Dazed Democrats, including yours truly, are trying to understand why so many top pundits were wrong about yesterday’s presidential  election. Not all of the political analysts were wrong. Ruy Teixeira, whose work frequently appears in these pages and at The Liberal Patriot and Washington Post, has been warning Democrats for years to stop  doing ‘unpopular stuff.’ See also Ed Kilgore’s nuanced analysis in his recent TDS post.

There are already some good ‘election take-away’ articles floating around (see here, here and here, for example). Here are some points from James Oliphant’s “Takeaways From the US Presidential Election” at Reuters, via U.S. News:

Three-fourths of voters surveyed by Edison said the country was going in a negative direction. Of those voters, 61% went for Trump. Of the voters who called themselves “angry,” 71% backed the Republican.

Emily DeLetter’s “Presidential election polls 2024: What polls are saying just 2 days before Election Day” shares some interesting data at USA Today: “With just two days before Election Day, polling suggests the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remains neck-and-neck….National polls provide a snapshot of the country as a whole, and a majority of the national polls released Sunday suggest either a tie between the candidates or Harris taking a narrow lead….In a surprising turn, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Harris leading Trump in Iowa by three points, a state that previously went for Trump in 2016 and 2020….The poll of 808 likely Iowa voters, which includes those who have already voted as well as those who say they definitely plan to vote was released late Saturday and conducted by Selzer & Co. from Oct. 28-31….Harris is leading Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters in Iowa, according to the poll, which has a margin of error of ± 3.4 points….This follows a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with four point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll, where he had an 18-point lead over President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time….“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co, told the Des Moines Register, part of the USA TODAY Network. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

From “Trump and Harris are both a normal polling error away from a blowout” by G. Elliot Morris at 538: “In 2020, polls overestimated Biden’s margin over Trump by about 4 percentage points in competitive states. As of Oct. 30 at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, the margin between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump in 538’s polling averages is smaller than 4 points in seven states: the familiar septet of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That means that, if the polling error from 2020 repeats itself, Trump would win all seven swing states and 312 Electoral College votes….Of course, if the polls are off, it won’t necessarily benefit Trump. The direction of polling error is impossible to predict in advance, and polls have overestimated Republicans plenty of times in the past. In a scenario where the polls overestimate Trump’s margin by 4 points in every state, Harris would win all seven swing states and 319 electoral votes….Based on how much polls have been off in the past, our election model estimates that the average polling error in competitive states this year will be 3.8 points on the margin.* This error is not uniform across states — for example, states with different demographics tend to have different levels of polling error — but, generally speaking, when polls overestimate a candidate, they tend to overestimate them across the board. In other words, the model is expecting a roughly 2020-sized polling error — although not necessarily in the same direction as 2020. (In 50 percent of the model’s simulations, Trump beats his polls, and 50 percent of the time, Harris does.)….Nationwide, our model expects polling error to be greater than 2 points in either direction 62 percent of the time. In other words, there’s only about a 1-in-3 chance that polls miss by less than 2 points (which we would consider a small polling error historically)….Of course, the probability of a blowout either way depends heavily on the popular vote outcome. If Harris wins the national popular vote by 3 points, she’s much likelier to win the states that will decide the Electoral College than if she loses the popular vote by 3….Meanwhile, our model reckons Harris needs to win the popular vote by 2.1 points to be favored to win the election because swing states are more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole. And if she wins the popular vote by 4.5 points (Biden’s popular-vote margin in 2020), she is favored to win in a blowout of her own.”

Domenico Montanaro explores “10 key demographic groups that could decide the presidential election” at npr.org and writes: “The largest single voting group is white voters. Republicans have been dominant with them in the last 20 years, but with the growing Latino and Asian American populations, white voters have been on a sharp decline as a share of the electorate since the 1990s….Because of that demographic change, former President Barack Obama was the first candidate to win a presidential election with less than 40% of the white vote in 2012. Democrat Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 when she got 2 points lower (37%). Biden won four years later and was above 40%….The October NPR/PBS News/Marist poll showed Harris winning 45% of white voters. If that were to hold, it would be the highest share for a Democrat since 1976. But Harris still only had a 2-point lead over Trump in the survey because of Trump cutting into margins with Black and Latino voters….Almost nothing now is a better predictor of how white voters will vote than whether or not they have a college degree. White voters with college degrees had long been reliable Republican voters. But that changed between 2016 and 2020, when Biden won them narrowly….Polling suggests Democrats’ advantage with them could balloon in this election….White voters without degrees, many of whom live in rural areas, are declining as a share of eligible voters in the country. But in key states, they still make up a larger percentage of eligible voters than whites with degrees. That’s true, for example, in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. In every one of the seven swing states, white non-college voters made up a higher share of the electorate than in 2016.” Read the rest of the article for a more in-depth look at pivotal demographic groups right here.

