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.

There is a lot going on in the presidential race, but one issue stands out, as I suggested at New York:

Kamala Harris’s effort to depict herself as a candidate of safe but forward-looking change (as opposed to the decidedly unsafe and reactionary change represented by Donald Trump) has unsurprisingly spurred a host of GOP attacks on a cherry-picked assortment of unpopular or at least questionable-sounding policy positions from her past, ranging from support for a single-payer health-care system and sympathy for undocumented immigrants to opposition to fracking and to aggressive policing tactics. There are two ideas about Harris this barrage is intended to reinforce: One is that she’s at heart a radical leftist, and the other is that she’s a dishonest shape-shifting politician whose word cannot be trusted.

So far, Harris is largely ignoring these attacks on her past record and her integrity, but she will eventually need to clarify her policy views, if only to buttress the impression that she indeed represents something other than Biden 2.0. And to the extent her “new way forward” contradicts or at least sounds different from her past positions, she’ll need a rationale for any “pivot to the center” that Republicans will describe as insincere or unprincipled.

In a New York Times op-ed, veteran political consultant James Carville offered an excellent formula for Harris to follow in this complicated situation:

“To be the certified fresh candidate, Ms. Harris must clearly and decisively break from Mr. Biden on a set of policy priorities she believes would define her presidency …

“At the same time she must break from Mr. Biden on some policy measures, she has one lingering liability she will not be able to outrun: the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination campaign, in which she and a gaggle of candidates favored more exotic positions within the Democratic Party. As last week’s CNN interview with Ms. Harris showed, this will be a consistent plotline deployed at her throughout this campaign. It’s vital that she give the same answer every time to these attacks. The retort can be simple: I learned from my time governing in the White House. These are my positions. Take it or leave it.”

Harris must repeat this over and over until the notion that she is vacillating or calculating or prevaricating dies of starvation. If she decisively lays out popular policies that distinguish her from Biden, and then sticks to her guns, her critics could soon be the ones who appear to be wandering all over creation in an effort to find some blows that land and sting. Indeed, just as Biden’s withdrawal drew attention to Trump’s age and questionable mental faculties, an opponent who “pivots to the center” and stays there could reverse the narrative and expose the former president to charges of incessant flip-flopping and political opportunism. But there’s no time to waste for Kamala Harris to plant her flag on solid ground and then defend it. It should happen during if not before she goes head-to-head with Trump at the September 10 debate.

One of the underlying issues in the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard endorsements of Donald Trump is the bizarre claim that he’s a man of peace. I addressed that idea at New York:

Donald Trump is famously hostile to U.S. aid to Ukraine and to national security alliances generally, even such time-honored institutions as NATO. He has also been outspoken for years about his opposition to “forever wars” like George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. At the same time, he is one of the most belligerent men ever to occupy the Oval Office. He loves military pomp and circumstance, he pushed regularly for increased Pentagon spending as president, and his basic formula for peace is to terrify potential adversaries with his remorseless willingness to inflict unimaginable casualties while ignoring or violating every traditional principle of limited war. He is also very interested in deploying the U.S. military against migrants from Mexico, domestic protesters, and even criminal suspects. He models himself on Andrew Jackson, who similarly stood for a policy of strict neutrality in overseas affairs matched with a clearly announced determination to kill anything that moves if malefactors cross him or his country. Some observers call this posture “isolationism,” but it is more accurately described as unilateralism, in which national interests unmodified by treaties, alliances, or moral considerations justify any conceivable military action (or inaction).

So it’s interesting to watch ex-Democrats famous for their opposition to “militarism” embracing Trump as an antiwar candidate. These include former Democrat then independent-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, and 2020 Democratic-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. In his long and rambling speech endorsing Trump on August 23, Kennedy listed Trump’s willingness to end (presumably on Russia-friendly terms) the war in Ukraine as one of three “existential issues” on which the two men agree. Shanahan similarly called “antiwar” one of the key principles supporting a “unity movement” between MAGA and her own preoccupations.

In endorsing Trump on July 26, Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party in 2022 after calling it an “elitist cabal of warmongers,” said of the Republican that she was “confident that his first task will be to do the work to walk us back from the brink of war.”

