KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE
— The presidential election “vibes” have arguably been positive for Republicans in recent days, but the race is still completely up for grabs.
— Our seven Toss-up states remain rated that way, although we do have some inclination of where we might go in our final projections in at least some of them.
— Close polls aren’t telling us much about the ultimate winner, and other metrics, like early and absentee voting patterns, don’t seem all that helpful either, at least at this point.
Updating the presidential race
With three weeks to go before the election, we have an unfortunate announcement to make: Our crystal ball is missing.
We don’t know what happened. Maybe one of us left it at the office, which is now under construction as part of a major renovation and expansion project. Maybe the ghost of Mr. Jefferson whisked it away. Maybe we’re… ummm… making excuses. Anyway, we just can’t figure it out!
Hopefully we’ll get it back sometime over the next three weeks, because we’re going to need it. Some bit of mystical forecasting magic may be required to come up with a halfway-decent forecast of this election, because those looking for clear signs about which way this election is going to go, including us, are likely to be disappointed.
The bulk of polling provides little clarity, with the candidates separated by less than 2 points in all of the key states, based on polling aggregates.
The theme of the past week has been that the “vibes” seem to be getting worse for Kamala Harris and better for Donald Trump. It is true that the polling, in aggregate, has generally been a little better for Trump over the past week or so than previously, but only slightly, per Nate Silver’s polling average (and the comparison to a month ago at this time is more mixed). Some of what’s going on may have to do with the respective party cultures—having received thousands and thousands of political emails over the years, the Democrats seem likelier to engage in “the sky is falling”-style appeals. We see it in some recent reporting, too, like reports of top Trump campaign official Chris LaCivita recently telling a friendly crowd that Trump was on course to win at least 289 electoral votes, per a weekend story from the Washington Post, while the Harris campaign has stuck to positioning themselves as the “underdog.” Democrats are famously accused of “bedwetting” and worrying about the election; whether the worrying is justified remains to be seen, although sometimes it is. Part of Democrats’ mentality may also be that they saw their nominees go into the last two presidential elections as clear favorites, but Trump overperformed in both elections.
We do think one thing going on that is potentially more helpful to Trump than Harris is the fact that this campaign is not building to a final big event—there’s no debate scheduled. While the campaigns are both of course active, we do wonder if the lull is helpful to Trump because of his seeming ability to regenerate support when he’s not receiving maximal attention. Harris is the one pushing for a final debate, which Trump has resisted. Harris is also the one who is now reaching more clearly outside of her media comfort zone, like doing an interview with Fox News that is set to air Wednesday evening. Meanwhile, Trump is not even maximizing his time in swing states, holding rallies in Aurora, CO, Coachella, CA, and, later this month, New York City’s Madison Square Garden (all of these locations are in states that we rate Safe Democratic for president).
Is Harris desperate? Is Trump confident? You could spin it that way, but other factors may be at play: Harris does have better favorability than Trump, but it’s common to hear voters saying they want to know more about Harris, and maybe the interviews help her fill in those gaps—although it’s also hard to know if they are helping, and they occasionally lead to unhelpful headlines, like her inability to draw distinctions between herself and the unpopular incumbent, Joe Biden.
Trump may believe that his rallies are going to be covered regardless, and the spectacle of going to certain places (particularly Madison Square Garden) may generate some positive buzz. Maybe Trump is targeting competitive House races through these non-battleground rallies: Rep. Ken Calvert’s (R, CA-41) swing seat abuts where Trump held the rally, and New York has several competitive House races, although none are in Manhattan. Or maybe Trump is just wasting his time—and his campaign doesn’t mind as it “encourage[s] him to avoid the sort of high-profile national audiences that might motivate Harris’s supporters,” to quote from the Washington Post report cited above. There will be plenty to second-guess after the election, as there always seems to be after close elections.
So we continue to have all seven of the key swing states this year as Toss-ups. We do have some thoughts about where we might ultimately lean in at least some of these states, though, even as we aren’t immediately changing any ratings.
We still think Michigan is likeliest to be Harris’s best state out of this group, as it was for Biden in 2020, and it generally has been the most Democratic of these seven states over the past couple of decades. We have made these points about Michigan in the past (see the links for more thoughts on the particulars in Michigan).
Meanwhile, North Carolina is the one state among the seven that Biden did not carry in 2020, and we remain somewhat skeptical of Harris’s ability to actually win it.
One thing that is preventing us from being confident enough to move it to Leans Republican is the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, which could have impacts on turnout in what is on balance a Republican-leaning area. In 2020, the 25 counties that FEMA currently considers to be the disaster zone favored Trump by 25 percentage points while Biden carried the rest of the state by 3.5 points. The state has taken efforts to keep early voting on track in western North Carolina; giving voters additional opportunity to make their voices heard in the midst of an unforeseen disaster is probably the best argument there is for offering robust absentee and early voting options.