Some insights from “Our Final 2024 Ratings” by Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and J. Miles Coleman at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “What has surprised us down the stretch, meanwhile, is that Georgia and North Carolina are both gettable for Kamala Harris. A week or two ago, we were taking it almost for granted that while these states would of course be close, they would break toward Trump at the end. This is now far from guaranteed. Trump himself was campaigning in North Carolina on Saturday, Sunday, and today. While we have heard some arguments as to why this isn’t that big of a deal, we do take this as something of a signal about that state, particularly when combined with our own intel and the stubbornly close polls. Nevada, also apparently super-close, saw Republicans get out to a lead in the advance vote, leaving it an open question as to whether Democrats could catch up….Of the Industrial North battlegrounds, our strong prior has been that Michigan was likely to be the bluest of these states. We are sticking with that prior belief despite obvious signs that Harris has not nailed it down….Pennsylvania may be the biggest wild card, and the most responsive to whatever has (or has not) changed in the final days of the campaign, because it ultimately does not have that much advance vote. Something like 70% or even more of the total Pennsylvania vote will be cast on Election Day, clearly the highest of the 7 key battlegrounds, according to calculations we made from turnout expert Michael McDonald’s overall turnout forecasts and reporting of votes cast so far….Our prior belief heading into the election season was that Wisconsin would be the hardest Industrial North state for Democrats to hold, both because it was the closest state Joe Biden carried in the region and because it skews whiter and more rural than the other two. Yet this does not seem to be the elite consensus down the stretch of the campaign nor is it what polling averages indicate: Harris is doing very slightly better in Wisconsin polling compared to Pennsylvania. This, in addition to the Keystone State having the most electoral votes of the 7 key states, explains the conventional wisdom that suggests Pennsylvania is the most important. We do also have to remember that 2016-2020 Trump polling underestimation was greatest in Wisconsin, although such a large error this time would suggest Trump winning the state by several points, which seems far-fetched….Some recent polls show Trump with narrower-than-expected margins in states like Kansas and Ohio, as well as Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, where several polls suggest Harris is likely to outperform Biden’s 2020 showing. We also think it may have implications in neighboring Wisconsin, which is in some ways similar to Iowa, although that could be off-base. The abortion rights issue, especially salient in Iowa because of a new, 6-week ban there, could be having a major local impact, which could make the finding less generalizable to other states that don’t have such a ban in place. Or it could be that Trump strength with white voters is just being underestimated again, even by someone who has been excellent at detecting that support in the past.”

Ronald Brownstein explains why “Why working-class White women could be so decisive this fall” at CNN Politics: “Even as Trump struggled with other groups of women in his 2016 and 2020 presidential races, exit polls and other analyses showed that he amassed a big lead each time among White women without a college education….Those working-class White women loom as a critical, potentially even decisive, factor in Trump’s third White House bid. That’s partly because so many of them, polls show, are torn between personal disdain for Trump and discontent with the results of Joe Biden’s presidency, particularly over inflation and the border….But it’s also because these women are especially plentiful in the three former “blue wall” states that still constitute Harris’ most likely path to an Electoral College victory: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. To win those states, which she is barnstorming every day this week, Harris doesn’t have to win most of those women – Democrats almost never do – but she does need to remain competitive with them….“They are really tired of Trump, and they’d really like to move on, but they are also nervous about moving on, and they do think the economy was better for them under Trump,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. As for Harris, Lake said, “They like she would bring everybody together, they like her empathy. … But they don’t feel that they know her that well.” The sum total of these contradictory impulses is that, “They are really torn,” Lake said. “They feel very insecure about these choices….One measure of how much Democrats prioritize these blue-collar White women is the massive voter contact program that American Bridge 21st Century, a party super PAC, is targeting at them. The group is spending about $140 million to try to reach 3 million women, predominantly White women without a college degree, just in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three states that Trump in 2016 knocked out of what I termed the “blue wall.””

