After the Democratic National Committee ran an ad warning that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump, I assessed her spoiler potential at New York:

In a presidential contest so close that every one of the seven battleground states could go either way, the major-party campaigns are spending some of their enormous resources trying to ensure that minor-party candidates don’t snag critical votes. This ad from the Democratic National Committee is indicative of these fears:

Not only does this ad convey the simple message that “a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump,” but it includes the reminder that according to the Democratic narrative of the 2016 election, the Green Party candidate was the spoiler who gave Trump his winning margins in the key battleground states whereby he upset Hillary Clinton despite losing the national popular vote.

It’s true that Stein won more votes than Trump’s plurality in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2016. So if all of her voters had instead voted for Clinton, Trump would have not become the 45th president and the hinges of political history would have moved in a very different direction. But even though Stein was running distinctly to Clinton’s left and appealing to disgruntled Bernie Sanders primary voters, it’s not 100 percent clear what would have happened had she not run (the Greens, of course, are a regular presence in presidential elections; it’s not as though they were conjured up by Trump in 2016). Some might have actually voted for Trump, and even more might have stayed at home or skipped the presidential ballot line.

The picture is complicated by the presence of an even larger minor-party candidacy in 2016, that of Libertarian Gary Johnson, who won 3 percent of the national presidential vote compared to Stein’s one percent. One academic analysis utilizing exit polls concluded that Clinton would have probably lost even had neither of these minor-party candidates run.

In 2024, Libertarian Chase Oliver is on more state ballots (47) than Stein (39), including all seven battleground states (Stein is on six of them, all but Nevada). Traditionally Libertarians draw a bit more from Republicans than from Democrats (many of them wouldn’t vote for a major-party candidate in any event). But it’s understandably the Greens who worry Democrats, particularly since Stein is counting on defections from Democratic-leaning voters who are unhappy with the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel in its war on Gaza. As the Times of Israel reported last month, there are signs Stein’s strategy is working to some extent with Muslim voters:

“A Council on American-Islamic Relations poll released this month showed that in Michigan, home to a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed the Green Party’s Stein. Republican candidate Donald Trump got 18% with Harris, who is US President Joe Biden’s vice president, trailing at 12%.

“Stein, a Jewish anti-Israel activist, also leads Harris among Muslims in Arizona and Wisconsin, battleground states with sizable Muslim populations where Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by slim margins.”

It’s also worth noting that Stein chose a Muslim (and Black) running mate in California professor Butch Ware.

Any comparisons of her 2024 campaign with her past spoiler role should come with the important observation that non-major-party voting is likely to be much smaller this year than it was in 2016, when fully 5.7 percent of presidential voters opted for someone other than Trump or Clinton. The non-major-party vote dropped to 1.9 percent — a third of the 2016 percentage — in 2020. Earlier this year it looked like independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would push the non-major-party vote even higher than it was eight years ago. But then Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, which reduced the “double-hater” vote unhappy with both major-party candidates, followed by Kennedy’s withdrawal and endorsement of Trump showed that particular threat evaporating. Despite his efforts to fold his candidacy into Trump’s in the battleground states, Kennedy is still on the ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin, though it’s anybody’s guess how many voters will exercise that zombie option and who will benefit. Another independent candidate, Cornel West, stayed in the race, but he’s struggled with both funding and ballot access; he’s not on the ballot in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, or Pennsylvania, and he’s competing with Stein for left-bent voters unhappy with Kamala Harris. Unsurprisingly, Republican operatives have helped both Stein and West in their ballot-access efforts.

There are some indications that the non-major-party vote will drop even more than it did earlier this year. A new Pew survey shows that only 12 percent of registered voters who express a preference for a minor-party or independent candidate are “extremely motivated to vote,” and only 27 percent of these voters think it “really matters who wins.” These are not people who will be rushing to the polls in a state of excitement.

