It’s a very close presidential election, so unsurprisingly Team Trump is looking for an illicit edge, as I explained at New York:

With the major-party presidential candidates in close battles in a sparse landscape of battleground states, every electoral vote matters. There are scenarios where either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins 269 or 270 electoral votes. Part of the underlying picture is that each of them has been expected to snag a single Electoral College vote from one of the two states (Maine and Nebraska) that allocate them by congressional district. Biden won the Omaha-based Second Congressional District of Nebraska in 2020, when Trump won the largely rural Second Congressional District of Maine. Polls are showing the same outcome is likely this year.

So the two campaigns have hungrily looked at a potential gain or loss of an electoral vote if either state adopted a winner-take-all system. But only Nebraska, pushed aggressively by Team Trump, has seriously moved toward taking that step in 2024. It hasn’t happened yet, in part because of internal Nebraska Republican dissension and in part because Maine Democrats have threatened to retaliate and make the whole exercise pointless. But now, at the very last minute, the heist may be back on, as the Nebraska Examiner reports:

“The national Republican push to help former President Donald Trump win all five of Nebraska’s Electoral College votes is ramping up again, and this time it might work.

“Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen on Wednesday hosted two dozen state senators at the Governor’s Mansion, along with Secretary of State Bob Evnen, the state’s chief election official.

“Several who attended the meeting said some senators who had wavered earlier showed more support now for changing Nebraska to the winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes this year.”

Pillen has talked off and on in recent weeks about calling a special session of the legislature (the state’s second this year) to give Trump this very special gift if he could secure the votes to overcome a likely Democratic-led filibuster. Now he’s bringing in some outside help:

“State senators at Wednesday’s meeting at the Governor’s Mansion heard from Trump ally U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., about the national security and economic stakes if voters don’t return Trump to the White House.

“A national GOP spokeswoman said Graham’s visit shows how seriously Republicans are treating the need for Trump to win Nebraska’s 2nd District. Some have argued it could break a 269-269 Electoral College tie.”

One Republican legislator involved in this skullduggery dismissed complaints about such a last-minute change by citing the substitution of Harris for Biden on the Democratic side. Apparently, rules of fair play no longer matter, if they ever did, to Trump’s backers.

So why didn’t Pillen (and Lindsey Graham, and Trump’s other operatives) put on a full-court press earlier? This explanation from Politico Playbook is persuasive:

“Back in April, when the Nebraska idea was first gaining steam, Maine’s Democratic House Majority Leader Maureen Terry issued a statement indicating that if Nebraska made such a move, she would push for a like-for-like move in her state, which delivered one electoral vote to Trump in 2016 and 2020.

“[Democratic] Gov. Janet Mills would be required to call a special session of the legislature. But the stickier wicket is in the timing: A bill only becomes law in Maine 90 days after it’s passed, unless the bill receives a two-thirds vote in each chamber (Democrats currently have majorities, but not supermajorities). We’re 46 days away from Nov. 5, and 87 days from Dec. 16, when electoral votes are set to be cast.”

More than likely, the electoral-vote robbers chose to postpone their gambit until it was too late for Democrats to neutralize the theft in Maine.

It appears the effort to nail down the votes needed to pull off the Nebraska heist will come down to a very small handful of state senators. All sorts of horse-trading could ensue. But there are good odds Republicans will “rig” the Electoral College by one vote, and unless a creative lawsuit is in the offing, no one will be able to do anything about it.

 

One of the many variables affecting the 2024 election is the plethora of ballot measures to protect abortion rights on state ballots, which I wrote about at New York.

After many months of signature-gathering on petitions and lots of maneuvering in state courts, ballot measures to expand or protect abortion rights have been certified for general-election ballots in ten states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota. Two (in Maryland and New York) were referred by legislators and confirm rights already protected by statutes, while eight were citizen referred. This is more impressive than you may think: Only 17 states allow citizen-referred constitutional amendments, and after this year, fully 14 states whose legislatures enacted abortion bans will have voted on abortion ballot measures seeking to overturn them. Pro-choice advocates have won all seven ballot fights (four in the deep-red states of Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio and another in the battleground state of Michigan) since the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade; there is a significant chance the winning streak could expand to 17 in November, in an astonishing confirmation of the breadth and depth of support for abortion rights.

We don’t have significant public polling in some states, but everywhere (including in the deep-red states of Missouri and South Dakota), advocates for expanding or defending abortion rights seem to have an advantage. It’s telling that one of the few signs of hope for the anti-abortion cause is in Florida, and that’s only because the state has a 60 percent supermajority requirement for constitutional ballot initiatives. Meanwhile, an abortion-rights victory is all but assured in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, and Nevada. In Montana, it’s worth noting that voters rejected a 2022 ballot measure to restrict abortions.

