The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 44
October 28, 2024
This week:
- Rogan interview, McDonald’s stunt boost Trump
- A popular-vote win is conceivable
- Early vote looks strong for Trump so far
President 2024
The race isn’t over, but it’s undeniable: All the buzz in this election is on one side at the moment. All the “vibes” are for Donald Trump, and right now, there is no joy in Kamala-ville.
Trump’s interview with Joe Rogan, although not as well-targeted as a typical rally or get-out-the-vote event in a swing state or bellwether county, had such broad reach (in the tens of millions) that it was a brilliant decision to do it. The three-hour interview really helped humanize Trump and will reach an audience full of politically marginal, semi-uninvolved people who are not necessarily regular Republican voters. Like his earlier McDonald’s stunt and his attendance at a couple of football games, it is a cultural touchstone that also has people talking about him — everyone from elementary schoolchildren to office workers around the water cooler.
Trump famously loves to be the center of attention. The thing is, when you’re running for president, it’s usually a really smart place to put yourself, if you can.
Not only is Trump putting the focus on Trump, but so is the Kamala Harris campaign. Her campaign’s closing argument, in fact, is that Trump is Hitlerian, fascistic, and a threat to democracy. Her sharply and darkly negative tone in the final days point to a campaign that thinks it is losing.
State of play: In fact, the possibility of Trump winning the national popular vote has only now finally planted itself in the public’s consciousness. This is in large part thanks to much stronger national polls than Trump ever enjoyed in either of his prior presidential races — 7.6 points better than 2020 and 4.6 points better than in 2016. Trump has led or tied Harris in six of the last eight national polls.
Trumpian optimism can also be put down to the widespread (and for Trump, unprecedented) expectation that he is going to win, as reflected in the betting markets.
But let’s throw some cold water on all this before we go on. First of all, the only way Trump can win, whether or not he wins the national popular vote, is to carry one of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Barring less likely scenarios where he breaks through in Virginia or New Mexico or overperforms expectations in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, there’s no getting around that “Blue Wall.” Although Trump led in all three in polls released over the weekend, his lead is in every case well within the margin of error. His lead in each state’s RealClearPolitics average is less than one — hardly a dependable lead.
Second, even if the betting markets reveal something unprecedented about 2024 — namely, that people actually do believe Trump is going to win for the first time in his career — they should not be taken too seriously. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that unlikely events do occur. If a given coin somehow has a two-thirds chance of coming up heads (roughly Trump’s current odds on Polymarket), it is still not shocking if it comes up tails on the first flip. Second, betting odds may only reflect widespread erroneous impressions. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was an 88 percent favorite to win. Nobody who owned FTX stock saw the collapse of FTX coming. Markets that have imperfect or incomplete information are prone to wild swings once the truth becomes known.
However, there are still reasons for Trump to have high hopes, based on good early-vote news from key states, an evident lack of enthusiasm for Harris, and the second-guessing among Democrats of whether it was really such a good idea to cast Biden off over the summer.
Florida: This is not a swing state anymore, nor even a bellwether. It is, however, a very consequential state with a Senate seat and a few competitive House seats on the line. It also has a very transparent early voting program that is easy to track in terms of who has voted. And if you’re wondering who is voting, it is the Trump voters.
Not only are Sunshine State Republicans outvoting Democrats by more than half a million votes already, but they are also outperforming their share of the 2016 vote in 65 of the state’s 67 counties. (Note: Harris’s overperformance in the other two counties is tiny to the point of insignificance.) Recall that, in 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 1.2 percentage points in Florida.
Republicans have even managed to bank an absolute vote advantage of more than 5 percentage points in Miami-Dade County, something that might have been considered unheard of before the 2022 election, in which Gov. Ron DeSantis carried both Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties.
This raises the possibility of Trump coasting to victory in Florida by double digits. In that context, Sen. Rick Scott (R) suddenly looks a lot better. So do House marginal House incumbents such as Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) in the St Petersburg area.
Once again, one of the best state parties in America is throttling one of the worst.
Unfortunately for Republicans, though, Trump’s victory in Florida is already baked into the cake and widely assumed. It does nothing to improve his odds elsewhere. Indeed, in 2022, the massive Republican overperformance in Florida led some to believe on election night that a red wave had hit. The truth of the matter, however, was that the Republican parties of Florida, New York, and Iowa had delivered massive victories, but there was disappointment throughout the rest of the country.
