We are going to be here a while today. And when I thought about writing today’s Backchannel, a standard post didn’t make sense to me since anything you receive in the late afternoon will be immediately dated. So I thought I’d write a simple cheat sheet of ways to watch election results tonight — if you’re into that sort of thing — and how to get as much signal and as little noise as possible. You’ll know many of these things. But I’m just putting them here in one place.

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.

I told you a week or more ago not to try to interpret early voting data yourself. And don’t put much stock in a hot take on it you see from someone on Twitter. It’s a fool’s errand. If you have access to a lot of data you can draw inferences. That can be real-time modeling data the campaigns have access to or it can be various other datasets that provide context for interpreting the data. Even with all that, the hallmark of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about is a lot of tentativeness and uncertainty. With a lot of knowledge you can point to patterns or a tightened ranges of possibilities, not certainties.

I’m doing this post both because the findings are interesting but also because it’s an illustration of how you can actually pull some signals out of the data when you really know your stuff.

NPR reported yesterday afternoon that The Washington Post has lost more than 200,000 subscription in the backlash against owner Jeff Bezos’ last minute intervention ending the Post’s policy of endorsing presidential candidates. That’s a staggering figure, far more than I would have guessed. When I wrote my piece over the weekend, the clearest report was that they’d lost over 2,000 subscriptions. If I understand the numbers right, the Post lost almost 10% of its paying subscribers in a single weekend. Again, a totally stunning and in business terms devastating number — in part because the cancellations appear to continue.

I got some inkling that the damage might be severe when TPM Reader BS emailed me this morning to tell me that after canceling his subscription, he received a special offer to restart his subscription including a link to a new article by Dana Milbank in which Milbank argues that he’s not giving up on the Post and he hopes readers don’t either. If the Post had lost a couple thousand subscribers, that would have been a downer for them and certainly a black eye among news super-consumers and what we might call elite news and politics opinion. (I use “elite” here in a purely descriptive sense.) But it wouldn’t be a huge thing in business terms. And I’d be surprised if the institution itself would address the issue so frontally in the pitches to cancelling members. That’s especially since basically all of the columnists and reporters asking readers not to leave do so while roundly denouncing Bezos’ decision.

I’ve made this point a few times in recent weeks, here and on the podcast. I’m going to make the point again because I think it’s critical for understanding this election nine days out. We keep hearing that this is the closest election in decades. Polls say that’s right. At least 5 of the 7 swing states are within a single percentage point — fairly meaningless margins statistically. National poll averages are between one and two points — right on the cusp of where most believe a Democratic Electoral College victory becomes possible. But I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. What we have is a high uncertainty election. That’s not the same thing. There’s every chance that most or every race that looks close will veer more or less uniformly in one direction. And that wouldn’t necessarily be because of one late-breaking story, some great decision by one of the candidates or even undecideds all “breaking” in one way. It could simply be because the dominant understanding of the race and the electorate was just a bit off and had been all along.

Axios this morning leads with the email subject line: “Dems’ private panic.” And then inside the email “1 big thing: Dems fear they’re blowing it.” In this case I’m not really writing to criticize Axios, which I admittedly, and rightly, often do. Because what they’re describing here is real. This post is agnostic on what the result of the election is going to be. And for what it’s worth, I keep in close touch with numerous high level campaign operatives in the swing states and I do not sense panic or pessimism from them. They all know it could go either way but I don’t think they think they’re losing. My topic is this blame feature of Democrats’ mass psychology, which is strongly echoed in the press, and their tendency to panic and almost always think they’re going to lose unless the available evidence to the contrary is simply overwhelming. But it’s not the “bedwetting” that interests me most. It’s the second version of the headline, that blame feature: “Dems fear they’re blowing it.”

We have a nice addition to the emerging library of reporting on Republican ground operations from Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect. Cooper actually lives in one of the swingiest parts of Pennsylvania. So he’s not only a very sharp political reporter and commentator, he’s there on the ground as a recipient of the door-knocking and mailering and all the rest — both lab-coated scientist and guinea pig, as it were. So it’s a unique view. The gist matches what I’ve come up with. There just doesn’t seem to be much if any GOP ground operation in the sense of door knocking, dropping off pamphlets or much of anything else. There’s a slew of mailers. And there you’ve got the other issue I’ve been obsessed by: Cooper is a left-leaning Democrat who I’d assume has seldom or ever voted for a Republican. So why is his mailbox bursting with GOP mailers?

Like many people, I’ve been watching the early vote closely to see if I can glean anything predictive about what we’ve seen so far. On balance I’ve seen very little that gives any real indication either way. I want to stress that point because I think it’s the most important point in this entire post: I’ve seen little if anything that gives any real or clear indication who the winner of the election is going to be.

One of the many surprising things in the floppy and shambling political career of Colorado’s Lauren Boebert is that she has always been full freak show, a full Freedom Caucus stalwart, despite being from a GOP-leaning swing district. We expect the crazies to be from lopsided Republican districts where they’re never going to face any real price for their antics. But something’s caught my eye over the last week or so. There are actually three members of the Freedom Caucus who appear to have real races on their hands at the moment.

Each race is different, both in how serious a challenge the individual rep faces and in how much evidence we have to suggest they could be in danger. So let me go through all three.

I get this question a lot: are right-wing pollsters flooding the zone? So I thought I would answer it generally in a single post.

Are they? Yes, they definitely are. But there are some important caveats and qualifiers to know to make sense of the whole story.

Just to review the basics: There are a series of Republican or right-wing pollsters who are overtly partisan, use questionable or floating methodologies and pretty clearly release polls not as a predictive enterprise but to produce friendly numbers for Republican candidates. The worst offenders are places like Rasmussen, Trafalgar, InsiderAdvantage. We know this from a mix of a lack of transparency about methodology, general behavior that betrays a goal of shaping election perceptions and outcomes rather than measuring public opinion, and extreme “house effects” — the tendency to favor a particular party’s candidates over the other’s relative to what most pollsters are finding — that support their agenda. After those, there’s a larger penumbra of often less-known pollsters who don’t appear to be as flagrant, but generally seem to be in the same category.