It’s hard to find a credible recent national poll showing Stein, Oliver, or West with more than one percent of the vote. But a late-September New York Times-Siena poll of Michigan, with its significant Arab-American and Muslim populations, did show Stein with 2 percent of likely voters. In an extremely close race, even small splinter votes can matter, as the experience of 2000 in Florida will eternally remind Democrats. Had that year’s Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, not appeared on the ballot, it’s pretty likely Al Gore would have been the 43rd president. So anything can happen in what amounts to a presidential jump ball, and you can expect Democrats to continue calling Stein a spoiler while Republicans not-so-quietly wish her well.

Recently I got to thinking about the use of defectors from the other party by the Harris and Trump campaigns, and wrote up some implications at New York for how they differed:

For a presidential election characterized by immense partisan polarization, there is a remarkable amount of attention being paid to defectors. Kamala Harris campaigned last week with Liz Cheney, the woman who was the No. 3 House Republican as recently as 2021 and who happens to be the daughter of iconic conservative Dick Cheney, who has also endorsed Harris. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s campaign has blessed a road show by ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard that is showing up in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada.

The obvious reason for this high-profile deployment of apostates is that this is a very close presidential election between two equally matched party bases that can achieve total victory with even a small accretion of additional support. But that doesn’t mean the two campaigns have mirror-image strategies for deploying defectors. A closer look, in fact, suggests very different approaches based on very different ideas of where to find the crucial bloc of persuadable voters.

The Harris-Walz campaign, like the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020, is focusing on a clearly identifiable slice of the electorate: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (some call them anti-Trump Republicans and others Nikki Haley Republicans) who don’t want to vote for Donald Trump but are reassured by the company of like-minded leaders that it’s acceptable to vote for Democrats. Despite the complaints of some progressives that the size of this bloc of voters is perpetually overrated, Pew’s authoritative analysis of validated voters shows the share of moderate/liberal Republicans voting for the Democratic nominee doubled from 8 percent to 16 percent between 2016 and 2020. The value of these voters is enhanced by their demographic characteristics; they are disproportionately college educated and somewhat older and very likely to show up at the polls, all other things being equal. In addition, the Harris campaign can reach out to them without modifying its message significantly, as my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out:

“Harris’s Republican supporters generally don’t claim her policy agenda is better than Trump’s. Their argument is simply that supporting the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power is a threshold issue he fails to clear. Trump ‘tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,’ said [Liz] Cheney, ‘He can never be trusted with power again.’”

So conventionally speaking, Harris is able to use Republican surrogates to reinforce her implicit message that she is much closer to the country’s mainstream — closer to “the center,” in the language of the Beltway — than Trump and a safer option for voters fearful of both left and right extremism. If Harris is indeed a “Marxist,” as Trump likes to say, could Dick Cheney and his daughter really support her? Probably not.

Now the mirror-image strategy for the Trump-Vance campaign would be to identify and deploy relatively conservative Democrats to denounce Harris and Tim Walz as radical leftists who are inadequately patriotic, too “woke,” and in love with open borders and runaway government spending. That is, after all, what the Trump campaign and conservative media are saying around the clock. But there just aren’t any notable Democratic celebrities this year who are willing and able to play the role of centrist defector played by Zell Miller in 2004, Joe Lieberman in 2008, or Artur Davis in 2012. To a remarkable extent, Democratic opinion leaders have lined up behind Harris. That’s one major reason the Trump campaign is going in a different direction in using apostates. The big-name defectors who are available are by no means sensible centrists tut-tutting about her San Francisco liberalism. They are people like Kennedy and Gabbard, who have an entirely different rationale for going MAGA, as the Bulwark’s Marc Caputo explained after taking in their Reclaim America event for Trump in Michigan:

“The message delivered to the thousand people who showed up at a local Detroit area theater that day was hardly typical GOP fare.

“Speakers issued dire warnings about the dangers of illiberalism, corporate power, ‘poison food,’ state surveillance, and the military industrial complex. Former Vice President Dick Cheney and past Ambassador John Bolton were name-dropped and booed as war pigs. Mentions of illegal immigration were scant. Dystopian rhetoric about big city crime was absent.

