50 Hours to Go. Here's Where the Race Stands
While the race has been tight for the last few months, the momentum is on Harris's side in the final days.
We’re just over 50 hours until the first polls close. After all the debates, interviews, ads, conventions and rallies this race has remained remarkably stable on the surface. When Kamala Harris entered the race in late July there were seven true battleground states and we’re going to enter election day with the same seven. Neither candidate has been able to wrestle away any of these states and neither side has been able to put new states in play. As we wait for the final hours of this wild campaign to tick away, let’s run through where the race stands on the final weekend and what factors might decide the winner on Tuesday.
While a lot of the public data suggests the race is close, there are several indicators that suggest Harris has an edge going into election day. Early voting and vote-by-mail data has been positive for the Harris Camp and there are reasons to suggest that the race on the ground isn’t as close as recent polling has suggested.
What the Polls Say (or Don’t Say)
From a strictly polling standpoint, this race has remained very stable since August. Shortly after Harris entered the race in late July she closed the polling gap between herself and Trump but since then the polling numbers for each side more or less flat lined. In the last two weeks we started to see a tightening of the race in public polling which caused hand wringing among Democrats. But did the race actually tighten, as the big public polling shops suggested?
Outside of polling, all the momentum has been on Harris’s side the last two weeks. The Trump campaign has had a series of potentially fatal errors, none bigger than the poorly timed and highly insulting remarks about Puerto Rico at Madison Square Garden last weekend. Trump hasn’t been able to stay on message and the candidate doesn’t seem like he’s interested in reaching out the undecided voters he needs to break his way to win. So, then, why have the polls showed a tightening races even as the wheels seem to be coming off the Trump campaign during the same time period?
There’s two main reasons. First, outside Republican polling firms and organizations have been “flooding the zone” for months with partisan polls that are highly favorable to Trump but aren’t accurate. Why would someone intentionally release polling that they know probably isn’t accurate? This coordinated effort by outside GOP organizations has been fairly effective at lifting the polling averages in Trump’s favor and showing the race to be closer then it probably is. Republican polling groups tried this in 2022 and we’re largely responsible for the media narrative that a “red wave” was coming. Their polls were wrong and Republicans (not surprisingly) vastly underperformed the polling averages that had been juiced in their favor.
The second reason the polls have been tightening is that as pollsters think about weighting their polls they seem to be reacting to early voting data, rather than what the final electorate will be once every vote is counted. I will get into the early voting data in more detail below but we have seen an increase in Republican voters voting early this year then we have in years past. This doesn’t mean Republicans are out voting Democrats. It just means the Republican voters we always expected to come out (i.e. they voted in 2020) are voting early instead of on election day. There has been no indication a wave of new or sporadic Republican voters are coming out. Tweaking your polls to reflect increased Republican early turnout is not only inaccurate, it skews the polls in Trump’s favor.
Let’s take a couple of recent polls from Quinnipiac, for example. In early October they released a Pennsylvania poll that showed Harris UP 3-points on Trump. In that survey, Republicans made up 34% of the sample while Democrats made up 36%.
Late last week Quinnipiac released their final Pennsylvania poll that showed Harris DOWN 2-points. If you believe both of these polls from the same pollster surveying the same state 3 weeks apart then there was a 5-point swing in Trump’s favor in a three week stretch. In a race that has been remarkably consistent for months a 5-point swing is massive and surprising. So, what changed? Looking at the partisan composition of the late October poll we have following: 34% Democrats vs. 36% Republicans. The late October poll was more Republican and less Democratic than the poll 3 weeks earlier. Nothing has happened during the early period in Pennsylvania to suggest an increase in Republican turnout.
The final point I’ll make on polling is to mention the ground shifting poll released last night by revered Iowa pollster Ann Selzer. For those not familiar with Ann, she is widely considered one of the best (if not the best) pollster around. Her track record is unmatched and she has a remarkable ability to identify important shifts and movements happening under the surface that the rest of us can’t pick up (ie. Obama’s primary win in Iowa in 2008 and Trump’s late charge in 2016). We’re talking the Lebron James of polling. The Warren Buffett of polling.
Seltzer released her long anticipated Iowa poll last night which showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa by 3-points. Yes, you read that correctly. The vaunted Selzer poll has Harris leading Trump in red Iowa. Now, do I think Harris will win Iowa? I don’t know. I think she could, or at least she could put a real scare into him. While Iowa is a Republican state it has a proud independent streak and folks in Iowa know better than anyone what across the board tariffs would do to their state, so I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibilities. But whether or not Harris will win Iowa is not really the point. The fact that we’re even talking about whether Harris is competitive in a very white Republican midwestern state that Democrats haven’t won since 2008 is the point. It signals that Harris’s standing with white voters isn’t nearly as bad as the media has made it out to be and it’s a good omen for must win states like Wisconsin and Michigan. If Selzer’s poll is even somewhat true, it means the above discussion is probably true: the polls have been underestimating Harris’s support.
