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.

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.

I’m seeing more and more data points and testimonials – from both sides of the aisle – that the Democratic ground game in multiple states is superior to the Republican one, in many cases by a substantial degree. Now it’s Republicans who are starting to say it. For Republicans saying this is itself a get out the vote effort, warning of the danger to shake more Republican voters loose and get them to the polls. But looking at it in toto I think they’re saying it because they mean it.

We’ve discussed repeatedly in recent months how poll results aren’t just “the numbers” in some hard, incontestable sense. They include a set of assumptions about the nature of the electorate. For most TPM readers, this is a fairly straightforward point that doesn’t require much convincing or explanation. But this post by a professor at Vanderbilt provides a really helpful real-world illustration. Josh Clinton takes sample data and shows that by using different reasonable and good faith assumptions about the electorate he can get results ranging from Harris +.9 to Harris +8. Don’t pay attention to the fact that these results are all still in her favor. The point is that the assumptions baked into the poll can yield results 7 points apart. It could as easily be Trump +3 to Harris +4. Again, it’s one thing to understand this in the abstract. But the specific explanation and the concrete outputs tell the story in a different way.

If nothing else, this is why that 7 point spread is just a bright flashing neon light that many of us are disregarding or not even seeing while we’re obsessing about win or loss margins of like half a percentage point.