“This is Blue MAGA.”

If the messengers aren’t the Democratic equivalent of the Cheneys or the host of former GOP administration appointees who have endorsed Harris, neither are the voters Kennedy and Gabbard are targeting typical middle-of-the-roaders. Au contraire, particularly with respect to the former 2024 candidate Kennedy:

“Kennedy’s political value is not in the typical Democrats he can bring to Trump but in the unconventional voters and audiences he can reach. He has received positive attention on influential podcasts, most notably the Joe Rogan Experience, whose host praised Kennedy as ‘the only [presidential candidate] who makes sense to me’ before he quit his campaign in August …

“How big a boost Kennedy and Gabbard provide Trump is ultimately the million-dollar question. A Trump campaign adviser, speaking anonymously, said the campaign’s internal data indicates about 30 percent of the Reclaim America Tour’s audiences are people who ‘are not in our system.’”

What this suggests is that the deployment of these ex-Democrats is part and parcel of a Trump campaign strategy that has eschewed traditional get-out-the-vote methods in favor of a focus on “low-propensity” voters. This controversial approach has its critics and its admirers, but it does seem Team Trump is pursuing it consistently.

It’s probably not a coincidence that prize Trump surrogate Kennedy had a sizable following among low-propensity voters at the peak of his now-abandoned independent presidential campaign: voters hard to classify by conventional ideological categories and often relying on unconventional sources of political information — like, for example, Joe Rogan — while expressing mistrust and even fury toward conventional politics and other Establishment institutions. It’s not surprising that a master of rage and chaos like Trump might have a potential edge among “I hate everybody” voters who believe government and corporations are conspiring to poison their children and then send them off to war.

A lot may depend on which campaign’s theory of the nature of persuadable voters is accurate and how well their surrogates are able to reach out to them. For all we know, the Cheneys could be the key to victory for Harris and Kennedy the key to victory for Trump. In either event, that would blow many minds.

It’s traditional in American politics to fret about “October surprises,” the unanticipated events that throw off years of plans and calculations. October has barely begun, but Hurricane Helene with its terrible destruction already has people wondering, so I wrote some preliminary thoughts about how to assess it at New York:

The upcoming presidential election is so close that it could easily be swayed by external developments. Perhaps a widening war in the Middle East will turn heads in one direction or the other, or possibly a dockworkers strike will shake the steadily improving economy and help Republicans. But the major event we already know about is Hurricane Helene, which took a horrific toll on a swath of coastal and inland communities stretching from Florida to Virginia. Confirmed deaths from the storm have already reached 175, with more likely as rescue crews sift through the wreckage and reach remote areas. Damage is expected to reach as much as $160 billion, making the storm one of the deadliest and costliest in U.S. history.

While the human tragedy of Helene remains front and center, it’s impossible to forget entirely that the nightmare storm hit late in a very close and highly consequential presidential election, and two battleground states (Georgia and North Carolina) were very much affected. Here’s what we know about the possible political fallout.

Will damage from the storm impact turnout?

A lot of what we know about the impact of a major destructive storm on the willingness and ability of citizens to vote comes from Hurricane Sandy, which hammered parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York in October 2012 during the run-up to a reasonably competitive presidential election. Sandy, to be clear, was much more proximate to Election Day (hitting the United States on October 29, eight days before the election) than Helene. On the other hand, early voting has become more significant since 2012, and mail ballots were going out in North Carolina when Helene roared across the area. The major study on the electoral impact of Sandy concluded that the famous “superstorm” did not have a significant impact on voter turnout in 2012.

There’s some talk in North Carolina of flooded polling places that may not be usable any time soon and fears of extended disruption of mail service. However, in all but a few isolated places, there should be plenty of time for recovery in the month before Election Day. Individuals, of course, may experience dislocations and psychological effects that might interfere with all kinds of civic participation, but it will be hard to anticipate the magnitude of such collateral damage.