What Early Voting Data is Telling Us
Early voting has largely ended in most of the battleground states at this point. While I think the overall early voting picture favors Harris, there’s plenty of data points each side can point to so I’m not going to spend a ton of time on the early vote data. Rather, I want to point out a couple of big topline trends that I think are important to keep in mind as we wait for results Tuesday.
On the whole, turnout has been high. In Georgia, a record breaking 4 million votes were cast during the early voting period. At the end of the early voting period in Georgia 56% of votes cast were cast by women. The Harris campaign will be pleased to see that. Even major urban areas like Detroit are expecting turnout in 2024 to eclipse 2020 turnout. Another positive sign for Harris.
Going a step deeper into the turnout number the one major flashing red light for Team Trump is that across the seven major battleground states women make up 55% of the electorate. As we’ve talked about many times here, Trump has continued to struggle with women and he needed a strong showing from men to make up for his low standing among women voters. So far, that’s not materializing.
As I referenced above, we’ve seen an interesting shift in “mode switching” among Republican voters this cycle. In previous cycles Democratic voters would primarily vote by mail and in person early while Republican voters always came out on election day. This year, the Trump campaign has been encouraging their supporters to vote early so we have seen a sharp increase in GOP voters during the early voting process. That does not mean there’s been an increase in GOP turnout, however. It just means that the Republican voters who were already expected to come out are voting early instead of on election day. None of the early voting data suggests a surge in new or sporadic GOP voters, at this point.
This “mode switching” has thrown off pollsters and the media and fed into the narrative that Republican voters are turning out in big numbers. That doesn’t seem to be the case right now. It’s the same group, just a few days earlier than in previous cycles.
I’m a strong believer in not engaging in “ancidata” so I will leave the early voting analysis at that. Turnout is strong, and favors Harris at this point. But we’ll see who shows up on election day.
The Field Game
At this point in the campaign, the hay is largely in the barn. The ads have been run, the rallies have been done and most voters have made up their mind. It’s all about getting your people out to their polling places to cast their vote. In a previous post I talked about the very unorthodox approach the Trump campaign was taking to the field game. They have essentially outsourced their field operation to Elon Musk’s Super PAC and we’re starting to get the first feedback on how that controversial choice is going. A story this week in WIRED painted a grim picture of that Musk led effort to support Trump: dark U-Haul’s full of out-of-state workers who were threatened into hitting quotas while unaware they were working on behalf of Trump. Not optimal, to say the least.
On the Harris side, they reported the campaign knocked a staggering 2,000 doors per minute across Pennsylvania yesterday. That is wild. They knocked more doors in one day than the Musk led operation had hoped to knock during the entire campaign. This alone doesn’t predict victory. But in a close election it shouldn’t be overlooked.
Who’s got the momentum heading into election day?
This one is pretty easy. Harris has all the momentum and velocity at this point. Her field program is firing on all cylinders, her rallies are big and energetic, the early vote data shows her in the catbird seat in the “blue wall” states going into Tuesday and the polling looks pretty darn good.
On the flip side, Trump hasn’t been able to regain his footing after the disastrous event at Madison Square Garden. The MSG event may have jazzed up his base but he also did serious damage with undecideds and persuadable Republicans. Trump’s closing message has veered from calling the United States a “trash can” (not popular with big segments of the country) to threatening Liz Cheney (also not popular with big segments of Republicans). He hasn’t been able to find any sort of message consistency over the final stretch.
It should also be noted that Trump is holding events in Virginia, New Mexico and New Hampshire over the final couple of days. This is notable because Trump will not win any of these states. It’s actually a move meant to jump start momentum. Much like Harris, Trump has been cycling through the seven battleground states for the last 3-4 months. But his crowd sizes have dwindled recently as his supporters in these states have heard his “shtick” several times already. Sending Trump to states he hasn’t been to recently will help draw bigger crowds and, therefore, help show strength and momentum down the stretch.
So, what’s going to happen?
I’ll try to get a “what to what for” piece out before election day but for now my feeling is that Harris is headed for a comfortable win. Momentum and velocity matters in campaigns and Harris appears to have that on her side at the moment. Late breaking voters are falling in her direction and if the Selzer poll mentioned above is even partly accurate then Trump is headed for a tough night. The Harris camp still has a few odds and ends to take care of before election days, primarily in Nevada, but all signs point to a structurally sound blue wall. And if that wall holds, Harris will have a great night.
Stay tuned for more on the House and Senate races soon.