Brownstein notes further, ““In general, the blue wall states are still the path of least resistance to 270” for Harris, said Bradley Beychok, a co-founder of American Bridge 21st Century. “But I think it’s pretty clear that women are the determinative demographic of this election cycle, and they have been the last few election cycles, so it’s not rocket science.”….American Bridge has pursued these blue-collar women through an extraordinarily long engagement that began in 2023 by regularly mailing them newspapers produced by an affiliated group. The effort has included multiple rounds of contacts and testimonial ads from former Trump voters delivered through every available platform, from television and digital to mail and streaming services. Beychok said one of the group’s strongest messages is reminding voters of the uncertainty and volatility that comes with Trump….Beychok said the group’s guiding principle is that even small gains with these women can prove decisive across narrowly divided states. “We may not get to 50.1 with them, but if we run a program to get what is available to us … it can be just as effective,” he said….The Republican presidential nominees won just under three-fifths of these working-class White women in the 2004, 2008 and 2012 races, while Trump pushed his share with them over three-fifths in both the 2016 and 2020 races, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. Other well-respected analyses of the 2016 and 2020 vote likewise showed Trump winning about three-fifths of these women, with the Democratic targeting firm Catalist putting Trump just below that threshold each time, and the Pew Research Center’s Validated Voters study putting Trump just underneath it in 2016 and just above it in 2020.”

“The GOP advantage in those national figures is inflated by its imposing advantage among these women in Southern states, where many of them are culturally conservative evangelical Christians who support the GOP in overwhelming numbers,” Brownstein adds. “Critically for Democrats, in the pivotal battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, they have usually run a few points better with these women than they do nationally. In Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection victory, for instance, he only won about one-third of these women nationally, but he carried about 45% of them in both Michigan and Pennsylvania and won a narrow majority of them in Wisconsin, the exit polls found. By contrast, in 2016, Hillary Clinton, the exit polls found, stalled out at around 40% support from them in all three states, which contributed to her losing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined margin of roughly 80,000 votes – and with them the presidency….Compared with Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020 posted a small but critical improvement among these women in Michigan and Wisconsin, contributing to his victories there, exit polls found. Biden ran only about as well as Clinton did with them in Pennsylvania, where he flipped the state primarily by vastly expanding on her margin in the heavily college-educated suburbs of Philadelphia….Because Biden won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes, Harris has a cushion to sustain some erosion among men. But Lake, like many other Democrats, believes that to win the three big Rust Belt battlegrounds – and for that matter, any of the swing states – Harris will likely need to run at least slightly better than Biden did among women. “She is going to have to do better with women,” Lake said flatly. “She has to make up for the fact that she won’t do as well with the men as he did.”

In addition, Brownstein writes, “In a new analysis shared exclusively with me, William Frey, a demographer at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank, has calculated that these White women without a college degree will comprise a huge share of eligible voters in these pivotal states. According to his analysis of the latest census data, they will represent over one-fourth of adults eligible to vote in both Michigan and Wisconsin and almost exactly one-fourth in Pennsylvania. In all three states, he found they represent roughly as big a share of the eligible voting population as the blue-collar White men who are Trump’s strongest group and a bigger group of eligible voters than either White men or women with a college degree, or non-White men or women. Every vote from every group, of course, counts the same, but the blue-collar White women are a big enough bloc that even minuscule shifts in their preference, or turnout, could easily tip these precariously balanced states….McHenry said in his polling, significantly more of these blue-collar women say they were doing better economically under Trump than Biden. The latest national New York Times/Siena survey reinforces that finding: Among White women without a college degree, 54% said Trump’s policies had helped them personally, while a nearly identical 53% said Biden’s policies had hurt them, according to unpublished results provided by Siena….In the 2022 exit polls, a solid majority of blue-collar White women also backed abortion rights across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to results provided by the CNN polling unit. The Democrats’ problem is not that these women don’t support legal abortion; it’s that fewer of them prioritize it as much as their female counterparts who are college-educated, single or younger.” Brownstein concludes, “How a few thousand conflicted and ambivalent working-class White women in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin sift through these competing views may decide the states that remain the most likely to determine the next president.”

From “To win, Harris should talk more about working-class needs and less about Trump” by Dustin Guastella at The Guardian:

The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) recently tested a variety of political messages on voters in Pennsylvania, a key battleground for both campaigns, to determine what kind of rhetoric is working to nudge blue-collar voters toward Harris. In collaboration with the polling firm YouGov, we polled a representative sample of 1,000 eligible voters in Pennsylvania between 24 September and 2 October 2024. We asked respondents to evaluate different political messages that they might hear from Harris and Trump, and to score them on a scale of favorability.