If Helene does affect voting, will there be a disparate impact on candidates?

The Washington Post took a look at the communities experiencing the most death and destruction from Helene and quickly concluded Trump country was most affected:

“As of writing, the federal government has issued disaster declarations in 66 mostly rural counties across four states: 17 in Florida, 11 in Georgia, 25 in North Carolina, and 13 in South Carolina. The declarations follow Helene’s path, from the section of Florida where the state bends along the Gulf of Mexico, through eastern Georgia and into the western Carolinas …

“Overall, counties in those four states that weren’t declared disaster areas voted for Joe Biden by a slight margin. Counties that were declared disaster areas backed Trump by a nearly 16-point margin. In all four states, counties that were included in the federal government’s disaster declarations were more supportive of Trump than were counties that didn’t receive that designation. In Georgia and North Carolina, non-disaster counties gave more votes to Biden.”

The disparate impact is most notable in North Carolina, a red-hot battleground state and the one where Helene’s impact was most heavily concentrated:

“Trump won North Carolina by a bit over one percentage point in 2020. If no one in the counties currently undergoing a Helene-related disaster had voted, Biden would have won by more than three points. If those counties are unable to vote at the same level as they did four years ago by the time Election Day arrives, that could spell trouble for the former president.”

But again, it’s a long time until Election Day.

Will government relief and recovery efforts affect voter preferences?

People who have lost homes or other possessions to high winds and (especially) flooding and/or who lack power or other essentials for an extended period of time are especially dependent on emergency assistance and may be grateful if it arrives expeditiously. Beyond for those immediately affected, the perceived competence and compassion of government entities dealing with disaster relief and recovery efforts can affect how voters assess those in office, particularly in a high-profile situation like that created by Helene.

An American Enterprise Institute study of Sandy suggested that the Obama administration’s response to the storm was a major factor in the incumbent’s ability to win late deciders in 2012, topped by this finding: “Fully 15 percent of the electorate rated Obama’s hurricane response as the most important factor in their vote.”

At the other end of the spectrum, the George W. Bush administration’s tardy, confused, and seemingly indifferent response to the calamity of Hurricane Katrina in August and September of 2005 had an enduringly negative effect on perceptions of his presidency, even though it occurred nowhere close to a national election, as Reid Wilson explained:

“Voters, already turning skeptical over the mismanaged war in Iraq, blamed Bush for the unfolding disaster in New Orleans. Bush’s approval rating hit 45 percent in Gallup surveys the month after Katrina; they never again reached that high. The number of Americans who said the country was headed off on the wrong track rose north of 60 percent and stayed even higher for the rest of Bush’s presidency.”

While FEMA and HUD are typically the federal agencies most involved in disaster response and recovery, presidential leadership in a disaster always gets attention, too, and the risk of negative publicity or graphic displays of unmet needs won’t go away immediately. Bureaucratic backlogs in distributing funds and approving applications for assistance could cause voter unhappiness long after the initial damage is addressed.

Barring unexpected developments or a major series of screwups in the federal response, Hurricane Helene is likely to mark a big moment in the lives of people in and near the areas of devastation but probably won’t much affect their voting behavior. Obviously the campaigns and their allies will need to adjust their get-out-the-vote operations and show some sensitivity to the suffering of people whose lives were turned upside down. We can only hope the election itself and its aftermath don’t add violence and trauma to the damage done.

Lately I’ve noticed a tendency in some parts of the pro-Democratic commentariat to scorn anyone who isn’t confidently predicting a Kamala Harris landslide in November. So I wrote a warning about this self-delusion at New York:

It’s the nature of the political game that some fans perpetually insist their team is on the brink of a landslide victory. Maybe it’s just a device for maintaining their own enthusiasm, or maybe they truly believe that hype and spin add votes to their candidate’s columns. I usually associate this tendency with conservatives, but in this tense 2024 presidential contest, the landslide-predictors aren’t all in the MAGA camp. There are assorted voices pouring buckets of cold water on the data suggesting the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is a dead heat, insisting Harris is on the brink of a big victory.

