Amid reports of huge early voting turnouts in metro and suburban Georgia, Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball strikes a cautionary note, which should stem excessive  exuberance about Democratic prospects:

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.

Moving toward his conclusion, Kondik notes “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.” Read the whole article for a more nuanced analysis.