The very idea of Donald Trump as a man of peace is problematic, but presumably if the only national-security issue you care about is ending U.S. support for Ukraine, he’s your guy. Yes, some “doves for Trump” credit him with a determination and willingness to reduce the risk of nuclear war, notwithstanding his opposition to the nuclear nonproliferation treaties that kept the Cold War from turning hot. But a more honest assessment of the 45th president’s posture is that he has perfected the so-called “madman theory” once embraced by his predecessor (in office and in spirit) Richard Nixon, which means keeping the peace through sheer terror at the president’s unpredictability and indifference to human life. You can argue that Trump might succeed in intimidating other leaders into accepting his policy dictates. You cannot genuinely believe he will make the world a less violent and more stable place.

There are, to be clear, other reasons for the conduct of these and other doves for Trump. Kennedy and Shanahan are clearly angry at Democratic efforts to keep them off the ballot and at establishment liberal mockery of their subscription to a vast range of conspiracy theories involving alleged corporate capture of government agencies (not that this is a concern of Trump’s). Gabbard has revived an old cultural conservative strain of her political career and is regularly blasting Democrats for “wokeness.” It seems unlikely that there is a reservoir of voters concerned principally with the power of the military-industrial complex and the resources devoted to national defense who look at Trump and see a comrade. If he stands up at one of his rallies and flashes a peace sign rather than the clenched fist of vengeance, maybe it would do him some good.

We all look at poll numbers, but it’s important to read them in a way that improves your knowledge rather than making you doubt they matter at all, as I tried to explain at New York:

With Democrats’ substitution of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden, it’s looking very much like the very close election we originally envisioned for November has returned. And why shouldn’t it have? There has been exactly one comfortably decided election in this century (Barack Obama’s 2008 victory over John McCain), the two major parties are in equipoise, and three-time Republican nominee Donald Trump has polarized American politics to an almost incredible degree.

Now, an increasingly attentive public is paying a lot of attention to the presidential election. It’s a good time to review some of the mistakes people tend to make in seeking to follow and interpret the polls.

Don’t get fooled by outliers.

When a poll favorable to one candidate or the other comes out, that “team” is very likely to hype the numbers as absolutely true and predictive of a great landslide to come (that’s particularly true of Trump’s MAGA fans; Democrats have been burned by poll-driven irrational exuberance too many times). Some pollsters are prone (deliberately or not) to partisan bias, but any one survey by any pollster can, for statistical reasons, turn out to be an outlier.

There are two simple ways to avoid the temptation to overreact to individual polls: (1) utilize polling averages, which tend to greatly reduce the importance of outliers, and (2) look at trends in the results found by specific pollsters over time.

This year, there are a host of polling averages available. Some (notably RealClearPolitics and, to a lesser extent, Decision Desk HQ) use simple arithmetical averaging without any adjustments or weighting of results, while others (FiveThirtyEight, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and FiveThirtyEight founder and now independent analyst Nate Silver) have sophisticated methodologies that seek to place a premium on higher-quality and more recent data. I personally prefer FiveThirtyEight’s averages, which are easy to navigate and aren’t quite as loaded with junk polls as RCP’s. But any of the above averages are a lot better than reliance on any one pollster or any one result.

Pay attention to margins of error and other methodological issues.

In close races where small swings in polling results can seem huge (particularly those in which the lead, however small, changes hands), it’s easy to forget that every reputable poll is accompanied by a “margin of error” reflecting the size of the sample and thus the likely range of possible underlying numbers (which, in turn, is modified slightly by a “confidence interval,” which is typically 95 percent). A recent national poll from Emerson College showing Harris leading Trump by a 50-46 percent margin had a margin of error of 3 percent, which means the results for either or both candidates could be off by that percentage. Thus a relatively robust Harris lead is actually “within the margin of error” (amounting to 6 percent in terms of the difference between the candidates) and could be misleading. To put it another way, no really close lead is safe and could represent an illusion.

The margin of error can become really large in subsamples of particular parts of the electorate (e.g., voters under 30, voters with or without a college education), which some pollsters compensate for with “oversamples” of particular groups of interest. When you see a poll with a finding that seems really odd (such as Trump leading among young voters or ringing up 30 percent of Black voters), always look for the size of the sample and the margin of error. This is why large-sample polls (all else being equal) are generally more reliable and why state polls are typically less accurate than national polls.

Until fairly recently, there was a very strong preference among polling experts for surveys based on live telephone interviews, until (a) cell phones began replacing landlines in households and (b) the unwillingness of Americans to respond to phone-poll solicitations began making it very difficult (and expensive) for old-school pollsters to get a representative sample. Now there remain “gold standard” pollsters (e.g., New York Times–Siena or Ann Selzer’s Iowa poll) that rely almost entirely on live-caller surveys but that now pay extra attention to the design and weighting of samples (e.g., by comparing them to verified voter files from the most recent election). There are also perfectly reputable polls that utilize refined, online voting “panels” and other methods. Pew found after the 2022 midterm elections (when pollsters had an excellent record) that “17% of national pollsters used at least three different methods to sample or interview people (sometimes in the same survey), up from 2% in 2016.”

FiveThirtyEight’s database of pollster ratings remains an essential tool for separating good from bad polls, based not just on accuracy but on transparency (pollsters who won’t tell you how they reach their results should not be trusted). But in general, you should beware of small-sample, one-day polls that are clearly designed to grab headlines.

Don’t confuse poll release dates with survey dates.

For varying reasons, pollsters (or, more often, the media outlets that pay for and sponsor polls) don’t always release polling data the minute it’s collected. So it’s possible a “new” poll will represent old data. For example, some media folk jumped on a Fairleigh Dickinson poll of the Harris-Trump race that was released the day after the Democratic National Convention ended and that showed a “post-convention bounce,” even though much of the polling was conducted before the DNC began. Keeping in mind the gap between the surveying and the reporting of results is important any time people look for a “bounce” from some significant event (particularly a candidate debate). Indeed, it’s wise to wait a few days after such an event to look for polling data since much of the impact is likely to come from secondary coverage rather than live viewership.

Pay attention to respondents’ likelihood to vote.

It obviously matters a lot whether the people polled and reported as favoring one candidate or another actually turn out to vote. But it’s not always easy to separate the participating sheep from the nonparticipating goats until fairly close to Election Day. This is why most pollsters stick with samples based on registered voters until they conduct a “switchover” to likely-voter surveys shortly before early voting begins (others, like Times-Siena, offer both registered-voter and likely-voter results much earlier).

There are different forms of “likely-voter screens” with different strengths and weaknesses. Some focus on stated voter intentions, which can overestimate turnout because people don’t like to admit they might find something better to do on Election Day than fulfilling their civic obligations. Others emphasize past voting behavior, but that obviously doesn’t work for newly eligible voters and may miss surges in turnout among voters who did not participate earlier (this has been one factor frequently cited as contributing to the underpolling of Trump voters in 2016 and especially in 2020). Likely-voter screens are especially important in non-presidential elections, when turnout is often low and variable.

Much higher percentages of registered voters participate in presidential elections, making assessments of likelihood to vote somewhat less essential. In the past, the application of likely-voter screens has often produced improved numbers for Republican candidates since they were disproportionately drawn from segments of the electorate most likely to vote (e.g., older voters). That may be less true in the Trump era, in which Democrats have improved their performance among both highly educated and older voters, while Republicans are doing better among non-college-educated voters who aren’t quite as likely to vote.

Finally, it should be noted that some polls (typically “issue polls” that don’t measure candidate preferences and some job-approval or favorability polls) don’t even screen for voter-registration status but use samples of “adults.” These results should be taken with a few grains of salt.

Be aware of polling errors.

One by-product of this era of close elections and partisan balance is that polls can get the outcome “wrong” even if they are reasonably accurate. It’s also important to note that national presidential polls estimate the national popular vote, not the results in the Electoral College (both George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 won the latter while losing the former, and in 2020 Trump came within a whisker of winning while pretty decisively losing the popular vote). So, for example, in 2016 the final polling averages at RealClearPolitics showed Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 3.2 percent. She won the national popular vote by 2.1 percent. That’s a pretty small error. But sparse state polling gave no hint that Trump was going to win the historically Democratic states of Michigan and Wisconsin — and thus the election. So when Trump did win by the equivalent of an inside straight, a lot of shocked observers felt betrayed by the polls, and some concluded they were worthless. They weren’t — at all — but they were, of course, not flawless.

Polling error was actually more evident in 2020. RCP’s final averages showed Biden leading Trump by 7.2 percent; he actually won the popular vote by 4.5 percent, a margin small enough to get Trump within reach of another inside straight in the Electoral College. Postmortems of this relatively poor showing didn’t reach any clear conclusions, but explanations often focused either on the pandemic conditions that greatly affected both polling and voting or on a continued problem pollsters were encountering in identifying Trump voters. Either explanation was consistent with the excellent record of the polls in 2022, when the pandemic had subsided and Trump wasn’t on the ballot. So there’s no reason to assume the polls will be right or wrong in 2024. But Harris supporters will pray that she is far enough ahead as voters vote that she can win in the Electoral College. And a big win might also reduce the very high odds that Trump and his supporters will again fight against certification of a defeat.