Personally, I try to keep it all in the road by looking at the broadest array of public polling data available, by sticking with averages rather than enthusing or panicking over isolated poll findings, and by using history and common sense to discern trends and avoid overreaction to every survey that comes down the pike. But there’s just so much science you can muster on these matters given the relatively small sample size we have for presidential elections, which occur only every four years. So there’s plenty of grounds for legitimate nitpicking about polls and the experts who interpret them. It can get pretty wonky, as with Nate Silver’s criticism of the presidential-election model being used by his successors at FiveThirtyEight. But it probably affects only the numbers — and the expectations — at the margins.

Another entirely legitimate form of carping about polls and predictions emanates from those who dispute interpretations based on poor analysis of the timing, mix, and provenance of public polls. My old colleague Simon Rosenberg became somewhat famous doing that ahead of the 2022 midterms, when he denied he saw any “red wave” in the data (there ultimately wasn’t one despite an insistent media narrative) and pointed to the skewing of polling averages by strategically released state polls from conservative outlets and firms. He was largely right, though all in all, 2022 polling was very accurate, even if the predictions weren’t. This cycle, Rosenberg is again more optimistic about Democratic prospects in 2024 than your average pundit, but he remains firmly anchored in the world of data and objective reality and admits it’s a close race.

Then you have pro-Harris critics of the polls and pundits who rely on quite different talking points. The distinguished political scholar Michael A. Cohen uses data to support his supposition that Harris is actually in command of the race but ultimately relies on more fundamental arguments that are impervious to numbers:

“I have a few well-argued beliefs about this campaign (and they predate Biden’s departure from the race). Donald Trump is a high-floor, low-ceiling candidate who voters, by and large, don’t like — and they have made up their minds about him. Trump is incapable of and unwilling to change his political messaging to appeal to voters outside of his MAGA base. Democrats have a growing edge with women and college-educated voters, as evident in multiple elections since 2018, which gives them a significant advantage in crucial swing states like PA, WI, MI, GA, and AZ. Democrats have the easier path to 270 electoral votes.

“In key regards, this election is playing out in much the way I expected — even when Biden was on the ticket. With Biden out and his age and mental acuity no longer an issue, it’s that much harder for Republicans to win.”

Maybe Cohen is right. I’ll believe it when I see it empirically. But it turns out my attitude is exactly the kind of thing that veteran progressive media critic Dan Froomkin considers a sign of terrible bias:

“What if Kamala Harris — after a spectacular entry into the race, a stunningly unified convention, and a devastating debate — is basically running away with it, leaving Trump in the dust, while the national media — still mortified by its failure in 2016 to see the extent of Trump’s support — stubbornly sticks to the safer narrative that it’s a horserace going down to the wire?

“But wait, the polls aren’t showing Harris way ahead, you say. At most, they’re showing her with a narrow lead. Well, polls are garbage these days. And the pollsters, whose arbitrary weightings make a mockery of science, travel in packs. They, more than anyone, are terrified of underestimating Trump support again. So maybe this time they’re overestimating it? (Which they sure did in 2022.)

“You could, by contrast, make a solid vibes-and-momentum argument that Harris is winning handily.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. The argument that “polls are garbage these days” isn’t supported by the 2022 record, and to the extent that polls have been garbage lately, they have indeed underestimated Trump’s support. The “arbitrary weightings” of pollsters may or may not be precise, but they are not “arbitrary”; they reflect what we know about the shape of the electorate. And just tossing out all data in favor of a “vibes-and-momentum” take that is 100 percent subjective hardly empties analysis of bias.

Froomkin tips his hand by quoting SFGate columnist Drew Magary, who angrily argues that Harris is “destroying Trump, because Trump is a deranged old s—tbag” and that anyone who doesn’t see that is an Establishment hack.