Trump has generally, although not always, led polling in Arizona and Georgia, the two typically Republican-leaning states that fell out of his grasp in 2020. Forced to choose, one might also be inclined to tilt those states to Trump. It seems possible that a critical mass of “softer” Republican voters in those states who dislike Trump personally are expressing some buyer’s remorse after they took a chance on Biden in 2020. It wouldn’t take all that many of them to flip Arizona and Georgia back to Republicans after Biden won each by less than half a percentage point.
That said, there may be other things afoot—David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Harris’s campaign and an Obama campaign alum, recently argued that Harris could show strength with Republicans and/or Republican-leaning independents, a group that Harris is clearly trying to reach. This is important particularly in Arizona, a party registration state where the GOP edge in registration is a bit better now than it was in 2020 (although there are lots of people not registered with a party, and we are generally leery of using party registration trends as a predictive tool). This possible dynamic is illustrated by comparing a couple of recent polls: the New York Times/Siena College recently showed Trump up 5 points in Arizona, while a Wall Street Journal poll from a bipartisan polling duo showed Harris up 2. Why the disparity? Part of it was that the New York Times found Trump and Harris with similar levels of party unity in the state, while the Wall Street Journal found Harris achieving markedly better party unity and more crossover support from Republicans. If Plouffe is right, the Wall Street Journal poll may be closer to the mark. However, the New York Times poll shows Trump with a bit more loyalty among his 2020 voters than Harris has with Biden voters, perhaps an indication that the state is shifting enough back to its GOP roots to allow Trump to win it.
While Pennsylvania and Wisconsin remain total Toss-ups in our view, we do think there has been a little overhyping of the former over the latter. It’s become common to see the argument that Pennsylvania is clearly the most important state and that the winner of Pennsylvania will win the election. It is of course true that Pennsylvania is tremendously important and that, with 19 electoral votes, it has more electoral votes than any of the other true battlegrounds. But we actually think the state is slightly more important to Harris, because we could see Trump winning the election without Pennsylvania—perhaps losing the state by a hair while winning Wisconsin and the Arizona-Georgia-North Carolina trio by a hair, which would give him victory assuming no other changes from 2020 —whereas we don’t think Harris has a real path without the Keystone State. Mathematically, Harris could do it by holding Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin as well as winning one of Georgia or North Carolina, but that would involve Pennsylvania voting to the right of the other “Blue Wall” states as well as at least two of the Sun Belt states. That does not really pass the smell test for us, although of course the individual states are so close in polling that we cannot totally rule it out.
When Harris got in the race, there was some question as to whether her best path to the White House was different than Biden’s path, which at the tail end of his candidacy seemed very reliant on the battlegrounds in the Industrial North. While Harris is certainly more competitive than Biden was in the Sun Belt at the end of his campaign, her most promising states still seem to be the Rust Belt trio, meaning that her path does not look that much different than what Biden’s would have been.
Early and absentee voting is ramping up all over the country. This is something we do follow, although we generally don’t think early voting trends are predictive on their own. One exception over the years has been Nevada, as revealed by sage analysis from the Nevada Independent’s Jon Ralston. But even he is concerned about the early vote’s predictiveness this year, particularly because the number of voters who are not registered with either major party has grown. We actually have been somewhat surprised that Harris still appears to hold a very narrow lead in Nevada even as margins are so tight elsewhere—this is one state where we’re more used to polls having a Republican tinge, as we noted in an assessment of the polls we published several weeks ago.
We’d be cautious when making direct advance voting comparisons between 2020 and 2024, because of course there was a pandemic going on in the former year that changed people’s voting habits. According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, in-person voting on Election Day made up only about 30% of all votes cast in 2020. But it was back to about half of all votes in 2022 as the pandemic subsided. Mail-in votes were generally way more Democratic than Election Day was, with a state like Pennsylvania standing out as an extreme example. Our general expectation is that Democrats will have less of an edge in advance voting this year, compared to 2020, but Republicans will have less of an edge on Election Day itself. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really help us from a forecasting perspective, although perhaps some clearer signals will emerge as Election Day itself gets closer.
Beyond all of this is just a sneaking suspicion that while the polls may be better this time, there may still be something like an extra point out there for Trump in the swing states that isn’t fully being captured. Combine that with a bias in the Electoral College that still likely benefits Trump even if perhaps not by as much as it did in 2020, and perhaps one can better explain the pro-Trump “vibes” over the past week or two. But this may all just be noise, too—Harris probably does have a higher “ceiling” than Trump, but her ability to reach that ceiling remains a legitimate question.
Anyway, if you do see a crystal ball sitting around somewhere, please send it along to us. We could really use it!