The polls show the race neck and neck. And congrats to those of you who are more motivated by being behind: If the final election results were to mirror current polling, Vice President Kamala Harris would lose the election to Donald Trump.
But what if the polls don’t match reality?
First of all, here are 538’s polling averages as of Friday at 4:45 PM ET.
Since Oct. 5, Trump has gained 1.4 percentage points in national polling and between 0.4 and 1.5 points in every battleground state. If you assign a state’s electoral votes to its polling leader, Trump would win 287 electoral votes and Harris would win 251, with her winning only Michigan and Wisconsin among the battleground states.
Scary, huh? I could dig into internal polling and show why this or that poll doesn’t look quite right, but eh, to what end? The reality is that the battlegrounds are all within the margin of turnout, and we have to work our asses off to get out the vote in all these states, regardless of whether Harris is up 2 points or down 2 points.
And that margin of turnout is the reason why I’m so confident in a Harris victory.
First, there’s the enthusiasm gap. Gallup found that Democrats are clobbering Republicans when it comes to their enthusiasm to vote.
Seventy-seven percent of Democrats said they were more enthusiastic to vote than usual, but only 67% of Republicans said the same. (Each party’s figure includes independents who lean toward that party.) This shouldn’t surprise anyone. For starters, we can see that gap in campaigns’ rallies: Harris’ rallies are packed, rocking, and fun, while Trump’s are drab, boring, and people leave early.
If rallies are designed to, well, rally the base, then Trump is failing miserably and Harris is firing on all cylinders.
So why does this matter?
On Thursday, I wrote about the underperformance of Trump’s all-important young male bro vote in the early vote. He has leaned on this group heavily, largely to make up for his poor support among women. That’s bad for Republicans, but hey, those men are young. They have no problem standing in long lines on Election Day, and they’re natural procrastinators anyway, right? The early vote is mostly older voters, so Republicans have nothing to worry about.
Or do they?
Politico headline: “Trump lagging in early vote with seniors in Pennsylvania, a red flag for GOP.”
That should be a five-alarm fire for the GOP.
“In Pennsylvania, where voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots, registered Democrats account for about 58 percent of votes cast by seniors, compared to 35 percent for Republicans,” Politico reported. “That’s despite both parties having roughly equal numbers of registered voters aged 65 and older.”
For campaigns, early votes matter because if you can lock in the votes of solid partisans, then you can focus your get-out-the-vote operation primarily on nudging lower-propensity voters to the polls on Nov. 5. But for voting analysis, an early vote counts the same as an Election Day vote. So how do we know how much of the early vote is cannibalizing Election Day votes? Republicans are certainly excited about cutting the Democrats’ early-vote advantage from 50 points in 2020, to 25 points today. There is a hitch, however.
Politico analyzed early-voting data:
But what that means for the overall makeup of the electorate when voting is complete is less clear. Roughly 35 percent of Republicans who have cast ballots so far in Pennsylvania are voters who cast ballots on Election Day in 2020 … By contrast, around 8 percent of Democrats who have voted in the state voted on Election Day in 2020. Those figures suggest that the early vote in Pennsylvania is likely to be redder than four years ago—and the Election Day vote is likely to be bluer—based on how voters are switching the timing of their votes.
So Republican early-vote gains in Pennsylvania are coming at the expense of their Election Day votes. And Democratic seniors are swamping Republicans among the largest, most motivated voting demographic.
And the Trump campaign has shifted from euphoria a week ago to anxiety now as those early-vote numbers continue to be tallied, according to Puck News.
“Last week, I reported on the preemptive but undeniably palpable sense of euphoria washing over Mar-a-Lago as data rolled in depicting early-voting surges in Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina,” wrote Puck’s Tara Palmeri. “But now, as the early results from Pennsylvania reveal an influx of first-time female voters who will likely break for Harris, a newfound anxiety is taking hold. While Trump continues to claim he has a massive lead, setting the stage to contest any unfavorable result, some in the Mar-a-Lago-sphere are starting to believe that his surge last week was two weeks premature.”
And CNN correspondent Kristen Holmes, pointing to Trump’s frequent visits to North Carolina, noted that his campaign is afraid of losing the state. And if Trump has lost the Tar Heel State, he’s likely already lost Pennsylvania and thus the election.
In a neck-and-neck race, the campaign that gets its voters out wins. So far, Democrats are—for the most part—taking care of business. Democrats have built the best GOTV operation in history, while Republicans … well, they’re doing this: “Workers Say They Were Tricked and Threatened as Part of Elon Musk’s Get-Out-the-Vote Effort,” according to a recent headline in Wired.
But there are still multiple days of voting left.
Leave everything on the field.
Let's get to work electing Kamala Harris our next president! Sign up for as many shifts as you can between now and Nov. 5 to talk with progressive voters in key states who might not turn out without hearing from you!