In line with our past research, we found that economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative fared best relative to Trump-style messages about Biden’s competence, immigration, corrupt elites, critical race theory, inflation, election integrity and tariffs. No surprise there. Meanwhile, Harris’s messages on abortion and immigration fared worse than any of the economic or populist messages we tested.

Yet no message was as unpopular as the one we call the “democratic threat” message.

Much like Harris’s recent rhetoric, this message called on voters to “defend our freedom and our democracy” against a would-be dictator in the form of Trump. It named Trump as “a criminal” and “a convicted felon” and warned of his plans to punish his political enemies. Of the seven messages we tested, each relating to a major theme of the Harris campaign, the “democratic threat” message polled dead last.

It was the least popular message relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And it was the least popular message among the working-class constituencies Harris and the Democrats need most.

Among blue-collar voters, a group that leans Republican, the democratic threat message was a whopping 14.4 points underwater relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And among more liberal-leaning service and clerical workers, it was also the least popular message, finishing only 1.6 percentage points ahead of the Trump average. Even among professionals, the most liberal of the bunch and the group that liked the message the best, the message barely outperformed Trump’s messages.

The exact opposite is true for the “strong populist” message we tested. This message, which combined progressive economic policy suggestions with a strong condemnation of “billionaires”, “big corporations” and the “politicians in Washington who serve them”, tested best with blue-collar workers, service and clerical workers and professionals.

If we break down the results by party we find much the same story. Republicans – who didn’t prefer any of Harris’s messages over Trump’s messages – preferred the strong populist message the most. And they overwhelmingly rejected the democratic threat message, on average preferring Trump’s messages over this by over 75 points. Among independents – an imperfect proxy for nonpartisan voters – the strong populist message was best received, while the democratic threat message was least favored. Only Democrats strongly preferred the democratic threat message, and even then it was among their least favorite.

….Moreover, the distaste for the democratic threat message among working people, and the total obliviousness to that distaste among campaign officials, is evidence itself of the huge disconnect between Harris and the working-class voters she desperately needs to win. Worse, every ad or speech spent hectoring about the Trumpian threat is one less opportunity for Harris to focus on her popular economic policies; one less opportunity to lean into a populist “people v plutocrats” narrative that actually does resonate with the working class.

The electoral college has become a gun held to the head of US democracy

Lawrence Douglas

Read more

If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people – a party that has given up on mobilizing working people around shared class frustrations and aspirations. A party incapable of communicating a simple, direct, progressive economic policy agenda. A party so beholden to a contradictory mix of interests that, in the effort to appease everyone and offend no one, top strategists have rolled out a vague, unpopular and uninspiring pitch seemingly designed to help them replay the results of the 2016 election.

Ironically, if Democrats are keen to defend democracy they would do well to stop talking about it. Instead, they should try to persuade voters on an economic vision that seeks to end offshoring and mass layoffs, revitalize manufacturing, cap prescription drug prices and put working families first.

“In other words,” Guastella concludes, “they should sound less like Democrats and more like populists.”

If you had any doubt about where UAW members stand on the presidential election, read “UAW members support Harris over Trump by 22 points in swing states – poll” by William Sainato at The Guardian. An excerpt: “United Auto Workers (UAW) members in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada support the presidential candidate Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by 22 points, according to a poll conducted by the union….UAW members in Michigan – the center of the US auto industry – support Harris over Trump by 20 percentage points, with 54% supporting Harris over 34% supporting Trump, the poll found. The union claimed in 2020 that UAW members accounted for 84% of Joe Biden’s margin of victory in Michigan….The poll also found that support among non-college-educated men – a key demographic where Harris has been lagging – gave Harris a 14-point margin over Trump” In addition other the polling, “The union is also running door-knocking operations in battleground states to turn out the vote for Harris. According to the union, the poll has engaged with 293,000 active and retired union members and their families in election battleground states….The union also noted union members who reported being contacted by the UAW about the election had increased their support for Harris over Trump by 29 points.”

Louis Jacobson shares an update on “The State Legislatures: Several Key Battleground Chambers Remain Toss-ups” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Jacobson provides a state by state breakdown for the key swing states and observes: “In our second and most likely final pre-election handicapping of state legislature control of the 2024 cycle, we find 13 chambers that are competitive—either Leans Republican, Toss-up, or Leans Democratic. That’s slightly fewer than the 15 on election eve two years ago, and only a handful of chambers are shifting ratings today compared to June….— Right now, the Republicans are playing defense in more chambers than the Democrats are, but only modestly. The GOP currently holds 7 of the competitive chambers, while the Democrats hold 5 of the competitive chambers. One other chamber, the Alaska Senate, is controlled by a cross-partisan alliance…..— Among the competitive chambers, 7 are rated Toss-up. This category includes 4 Republican-held chambers (the Alaska House, the Arizona Senate, the Arizona House, and the New Hampshire House) and 3 Democratic-held chambers (the Michigan House, the Minnesota House, and the Pennsylvania House)….— Four presidential battleground states this year have at least one competitive chamber—Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and how the presidential race shakes out in each of those states could have a significant impact on who takes control of those states’ legislative chambers.”

