What Surprises May Be in Store Next Week?
As we find ourselves in yet another cliffhanger of an election, the negative partisanship that has developed over the last three decades should not be underestimated. The high floors under eachparty and the low ceilings over each now mean that all national wins are on the margins. Between 1900 and 1984, 14 of the 22 presidential elections were landslides, with margins of 10 points or more.Since 1988, there have been no landslides.
In 2000, Vice President Al Gore won the national popular vote by a half-percentage point, but lost the decisive Florida electoral votes to George W. Bush by 537 votes. Four years later, Bush, seeking reelection, won the national vote by 2.5 percentage points, but the decider was a 118,601-votemargin in Ohio (out of 5.6 million cast statewide). Barack Obama’s two election wins were a bit wider.He beat Sen. John McCain by 7.3 percentage points, but four years later he took down Mitt Romney by just 3.9 percentage points. In 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the national vote by 2 percentage points but lost the three states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a combined 78,000 votes, tipping the election to Donald Trump. And let’s not forget four years ago, when Joe Biden’s 4.5-point margin nationally looked impressive, but the election was really decided by the 43,000 votes across three states, just barely ejecting Trump from the White House.
Just how close is this election? As of midday Monday, no candidate had more than 49 percent nor less than 48 percent in any of the seven swing states in the New York Times average of polls.
Trump was at 49 percent, with Vice President Kamala Harris at 48 percent, in Arizona, Georgia, NorthCarolina, and Wisconsin. Harris led 49-48 percent in Wisconsin. The two were tied at 48 percent in Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Not that the national numbers mean much, but Harris was up by a point, 49 to 48 percent. Anyone trying to glean a front-runner out of these poll numbers is showing a profound ignorance about survey research. Polling is not, never was, and will never be precise enough to determine leaders with numbers this close.
If Trump were to sweep all seven states and (as expected) pick off the 2nd District of Maine, he would prevail in the Electoral College by 312 to 226. Conversely, if Harris were to win all seven, she comes out on top, 319 to 219. Before rolling your eyes, don’t forget that in 2016 Trump won six out of these seven, all but Nevada, and in 2020 Biden carried six out of the seven, coming up short only in NorthCarolina. These states often break in a single direction.
That phenomenon applies not only to states but to malleable voters as well. If either candidate prevails by more than a whisker, it could mean that even though the share of undecideds is very small (about 3 or 4 percent) they tend to break disproportionately in one direction.
As The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein has argued, it could come down to a turnout contest between the most ambivalent backers of Harris and Trump.Don’t underestimate how cross-pressured some of these voters are. Some can’t really tolerate Trump and they’re certainly not anxious for a return Trump engagement in the White House, but at the same time, they’re not happy with the policies, priorities, and performance of the Biden-Harris administration over the last four years. In a poll taken earlier this year, fewer than 40 percent of voters said they viewed the Biden presidency as a success, with more than 60 percent saying it was a failure.Harris’s inability, or more likely unwillingness, to say what she would do differently from Biden complicates her ability to position herself as the change candidate and not the status quo. It is a cross that all vice presidents to unpopular or controversial presidents have had to bear.
There are a whole universe of surprises we could wake up to next Wednesday morning:
Pollsters nailed it. Or overcompensated again.
Pollsters have worked hard to address the under-sampling of Trump voters in both 2016 and 2020. Have their efforts created a polling error in the opposite direction? Keep in mind that if the polls are wrong, at this point they could just as easily err one direction as the other.
The final vote looked like the early vote.
As of Monday evening, Michael McDonald and his colleagues at the University of Florida Election Lab (https://election.lab.ufl.edu/early-vote/2024-early-voting/) have tallied about 46,250,000 early votes cast. Of the swing states that disclose the party affiliation of early voters, Democrats have a sizable lead in Pennsylvania, Republicans have a narrower lead in Arizona and Nevada, and North Carolina is neck-and-neck. Remember: The more votes that are cast early, the fewer minds (and voting decisions) can be changed by late-breaking developments.
One of the 43 states not widely considered to be competitive got really close.
Or one of the swing states swung hard in one direction.
Democrats retained the Senate.
In Nebraska, polling is showing second-term Republican Sen.Deb Fischer with a surprisingly strong challenge on her hands from independent labor-union leader Dan Osborn. In Texas, Rep. Colin Allred is giving Sen. Ted Cruz a spirited challenge as well. While Texas is getting less Republican, this has as much to do with Cruz’s acerbic style and unfortunately timed
2021 family vacation to Cancun while much ofTexas suffered an ice storm and power outages. Expect it to be pretty close, but don’t hold your breath for a Cruz loss.
Chaos in the House.
The lower chamber always holds surprises, and with very little publicpolling in competitive districts, not many people beyond the two major parties’ House campaign committees and leadership super PACs are privy to what is really going on. My guess is that the change will be within single digits one way or the other. Republicans could extend their majority from their current 221 seats to about 230. Democrats could find themselves with a narrow majority of 223. Don’t be shocked if, as in 2022, it takes nearly two weeks to determine who won control of the chamber.
And the uncertainty doesn’t end there. As Washington attorney Mark Medish, a former senior staffer on the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, noted in a smart piece recently, he advises his clients to monitorthe triple challenge of “the electoral horserace, the perils of transition, and the policy picture amid poly crisis.”
This article was originally published for the National Journal on Oct. 28, 2024.