On Sept. 8, the presidential forecast from election analyst Nate Silver gave Donald Trump a 64% chance of winning the Electoral College, with Vice President Kamala Harris at 36%, and as you can imagine, liberals freaked the fuck out. Fox News loved it. But the notion was absurd at the time. The polls were essentially tied.
On Sept. 20, Silver’s model flipped, showing Harris narrowly atop, with 51%. Did anything happen in the race to mark such a dramatic shift in his forecast? Of course not. His model sucks.
And this week? Harris is now up 55% to Trump’s 45% as of Thursday. To hear Silver say it, Harris’ chance of winning has shifted up 14 percentage points in the past two weeks. But nothing has changed in that time frame. So today’s theme is just that: Ignore people claiming things are up and down. The number of undecided voters is extremely low. No one’s minds are being changed. This is now a turnout election.
Here’s the state of the race, according to 538’s polling aggregate as of Friday at 10:30 AM ET:
I’ve removed Florida from the chart above since there’s no fresh evidence that it’s competitive. Everything else? Michigan didn’t budge, Harris inched up in Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and she slid a sliver in North Carolina and a little bit more in Arizona. Out of the seven battleground states, only Michigan and Wisconsin are outside a 2-point margin. It’s tight, guys. And the thing is, it’s remained tight.
So what should we be looking at? Focus on how close Harris is to 50% in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. We know Trump has a ceiling of support. Does Harris have one as well? It’s unclear, but as sort of a new face on the national scene, she has largely reversed her previously negative favorability ratings, according to Civiqs. And 538’s average even shows her in net-favorable territory, as of Friday.
In the polling, Trump is closer to 50% in Arizona and Georgia, but Harris isn’t as far behind, especially not as far behind as he is in the midwestern battlegrounds.
Nothing much seems to move numbers anymore—whether it’s a Trump assassination attempt, overt racism, Trump’s addled gibberish, or a Harris resounding debate victory. People are locked in. And there aren’t many who aren’t.
“It's kind of hard to believe,” CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten said on Sept. 17. “But the bottom line is that 4%—4% in the average of polls—4% of voters say that they are undecided. That is just half the level that we saw in 2020. Well less than the 10 percent we saw at this point in 2016 … In fact, it's the lowest level of undecideds that we've seen in polling at this point this entire 21st century.”
Those “undecided” are the politically apathetic, and odds are that they simply won’t vote this year. They have had more than enough information to make a choice by this point. You have to be wilfully obtuse to struggle with a choice.
That means the work lies in the field operation. The side that outworks the other will win this election, and that means you.
That was the case last week. It’s the case this week. And it will be the case next week, no matter what Silver’s stupid model spouts.
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