Maybe all these critics are right and, for various reasons, pollsters and pundits are afraid to admit Harris is romping to victory. I don’t think there’s much question that a lot of the people being accused of overestimating Trump would be ecstatic if Harris wins. But being careful about it, given what we actually know about this election and the electorate, is not just prudent but mandatory.

Trying to separate the wheat of legitimate concern about how the presidential election is going from the chaff of mere fear-mongering, I wrote a piece at New York assessing Trump’s electoral college advantage, such as it is:

With under six weeks left until Election Day, there are three major sources of anxiety besetting those who devoutly hope for a Kamala Harris victory over Donald Trump. One may not go away until January: the high probability that the 45th president would again try to overturn a defeat via legal action or perhaps even violence. The other two concerns are less distinct, if still alarming. One is that pollsters will once again crucially underestimate the Trump vote, either in the battleground states (as they did in 2016) or in both the national totals as well as the battleground states (as occurred in 2020). Pollsters keep assuring us they are making every effort to correct past problems and reach a truly representative sample of voters, and it’s worth remembering that there was very little polling error in 2022. But to many Harris supporters, no lead is going to feel safe.

A final source of concern is that any Harris lead in national polls, even if they are totally accurate, won’t be enough because Trump has an Electoral College advantage. This means he can significantly undershoot a national-popular-vote plurality and win anyway, as he did in 2016 (when Hillary Clinton beat him by 2.1 percent in the popular vote) and nearly did in 2020 (when Joe Biden beat him by a pretty big 4.5 percent in the popular vote, but Trump still came within 44,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin of gaining a tie in the Electoral College). So even if Harris leads Trump by two or three or four points in the national polls, and those polls do turn out to be correct, she could lose anyway — in theory, at least.

The source of this Electoral College advantage (which did not exist as recently as 2012) can be explained in two ways. The first is that the handful of key battleground states are simply more Republican than America as a whole, which means they’re winnable with a smaller vote than the average vote share nationally. In 2016 and 2020, the so-called tipping-point state that gave one candidate or the other the 270th electoral vote necessary for victory was Wisconsin, which in both cases was nearly dead even. This year, the tipping-point state might be Georgia or Pennsylvania, and for the most part, polls have shown both as closer than the national vote spread between Harris and Trump. But probably the simpler way to explain any popular-vote/electoral-vote discrepancy is that candidates can and will “waste” votes in states they either can’t lose or can’t win. In 2020, for example, Biden got a huge number of votes beyond what he needed to carry the large states of California, New York, and Illinois, while Trump’s vote was more efficiently distributed among the states he needed to win.

Interestingly enough, in a deep dive on this subject, the New York Times’ Nate Cohn suggests that Trump’s Electoral College advantage could fade significantly this year because he’s making gains over his past performance in both the Deep South states that are in the bag for him and states like New York and California, which are sure to go for Harris but perhaps by diminished margins.

The bottom line is that maybe Harris does not need to beat Trump nationally by 5 percent to win, but what she does need won’t be clear until the votes are counted. The even more basic point to remember, however, is that national polls are simply an estimate of the national popular vote, and, unfortunately, the national popular vote just doesn’t matter in presidential elections beyond conferring bragging rights. If it did, we’d be remembering the presidencies of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton.

This does not mean national polls are useless by any means. Their typically larger samples make them essential for understanding both trend lines and the performance of candidates among different groups of voters. And unlike state polls, they are both frequent and diverse, making averages more reliable. In some states, polling is dominated by pollsters with dubious methodologies and records, making the averages suspect as well. And it bears remembering that the national-popular-vote winner has indeed won the presidency in 23 of the past 25 elections spanning a century.

But until the dust has settled, it will be difficult for highly informed Harris backers to forget the fact that in 2020 the final national polling averages at FiveThirtyEight showed Biden leading Trump by 8.4 percent and it still wound up being a nail-biter. So while you should definitely read national polls, it would be a good idea not to believe they necessarily predict the winner.