In “Learning to trust Trump’s generals: There’s a reason why his military men now call him a fascist,’ Heather Digby Parton explains at Salon: “The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg chronicled Trump’s odd antipathy toward the military during his first term, the details of which were further confirmed by Susan Glasser of the New Yorker and Peter Baker of the New York Times in their book “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” as well as the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt’s book “Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President.” They all relied on former US Army general and Trump chief of staff John Kelly as a primary source for such anecdotes as Trump’s contemptuous references to service members as “suckers and losers” and his frequent demands to use the military unconstitutionally….Kelly isn’t the only former general saying this. Just a week or so ago, Bob Woodward reported in his new book “War“ that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, described Donald Trump as “fascist to the core” calling him “the most dangerous person to this country.” Woodward told The Bulwark podcast that former Defense Secretary and Retired Gen. James Mattis agreed with this assessment….It’s good that these former high-ranking military leaders are saying all this. But they really need to go on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” or cut an ad so that people who aren’t reading the Atlantic and the New York Times (or Salon, for that matter) will know about it. There’s no reason for them not to do it at this point. If they fear retribution from Trump, I’m afraid that ship sailed. You can bet they are already on his list. If they simply don’t want to be in the line of fire, it’s a sad comment on the military ethos for which they claim to be speaking.”

It’s time for election junkies to plan their strategy for watching the returns on TV. “When you hear the term bellwether, you might think about states in the presidential election that always vote with the White House winner,” AP’s Maya Sweedler writes in “Where are the voters who could decide the presidential election?,” “The true meaning of a bellwether is an indicator of a trend. And for that, you need to be thinking about counties….In a closely contested presidential election, as many expect 2024 to be, the results in a few bellwether counties in the key battleground states are likely to decide the outcome, just as they did in the past two general elections….Across the seven main battleground states in 2024, there are 10 counties — out of more than 500 — that voted for Trump in 2016 then flipped to Biden in 2020. Most are small and home to relatively few voters, with Arizona’s Maricopa a notable exception. So it’s not likely they’ll swing an entire state all by themselves….What these counties probably will do is provide an early indication of which candidate is performing best among the swing voters likely to decide a closely contested race. It doesn’t take much for a flip. For example, the difference in Wisconsin, in both 2016 and 2020. was only about 20,000 votes….North Carolina’s two Trump-Biden counties – New Hanover on the Atlantic Coast and Nash, northeast of Raleigh – are likely to be the first among the 10 to finish counting their vote on election night. Polls close next in Michigan’s Kent, Saginaw and Leelanau counties and Pennsylvania’s Erie and Northampton counties, followed by Wisconsin’s Sauk and Door. Maricopa is the closer.”

“When your enemy is sinking,” the saying goes, “throw him an anchor.” That’s what Kamala Harris is doing to Trump. But in this case the anchor is Trump’s own words, and the required Democratic response is thunderingly obvious.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. riffs on the short-term strategy, in his latest Washington Post column:

Vice President Kamala Harris has an indispensable ally as she closes her presidential campaign. She carries messages from him nearly everywhere she goes. His name is Donald Trump.

At a United Auto Workers union hall in Lansing, Mich., on Friday, she showed video of Trump demeaning the labor of autoworkers by describing them as simply taking parts “out of a box” and putting them together — “we could have our child do it,” he claimed — and declaring his hatred of overtime pay.

….For Republican-leaning voters who can’t stomach Trump but are reluctant to vote Democratic, she has highlighted the threat he poses to freedom and constitutional democracy. Clips of Trump describing his political opponents as “the enemy within” and threatening to use the military against them make the point more dramatically than anything a critic could say.

Those are only two of dozens of examples one could cite, and that’s just recently.  Summing it up nicely, Dionne quotes “Geoff Garin, a Harris campaign pollster,” who “draws the obvious conclusion. “They don’t want him to be seen and we do,” he told me. “Our job is to put him in front of the public in a way they don’t want him there.””

For Democrats, it’s less a planned strategy than an almost pavlovian response. When you are running against Trump, media makes it impossible to not use his own monumentally asinine comments against him. Unfortunately, Democrats can’t ignore his rants to craft and implement a pro-active strategy, because there isn’t enough time in the campaign work day.

The media demands a timely response to Trump’s daily outpouring of bilge and venom. To ignore it would be political malpractice at best and campaign suicide at worst. In a way, it limits Democratic strategy, which is too often determined by the need to react to Trump’s mouth. It almost traps Democrats in “I’m not Trump” as a central message. There is both an opportunity and a price, as Dionne, notes:

For Harris, Trump’s indiscipline offers her the chance to seize back the momentum she enjoyed from three surges: her buoyant emergence after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, the success of the Democratic convention and her pummeling of Trump in their single debate. Since then, Trump has managed to shift attention to his own attacks on Harris, his dire and deceptive tirades about immigration, and voter concerns about the cost of living. The result is polling suggesting virtual ties in all seven swing states.

Trump isn’t doing this with thoughtful deliberation. His undisciplined temperament requires that he wings it and ends up submitting to the meanness that rules his spirit. It is disturbing that so many voters like it.

Yet, the “I’d rather be us than them” meme is rooted in polling, early voting trends and endorsements at this political moment. One problem, however, is that Republicans often rally in the final days of presidential elections. And Musk is reportedly dumping big money into GOP GOTV, so they can put more warm bodies on porches. But their GOTV door-knockers are going to spend a lot of time playing defense, thanks to Trump’s recent outbursts.

So take heart, Democrats. Harris is playing a good hand, with no major blunders or gaffes dominating the daily news. Her prosecutorial experience really does serve her well in interviews, debates and speaking engagements, and she is very good at honing in on the main issue and striking ‘the cool head in the room’ tone. She could probably use a little rest to complete the marathon in top form. But Two weeks out, her campaign has to pour it on and work like hell.

At The New Republic, Timothy Noah reports that “Harris May Finally Be Breaking Through to the Most Critical Voters: A Times/Siena poll shows working-class voters are finally moving in the Democrat’s direction. She may need them to win in November.” As Noah writes, “The New York Times reported Tuesday the good news that Kamala Harris leads in its polling for the first time since she entered the race. The Times/Siena poll is judged by FiveThirtyEight to be the most reliable, based on both its track record and its transparency. It is also one of the more helpful polls when you want to take a deep dive into the electorate, because it makes available to the public detailed responses from key subgroups among likely voters. The crosstabs in this latest Times/Siena poll offer something more surprising than the top line: mild encouragement that working-class voters, about whom I’ve been worrying a great deal, are finally warming to the Democratic candidate….I say “mild” because there’s no evidence yet that working-class voters are warming to Harris in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which CNN has identified as “the most consistent tipping point in American politics.” During the past 32 years these states went Republican only once, when Trump won all three in 2016. If Harris wins these three, she wins the election. This isn’t her only path to the 270 electoral votes she needs to win (MSNBC has some alternative scenarios here), but it’s the easiest path. And among all seven swing states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina have the highest proportion of blue-collar workers.”

Noah adds, “The Times reported that Harris is leading nationally, and that she’s gained ground among some key constituencies, including older voters, who are hugely important because (if you define “older” as 50 years or more) they cast more than 60 percent of all ballots in 2024. Before he dropped out, Biden was leading with voters aged 65 and over, even though they usually lean conservative. (In 2020 they went for Trump.) But in mid-September the Times/Siena poll showed Harris losing this group to Trump by seven percentage points, 44–51. The latest poll shows Harris winning over-65s by two percentage points, 49–47. Hallelujah….The Times did not report that Harris is gaining nationally among working-class voters, but she is. (Working-class voters are defined here conventionally as voters lacking a college degree.) Harris still lags Trump with this group in the Times/Siena poll, but since July she’s narrowed that gap from a dispiriting 15 percentage points to 11 percentage points. There’s still a lot of work to do, but as recently as mid-September, in a Times/Siena poll taken immediately after the presidential debate, Harris was losing this group to Trump by an alarming 18 percentage points.”

Noah notes further, “Where Harris is gaining some traction is with white working-class voters, a group that, with the sole exception of Bill Clinton in 1992, hasn’t gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson. It’s doubtful that Harris will win white working-class voters outright in 2024, but since July she’s narrowed her deficit from 38 percentage points to 30 percentage points. As with Harris’s gain with working-class voters overall, the improvement is mostly recent; in mid-September, Harris’s deficit with white working class voters was 36 percentage points, and one week earlier (i.e., before her debate with Trump), Harris’s deficit was the same 36 percentage points. I would guess these white working-class voters are women….Because the new Times-Siena poll does not break out results by state, we don’t know whether in recent weeks working-class voters drifted toward Harris in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to the same mildly encouraging extent they did nationally. An October 8 Wall Street Journal article by Ken Thomas and Catherine Lucey (“Kamala Harris Struggling to Break Through With Working Class, Democrats Fear”) reports that a private poll last week by Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin, who’s running for reelection in Wisconsin, showed Baldwin up two points and Harris down three, with the difference attributed to working-class men.* The same story portrays Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer urging the Harris campaign to spend more time there; Harris’s last Michigan appearance was September 19. A September 30 New Yorker piece by Eyal Press about working-class voters in Pennsylvania has no new polling information and is mildly discouraging….Multiple polls now show Harris gaining on Trump, and sometimes beating him, on the question of economic stewardship. Perhaps that’s why she’s gaining a bit among white working-class voters. There’s growing reason to believe Harris can win enough working-class support to win the presidency. But her pitch to these voters still needs to improve. Perhaps the small encouragement the new Times/Siena poll offers about the working-class vote will inspire her to do so.”

As regards Trump bragging at the Al Smith Dinner about his ‘leading big’ with Catholic voters, the reality is a bit more complicated, as Tom Norton points out at Newsweek: “While Trump leads in some polls among Catholic voters, he is not leading in “all polls” and his claim that he has a “big” advantage is debatable….A poll released this week by New Catholic Reporter showed Trump was ahead by five percentage points in the seven battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin….While Trump led by 16 percentage points among white Catholic voters, the data also showed that seven out of 10 Hispanic Catholics and more than three-quarters of Black Catholics preferred Harris….Data from last month by Pew Research showed similar results. In a survey conducted from August to September, Pew found Catholic respondents overall were likelier to vote for Trump “if the 2024 presidential election were held today,” leading by five percentage points. However, the results split significantly between subgroups, with 61 percent of white Catholics picking Trump and 65 percent of Hispanic Catholics choosing Harris….Conversely, the same month, EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research showed a Harris lead among Catholic voters polled, with 50 percent supporting the Democratic presidential nominee, 43 percent for Trump and 6 percent undecided….Other data suggests Trump’s lead among Catholics may have declined since President Joe Biden stood down as the Democratic presidential candidate. Pew Research from April found Trump had voter support among 55 percent of Catholic respondents. This fell to 52 percent in Pew’s September 2024 survey….So, while Trump may be able to claim an advantage, its significance seems debatable.” We’ll leave it to others to sort out the significance of such stats in light of Catholic subgroup voter turnout rates in swing counties and states.

Roberta Kwock writes in “How Much Do Campaign Ads Matter?” at KellogInsight that research indicates that “TV ads do influence voter turnout and choices—and that the tone of the ad makes a difference. Based on data from the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the team found that positive ads encouraged more people to show up on Election Day, while negative ads slightly suppressed turnout. And while both types of commercials affected whom people supported, the negative ones were more effective at swaying voters’ decisions.”

OK, that data is 24 and 20 years old. But it did come from 75 markets areas and 1,607 counties.. And don’t forget that campaign videos have found even more exposure on notebook screens since then, and human psychology hasn’t changed all that much.

However, Kwock adds that “research on voter turnout has produced mixed results. Somestudies that evaluated the overall influence of ads, without distinguishing between positive or negative ones, found that the commercials didn’t affect turnout. Among researchers who analyzed specific ad types, some reported that both positive and negative commercials had little effect; others found that negative ads boosted turnout; and still others that negative ads decreased turnout.

Further, “if ads don’t affect voters much, that would mean that campaigns are wasting billions of dollars on every election cycle. But political teams clearly believe that these commercials are worthwhile.”

The effects can be pretty small. “If a candidate increased their positive advertising by 1 percent, voter turnout rose by 0.03 percent. If they increased negative ads by the same amount, voter turnout dropped, but only by 0.007 percent.” Of course elections can be decided by tiny margins. But campaigns often have limited budgets, and cost-effectiveness still rules ad decisions. Nearly all campaigns will have a mix of positive and negative ads.

