The State of Our Union's Elections (Part 4)

On the Eve of the Election: Early Indicators (Plus, Some Rapid-Fire Predictions)

Say goodbye to the dog. And, fingers crossed, say goodbye to Trump tomorrow.

Here we are. Election Eve. It is a night that drips with either anticipation or dread, depending on how seriously you take the Trump polling illusion.

Which calls for one final dose of Hopium from Salzillo’s Two Cents. My last post of this series will focus on what early indicators—including the early vote—tell us about what could happen this election.

But first, a quick side note. Many, including Nate Silver, have called the latest Des Moines Register poll a probable “outlier.” Although, how can a credible poll be an “outlier” where there are hardly any other polls to compare it with? Of course, there are always a small collection of partisan pollsters vomiting up the conventional narrative. But besides that, there is just one lonely Emerson College poll (Trump up by 9%) on the race between Harris and Trump in the Hawkeye State.

So, who’s the outlier? The Des Moines Register? Emerson College? Or maybe both?

But I digress. Let’s get onto the main act. I want to start this post with a few rapid-fire predictions:

Let’s begin with the essentials. At bare minimum, I predict Harris will win the Blue Wall with Biden’s 2020 margins or higher. Except maybe in Michigan, mainly because the significant Muslim-American vote there will be hard to predict. Either way, I believe Harris can swing enough other voters to ultimately win Michigan narrowly in a worst-case scenario.

Pennsylvania will be won on Election Day, and it will be won on VP Harris’s much stronger and much more enthusiastic ground game. North Carolina will go blue 2008-style, with likely the smallest of margins. The Harris-Walz ticket will eke out Georgia by at least (or approximately) the same margin that Biden did in 2020. I say this particularly given the encouraging early vote, the specter of Dobbs and its real-life effects, and the continued effectiveness of the Stacey Abrams political machine. Nevada will be close like it was in 2022. Arizona could very well be closer than it was in 2020.

In the House, Democrats are favored to win and I think they will win. Control of the House may come down to New York, or it may come down to surprise House races in states like Iowa. In the Senate, Sherrod Brown will at least narrowly prevail and Tester could pull off either a standard Tester win (in the range of 2-4%) or a real nail-biter that almost literally comes down to the last vote.

The polling desert makes it hard to predict margins with any certainty in any of these races. That said, the Harris campaign could realistically win the Blue Wall states with anywhere from a 2-5 percentage point lead, judging off the regrettably scattershot local-based polling there. The margins in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada should be close and I would be surprised if any of these margins went any higher than 3%, unless maybe we have a full-on landslide scenario. That said, larger margins in either the Blue Wall or the other battlegrounds are not impossible.

Finally, I will not predict any surprise wins in places like Iowa and Texas. However, I will not take such a scenario off the table either. Contrary to the assertions of the pundits, the Iowa polling does make sense given the effects of Iowa’s draconian 2023 (note that date; after the 2022 midterms, in which Iowa Republicans performed at expectations) abortion policies. Among other things, it has worsened a maternity care desert in the state and specifically in its more rural areas.

Texas women live in a similar—if not worse—dystopian reality, as the latest 60 Minutes special has made clear. Again, don’t underestimate women. I did when I saw the early September Des Moines Register poll (my mother, to her great credit, was not nearly as dismissive about the Iowa polls as I). I will not make the same mistake again.

Lastly, I am not sure whether Republicans will make permanent their 2022 midterm gains in Democratic strongholds like New York in any way. If they do, there is a slight chance Harris’s popular vote margin will narrow. That said, given the ability of Democrats like New York’s Tom Suozzi to outperform the polls in special elections, I am doubtful the Republican Party will make any meaningful gains in solidly blue states.

Okay. I’m done making predictions. Let’s take a quick survey of the early indicators: