack Obama quickly wove into his stump speech some of Trump’s weekend insanity:
Obama on Trump: Who cannot understand how an NBA superstar can be both Greek and Black… Who spreads ridiculous fantasies that Haitians are eating people’s pets. Who just this past week arranged for one of his supporters to tell jokes about Black people eating watermelon and… pic.twitter.com/8hs8buZc5d
The final polling of likely voters in the seven swing states by the NYT/Siena College:
Nevada: Harris 49%, Trump 46%
North Carolina: Harris 48%, Trump 46%
Wisconsin: Harris 49%, Trump 47%
Georgia: Harris 48%, Trump 47%
Pennsylvania: Harris 48%, Trump 48%
Michigan: Harris 47%, Trump 47%
Arizona: Trump 49%, Harris 45%
By The Numbers
ABC News poll: Harris leads Trump nationally among likely voters 49%-46%. “Harris was +2 in early October, +4 (a slight edge) last week and is +3 in this poll,” according to ABC News.
WaPo poll: Harris leads Trump 48%-47% nationwide among both likely and registered voters.
Shock poll in Iowa: Harris leads Trump 47%-44% among likely voters, according to the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll by highly respected pollster J. Ann Selzer.
Election Threats Watch
WSJ: The Proud Boys Have Regrouped and Are Signaling Election Plans
NYT: On Telegram, a Violent Preview of What May Unfold on Election Day and After
Politico: Republicans bring back fake electors in battlegrounds
Bloomberg: ‘What Worries Me? Everything’: Officials Brace for US Election Day
Thread Of The Day
Former Trump DHS General Counsel John Mitnick posted a compelling thread to fellow Republicans about why he’s voting for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump:
He is not a conservative; rather, he is a would-be autocrat and fascist motivated exclusively by his personal self-interest. … You won’t escape the disastrous effects of his policies (e.g., tariffs) on the economy, global instability and damage to national security resulting from his admiration for foreign dictators, or the chaos, lawlessness, and persecution that he promises. No one will.
Disinformation Watch
WaPo: Trump escalates false claims of fraud, setting stage to cry foul if he loses
NBC News: Why Pennsylvania’s unusual voting laws make it ripe for rigged election claims
The U.S. intelligence community issued a rapid assessment that a fake video portraying Haitians voting in Georgia was part of the Russian disinformation campaign.
Quote Of The Day
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA): “It doesn’t make you a man to pick on trans or gay kids. It just makes you an asshole.”
Kamala On SNL-ala
On The Trail
Where the candidates will be today on the final day of the campaign:
More purges: Conservative group’s ‘watch list’ targets federal employees for firing, the WaPo reports.
The Epstein Tapes
In the final days before the election, author Michael Wolff is dribbling out excerpts of his hours of taped interviews with now-deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein that pertain to Donald Trump.
However shocked Americans may be by Trump’s ascent, his arrival and ongoing influence shouldn’t have caught them entirely by surprise. Trumpian characters have floated across the political and social landscape for much of the country’s history. Trump and his fellow travelers have become fixations because they’re more than mere carny acts, attuned to the public’s needs and paranoia. They’ve secured their place because they’re also a reflection of the people they court.
2024 Ephemera
WSJ: Who Will Win the U.S. House? Watch These Tight Races
WaPo: GOP’s closing election message on health baffles strategists, worries experts
The Hill: “New security fencing went up around the White House, U.S. Capitol and Vice President Harris’s residence in Washington, D.C. as authorities prepare for Election Day in the event there may be political unrest in the coming days.”
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.