In February, Jessica Piper wrote at Politico that “Some political ads work a lot better than others. But nobody really knows what will reliably make an ad click with voters….That’s one of the major findings of a new study from researchers who analyzed data from Swayable, a platform used by Democrats to test the effectiveness of different messages and advertisements.” Further,

However,

What makes it particularly challenging is that trends that appeared in one cycle did not always persist to the next. For example, ads that highlighted issues — broadly, any issue-focused messaging — were more effective than other ads in 2018. But in 2020, issue-focused ads in congressional and Senate races were less effective than other ads, which included spots focused on character or biography. Ads with a positive tone seemed slightly more effective in 2018 and less effective in 2020, although not by statistically significant margins in either case.

But Piper cautions:

Still, the biggest lesson for all campaigns may be to not rely too much on what worked in the past….In 2020, some of the most effective ads tested for the Biden campaign were direct-to-camera video testimonials — featuring everyday voters shot as if they could be on Zoom, rather than slick campaign ads. But the style and substance of ads will likely be dramatically different this year, said Nate Lubin, an ad consultant on Biden’s 2020 campaign, even if the presidential race is poised to be a Biden-Trump rematch.

If you want to get wonky abut it, check out “Political Advertising and Election Results” by Jorg L. Spenkuch and David Toniatti, who write in a footnote and graph-rich article at economics.harvard.edu:

In “The October Surprise May Be Arriving Shortly: History suggests the decisive moment is still to come,” Jeff Greenfield provides a mini-history of recent October surprises at Politico. These include a Democratic president’s failure to win release of hostages held in Iran in 1980, or put differently, Reagan’s backdoor diplomacy success in negotiating a hostage release deal that would benefit him on election day. For the 1992  elections, there was the Iran-Contra affair, which hurt then President George H.W. Bush, followed by the 2000 revelation of his son’s drunk driving arrest 24 years after it happened – not much of a surprise or game-changer, as was the 2004 revelation by Osama bin Laden, claiming responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. –  Democrat John Kerry blamed it for his ’04 loss. That was followed by a huge October surprise, the tanking of the U.S. financial system in 2008, which benefited Obama. Arguably, the nastiest most deliberate, October Surprise was in 2016 when James Comey made a big deal about the F. B. I. reopening the weaponized investigation of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Greenfield sees no clear October Surprise for 2020. But you could argue that energetic activism brewed one behind the scenes, resulting in Georgia giving its electoral votes to Biden and picking up two Democratic U.S. senate seats in 2020-21. We can hope at least that Georgia’s enormous early voting opening may herald a similar October Surprise for 2024. October surprise or no, campaigns don’t win without being otherwise prepared.

Trump’s “Let’s listen to my cool playlist” town hall rally in Oaks, PA is probably not going to be an ‘October surprise.’ But for a display of raw Trump weirdness, Democrats couldn’t ask for much more. James Bickerton reports it this way at Newsweek: “Some attendees at a Donald Trump town hall event on Monday reportedly began leaving early after the Republican presidential nominee decided to stop taking questions from the audience and instead played music for 39 minutes….The former president attended the town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, moderated by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.” What, you might understandably wonder, was Kristi Noem doing there – other than  firming up the dog-lover vote for Harris? “Proceedings were paused while two attendees received medical attention, at which point Trump jokingly asked whether “anybody else would like to faint?” He then said: “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”….The incident took place after Kamala Harris questioned Trump’s mental cognizance at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday, branding her White House rival “unstable” and “unhinged.” In July, President Joe Biden announced he was stepping down from the 2024 presidential contest amid concern about his age and mental capabilities….According to The Washington Post, “some in the crowd began to leave” after Trump said he wouldn’t be taking any more questions at the town hall, and instead told his team to play a succession of nine songs as he at times danced on stage….”Ron Filipkowski, who edits self-styled “pro-democracy” media outlet MeidasTouch, added: “This is absolutely insane. Trump just froze up answering questions, said he wouldn’t take anymore questions, then stood on stage for the next 30 minutes while music played. Will media cover this as something other than a seriously bizarre cognitive episode???”

When a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calls the president he served under a “fascist,” that is news that merits further discussion, and it is getting plenty of buzz. As Steve Benen reports at MSNBC, “When Gen. Mark Milley retired last year, following more than four decades of military service to the United States, he delivered a retirement speech that included some language that did not go unnoticed. “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant or dictator — or wannabe dictator,” the retiring general said. Many assumed, of course, that he was referring to Donald Trump, but the phrasing was at least somewhat subtle, and the four-star Army general did not elaborate. At least, he didn’t elaborate publicly at the time….As The Washington Post reported, Milley apparently put subtlety aside when speaking to Bob Woodward for the longtime journalist’s new book.

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.