There are some complications to this generally bright picture for abortion rights. In Nebraska, anti-abortion voters succeeded in certifying for the ballot a competing initiative that would constitutionally ban abortion after the first trimester; the standard is technically less draconian than the state’s current 12-week ban but would set back abortion rights and is clearly designed to confuse voters. If that initiative and the primary measure restoring the Roe viability standard both pass, the one that gathers the most votes will be implemented. In South Dakota, a legal effort failed to keep the abortion-rights initiative off the ballot, but courts are allowing a trial over the anti-abortion movement’s complaints, which could in theory make an enacted amendment unenforceable.

In New York, the decision to nestle abortion-rights protections into a broader equal-rights constitutional amendment could be backfiring, as Politico explains:

“An issue that should have been as easy a win in New York as it has been for Democrats across the nation is now at risk of backfiring because of how they chose to craft the amendment.

“The pushback from the right has relied heavily on anti-trans rhetoric, a line of attack that internal polling shows has proven persuasive to voters in battleground House districts, three people who have reviewed the data told POLITICO. They were granted anonymity to discuss the inside information.

“Without a well-funded campaign to defend and bolster the equality amendment, deep blue New York could reject a referendum in support of abortion rights — with dire national political implications for Democrats.”

It’s still hard to imagine New York voting against an equal-rights amendment, but it may be more difficult than expected.

If all ten pro-choice ballot initiatives succeed, there will be 18 states in which constitutions (either by explicit provision or state supreme court interpretations) prevent legislatures from banning abortion and another seven blue states where passage of a ban is extremely unlikely. That’s half the states, which leaves a lot of work to be done to reverse the damage wrought by the U.S. Supreme Court but a lot of work accomplished as well.

There’s really not much drama going on in Congress lately, but a manufactured crisis could shut down the federal government right in the middle of the general election season, as I explained at New York:

Kicking cans down the road is an essential skill in Congress, particularly when partisan control of the government is divided, as it is now. Routine decisions like keeping the federal government operating must await posturing over essential laws each party wants to enact but does not have the power to impose. And that’s why there seems to be a perpetual threat of a government shutdown — which is what happens if either house of Congress or the president refuses to sign off on spending authority — and why Washington typically lurches along from stopgap spending deal to stopgap spending deal.

The most recent stopgap spending deal expires on September 30, the last day of Fiscal Year 2024. There’s been some back-and-forth about the length of the next stopgap based on changing calculations of which party is likely to be in the ascendancy after the November election. But this normal bit of maneuvering suddenly turned fraught as Donald Trump bigfooted his way into the discussion on Truth Social not long before he debated Kamala Harris:

“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO “STUFF” VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN — CLOSE IT DOWN!!!”

The backstory is that in April, when Speaker Mike Johnson was feeling some heat from the House Freedom Caucus over allegedly “caving” to Democrats in the last stopgap spending fight, the Louisianan scurried down to Mar-a-Lago to huddle with the Boss. Johnson announced he would do Trump’s bidding by introducing a bill to outlaw noncitizen voting, the phantom menace that is one of Trump’s favorite stolen-election fables. Those of us who understood that noncitizen voting (of which there is no actual evidence beyond a handful of votes among hundreds of millions) is already illegal shrugged it off as a MAGA red-meat treat.

But Johnson forged ahead with a House vote to approve the so-called SAVE Act. After the Senate ignored it, he included it in the first draft of his new stopgap bill. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, figured it would be dropped when negotiations got serious. But then Trump made his latest intervention and then, worse yet, Johnson couldn’t get the votes to pass his stopgap and get the ping-pong game with Democrats going (many right-wing House members won’t vote for any stopgap spending bill, and others are demanding big domestic spending cuts that don’t pass the smell test). So Johnson is back to square one, as the New York Times reports:

“Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday abruptly canceled a vote on his initial plan to avert a government shutdown, as opposition to the six-month stopgap funding measure piled up in both parties.

“It was a bruising setback for Mr. Johnson coming only a few weeks before a Sept. 30 deadline Congress faces to fund the government or face a shutdown.”

So now what? In the intense heat of an election year in which both the House and the White House are poised between the two parties, the leader of the GOP ticket has ordered Johnson to hold his breath until he turns blue — or more to the point, until the government is shut down — unless something happens that is as likely as Johnson suddenly coming out for abortion rights. Indeed, far from ramming the deeply offensive and impractical SAVE Act down the throats of Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, he can’t even get the stopgap spending measure that includes it out of his own chamber. In the past, Democrats have loaned him a few votes to help him out of a jam, but they won’t do it unless he drops the SAVE Act. And if he drops the SAVE Act, Trump’s friends in the House will happily drop him the first chance they get (maybe right away, or maybe after the election). On the other hand, if he obeys Trump and refuses to move any spending bill, there’s a good chance a few Republicans will defect and back a Democratic measure to avoid an unusually pointless and politically damaging government shutdown. That, too, would expose Johnson as feckless and disposable.

Ever since Johnson succeeded Kevin McCarthy, Washington observers have alternated between treating him as some sort of backwoods parliamentary genius who fools people with his apparent befuddlement and as a Mr. Magoo who stumbles forward blindly and survives by luck and the fact that House Republicans have no better prospects for wielding the gavel. We’ll soon see which Mike Johnson emerges from the current morass. Another major incident of GOP fecklessness and disarray could help Democrats flip the House, but it’s a shame people may not be able to do their jobs in the interim.

In my usual role of discouraging irrational exuberance (or if you prefer, offering a buzzkill), I issued a warning at New York about the need to cool jets despite the outcome of the September 10 debate:

It’s hard to recall a presidential-candidate debate so intensely anticipated as the September 10 encounter between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who are locked in a very close race as early voting commences. Now that it’s over, with Harris by near-universal assent being adjudged the winner, many excited Democrats are expecting this “consequential” debate to produce a tangible, perhaps even decisive, advantage for their candidate (particularly since the win was capped with the long-awaited Taylor Swift endorsement of Harris). They should cool their jets.

For one thing, it will take the more reliable pollsters days or even weeks to go into the field and assess the effect, if any, of this event on a contest that’s not just a face-off between candidates but a battle between two deeply rooted and evenly matched party coalitions. Yes, Harris won the CNN “snap poll” of debate viewers: 63 percent thought she won, and 37 percent said Trump won (the latter number showing the reluctance of Trump fans even the most obvious setback for their hero). That’s nearly as large as the margin (67 percent to 33 percent) by which Trump defeated Biden in the CNN snap poll following the June 27 debate. That debate ultimately drove the sitting president of the United States right out of his own reelection campaign. Shouldn’t Harris’ debate win have similarly dramatic consequences?

In a word: no. It’s hard to remember this now, but the June 27 debate did not have any sort of immediate dramatic effect on the Trump-Biden polls. The day of the debate Trump led Biden by a hair (0.2 percent) in the FiveThirtyEight national polling averages; on July 14 he led by a slightly thicker hair (1.9 percent). The debate chased Biden from the race not because he was losing so badly, but because it exacerbated a well-known and central candidate weakness that would make further losses down the road likely and recovery all but impossible. And this calamity occurred just early enough that there was time for Democrats to take drastic but essential action.

Nothing like this is going to happen to Trump. For one thing, his debate performance against Harris, while intermittently shocking, wasn’t at all out of character; his failure was a matter of degree. For another, to the extent there are Republican fears about Trump’s fitness for office or electability, they were crushed many months ago when the former president routed 11 primary opponents. Everyone still in the GOP has bent the knee to the warrior king, he’s overcome far bigger problems in the past, and it’s too late to do anything about it anyway, even if Republicans had a replacement candidate with Harris’s qualifications.

The debate will likely do two important things for Harris. First, it should revive the enthusiasm and sense of momentum that has characterized her candidacy since its launch. This isn’t just a matter of “vibes” but is instead an impetus for previously tuned-out Democratic-leaning voters to reengage with this election, which could have a big impact on turnout. Second, it will address the concerns of many Kamala-curious swing voters about her suitability to serve as president and reflect mainstream values and policy inclinations. That will remain a work in progress given her inherently tricky but essential strategy of offering unhappy voters a change from the status quo even as she remains a heartbeat from the presidency.

This represents very good news for the Democratic ticket, but Team Harris should manage expectations, much as Barack Obama and others did during the DNC when so many excited supporters wanted to believe the wave of “joy” would sweep away all obstacles. She didn’t get a convention bounce and may not get a debate bounce, which means this could remain a dead-even race in which Donald Trump will retain advantages (probably in the Electoral College, possibly in popular support that is stronger than the polls can capture) no matter how foolish or deranged he looked on the stage in Philadelphia.

Despite the recent return of Democratic optimism associated with the Harris-Walz ticket, there are a few stubborn fears that keep partisans awake at night. Here’s a review of four of them that I wrote at New York:

Democrats are in a vastly better state of mind today than they were a couple of months ago, when Joe Biden was their presidential candidate and his advocates were spending half their time trying to convince voters they were wrong about the economy and the other half reminding people about how bad life was under President Trump. While it’s possible this would have worked in the end when swing voters and disgruntled Democrats alike took a long look at Trump 2.0, confidence in Biden’s success in November was low.

Now that the Biden-Harris ticket has morphed into Harris-Walz, there’s all sorts of evidence from polls, donor accounts, and the ranks of volunteers that Democrats can indeed win the 2024 election. But at the same time, as Barack Obama and others warned during the Democratic National Convention, the idea that Kamala Harris can simply float on a wave of joy and memes to victory is misguided. She did not get much, if any, polling bounce from a successful convention, and there are abundant signs the Harris-Trump contest is settling into a genuine nail-biter.

While the September 10 debate and other campaign events could change the trajectory of the race, it’s more likely to remain a toss-up to the bitter end. And many fear, for various reasons, that in this scenario, Trump is likelier to prevail. Here’s a look at which of these concerns are legitimate, and which we can chalk up to superstition and the long tradition of Democratic defeatism.

Republicans’ perceived Electoral College advantage

One reason a lot of Democrats favor abolition of the Electoral College is their belief that the system inherently favors a GOP that has a lock on overrepresented rural states. That certainly seemed to be the case in the two 21st-century elections in which Republicans won the presidency while losing the national popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016). And in 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by a robust 4.5 percent but barely scraped by in the Electoral College (a shift of just 44,000 votes in three states could have produced a tie in electoral votes).

However, any bias in the Electoral College is the product not of some national tilt, but of a landscape in which the very closest states are more Republican or Democratic than the country as a whole. In 2000, 2016, and 2020, that helped Republicans, but as recently as 2012 there was a distinct Electoral College bias favoring Democrats.

To make a very long story short, there will probably again be an Electoral College bias favoring Trump; one bit of evidence is that Harris is leading in the national polling averages, but is in a dead heat in the seven battleground states that will decide the election. However, it’s entirely unclear how large it will be. In any event, it helps explain why Democrats won’t feel the least bit comfortable with anything less than a solid national polling advantage for Harris going into the home stretch, and why staring at state polls may be a good idea.

Recent polling errors

For reasons that remain a subject of great controversy, pollsters underestimated Donald Trump’s support in both 2016 and in 2020. But the two elections should not be conflated. In 2016, national polls actually came reasonably close to reflecting Hillary Clinton’s national popular-vote advantage over Trump (in the final RealClearPolitics polling averages, Clinton led by 3.2 percent; she actually won by 2.1 percent). But far less abundant 2016 state polling missed Trump’s wafer-thin upset wins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, largely due to an under-sampling of white non-college-educated voters. The legend of massive 2016 polling error is probably based on how many highly confident forecasts of a Clinton win were published, which is a different animal altogether.

There’s no question, however, that both national and state polling were off in 2020, which is why the narrow Biden win surprised so many people. Two very different explanations for the 2020 polling error have been batted around: One is that the COVID pandemic skewed polling significantly, with Democrats more likely to be self-isolated at home and responding to pollsters; the other is that the supposed anti-Trump bias of 2020 polls simply intensified. The fact that polls in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections were quite accurate is consistent with either interpretation.

So we really don’t know if polling error is a given in 2024, or which candidate will do better than expected. A FiveThirtyEight analysis of polling error since 1998 shows a very small overestimation of the Democratic vote across 12 election cycles. It might be prudent, then, to expect that Trump might exceed his polling numbers by a bit, but not necessarily by a lot.

Fundamentals in election forecasts

A lot of election forecasts (or model-based projections) incorporate, to varying degrees, what are known as “fundamentals,” i.e., objective factors that are highly correlated historically with particular outcomes. There are models circulating in political-science circles that project presidential-election results based mostly or even entirely on macroeconomic indicators like GDP or unemployment rates. Others take into account presidential approval ratings, the positive or negative implications of incumbency, or historical patterns.

While forecasts vary in how to combine “fundamentals” with polling data, most include them to some extent, and for the most part in 2024 these factors have favored Trump. Obviously the substitution of Harris for Biden has called into question some of these dynamics — particularly those based on Biden’s status as an unpopular incumbent at a time of great unhappiness with the economy — but they still affect perceptions of how late-deciding voters will “break” in November.

The high chances of a chaotic overtime

A final source of wracked Democratic nerves is the very real possibility — even a likelihood — that if defeated, Trump will again reject and seek to overturn the results. Indeed, some MAGA folk seem determined to interfere with vote-counting on and beyond Election Night in a manner that may make it difficult to know who won in the first place. Having a plan B that extends into an election overtime is a unique advantage for Trump; for all his endless talk about Democrats “rigging” and “stealing” elections, you don’t hear Harris or her supporters talking about refusing to acknowledge state-certified results (or indeed, large batches of ballots) as illegitimate. It’s yet another reason Democrats won’t be satisfied with anything other than a very big Harris lead in national and battleground-state polls as November 5 grows nigh.