Georgia: In Georgia, there is no party registration for voters. However, race is often used as a proxy for party registration. Black voters go overwhelmingly for Democrats, white voters overwhelmingly for Republicans.
Early-vote comparisons to 2020 are not terribly useful due to COVID. However, comparisons to 2022 suggest good news for Trump. White voters are turning out at with a vote share just slightly higher, black voters with a share just slightly lower, than in that midterm year, when Gov. Brian Kemp (R) comfortably won re-election over Democratic election denier Stacey Abrams, by 7.5 points.
If Trump does indeed perform substantially better with black men than most Republicans — as many have speculated he will — this will help him out even more. Trump has led in nine of the last ten polls of the Peach State, and the tenth showed a tie. This is probably a must-win state for Trump although mathematically he could substitute a win in Michigan were he to lose it.
Nevada: Registered Republicans actually hold a lead over Democrats in the number of early votes banked, by about 33,500 votes. This has apparently never happened before in any presidential election year, and it throws both the Senate race there — something of a sleeper until now — and two congressional races (both featuring Democratic incumbents) into question for the Democrats.
At the current rate of voting, local journalist Jon Ralston estimates that, in order to carry the state, Harris would need to win independent voters by an unrealistic margin or pick up a much bigger share of the Republicans than Trump picks up among registered Democrats.
Unless Democrats suddenly changed up their usual strategy to stop their voters from voting early and turn out on Election Day instead — something that would make no sense on its face — there is really no upside in this for them. But Democrats still hold forth hope that they can close the gap with early vote turnout in the coming days.
North Carolina: As in other states, comparisons to 2020 are misplaced, given the effect of COVID on mail balloting. But this was the swing state Trump hung onto successfully in 2020. And over the last four years, Republicans reportedly gained about 161,000 new registered voters, whereas Democrats lost about 135,000.
Right now, in every single one of the Tar Heel State’s 100 counties, the Republican early vote in 2024 is outpacing the rate from 2022, when Sen. Ted Budd (R) beat Sherry Beasley by more than three percentage points to defend an open Senate seat. More good news: in 98 of the 100 counties, registered Republicans voting early outnumber Democrats among those who did not vote in either 2016 or 2020. So the Republicans are clearly accomplishing something more than just turning out what would normally be their Election Day vote.
Whereas Republicans had previously cast very few early votes, they now enjoy a narrow one-point lead over registered Democrats. Again, unless Democrats suddenly changed up their usual strategy and tried to get people to stop voting early, this does not bode well for them.
Trump beat Joe Biden by about 1.5 points in North Carolina in 2020. Although there had been concerns about Harris putting this state into play, her staff has since downplayed her chances in conversations with journalists, as if it had been a bridge too far.
Pennsylvania: Polls in the Keystone State, as in Michigan and Wisconsin, favor Trump, but only slightly. They are simply too close to allow any reasonable prediction of what is going to happen. Yet if Trump overperforms the polls, as he has in the past, then he will win Pennsylvania going away. Otherwise, it could be a long night.
The early vote may prove key to reading the tea leaves. The consensus is that, in order to guarantee Democratic victory, registered Democrats will need an early-vote lead of about 600,000, and that they will probably lose if their lead going into Election Day is less than 500,000. As of Monday morning, registered Democrats had returned only about 371,000 more mail ballots in Pennsylvania than registered Republicans had.
Out of the three “Blue Wall” states, Pennsylvania has always seemed like the best fit for Trump. Harris utterly lacks the special appeal that Joe Biden had in the “Alabama in the middle” parts of the Commonwealth, plus Erie, the Lehigh Valley, and the Scranton-Wilkes Barre area.
Trump’s McDonald’s stunt in Bucks County went over quite well, and there has been a robust, concerted effort to register new Republican voters and turn out the early vote in rural parts of the state.
What has been most telling here, though, is that Sen. Bob Casey (D), whose re-election race has significantly tightened in the last couple of weeks, is distancing himself from Harris and even advertising how he worked with Trump during his time in office — a man he of course voted to convict in two separate Senate impeachment trials.