Like a lot of Democrats, I’m exhausted at the end of this exhilarating week, but did want to offer my insta-reaction to Kamala Harris’s big speech in Chicago that I wrote for New York:

Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech was relatively simple, almost stripped back, but laser-focused on a few objectives: introducing herself with autobiographical details that other speakers have been citing all week; defending herself forcefully against the attacks to come on her intelligence, strength and common-sense policy objectives; and making a clear and concise case against Donald Trump. She did not bother to defend the Biden administration’s record, and presented herself as focused on the future. It will not be easy for Republicans to depict this tough-sounding, highly articulate woman citing traditional American values and speaking to a crowd of flag-waving delegates as a “communist” or a “radical leftist” or unintelligent, as Trump has often done. And while she did not descend into wonkiness, she did describe enough of a policy agenda to create a real debate with Trump and his party.

As for her delivery, the contrast between Harris’s crisp, forceful, coherent and succinct presentation and Trump’s rambling screed in Milwaukee will be grist for the mill for some time. Indeed, this should make Democrats savor the upcoming debate, where there is every prospect for Harris to show up her opponent as the narcissistic would-be tyrant she spoke of in this speech. It was a fine start for the short sprint to November 5, and it showed she is not complacent but is determined to fight for swing voters while keeping her base excited.

Now on to the debate!

One of the odd subplots of this strange election cycle is the possibility of an electoral vote being purloined by Nebraska Republicans, as I warned at New York:

If you like to play with interactive maps laying out a host of presidential-election scenarios, you may be acutely aware that two of the 50 states award an electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district rather than allocating them statewide. These would be Maine, which adopted the practice in 1972, and Nebraska, which started splitting electoral votes in 1992. Until 2008, when Barack Obama snared an electoral vote from deep-red Nebraska’s Omaha-based Second Congressional District, it was all kind of academic. Then in 2016, Donald Trump won the Second Congressional District of Maine even though Hillary Clinton was the statewide winner. In 2020, both Nebraska and Maine split their electoral votes, essentially canceling each other out.

It was the general expectation that the same thing would happen this year in a Biden-Trump rematch. But then in April, Trump activist Charlie Kirk came to Nebraska and ignited a MAGA grassroots effort to convince the state’s Republican governor and legislative leaders to change the state back to a winner-take-all system to keep Democrats from again winning the Second District’s electoral vote. With a special legislative session focused on property-tax issues already pending, Governor Jim Pillen offered to go along only if he could be assured the votes to overcome a certain Democratic filibuster. Meanwhile, these developments were being monitored in Maine, where Democrats control the legislature and the governor’s office. Maine Democrats threatened to take countervailing action to deny Trump a shot at an electoral vote in their state if Nebraska fired first.

Things quieted down after Pillen decided against including the electoral-vote issue in the call for a special session. But then the presidential race retightened after Joe Biden handed off the Democratic nomination to Kamala Harris, who proceeded (though there’s no evidence the Second District issue was at all a factor) to choose native Nebraskan Tim Walz as her running mate. For whatever reason, the Trump camp is again putting pressure on Pillen to call a second special legislative session in September to ensure the 45th president gets all the state’s electoral votes, as the Nebraska Examiner reported:

“Nebraska Republican Party Chairman Eric Underwood confirmed what state senators have told the Examiner privately, that the issue is not dead for 2024, and Pillen and legislative Republicans are waiting for the right moment to bring it forward. …

“’It’s a delicate opportunity,’ Underwood said. ‘When we’re ready to go I’ve connected with the Trump Force team. I’ve connected with Turning Point Action. … When this opportunity presents itself, what we need to do is to be the support network for those individuals because this will be a national change.’”

In deciding whether and when to pull the trigger on this effort to rig Nebraska’s electoral votes for Trump, Republicans will presumably want to make sure Maine is not in a position to carry out its earlier threat to retaliate. Maine’s legislature has been out of session since May.

Does a single electoral vote really matter? It seems far-fetched, but there is a very common scenario in which Democrats win the “blue wall” battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin while losing the Sun Belt battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina. That would give them 269 electoral votes — with the Nebraska Second District vote putting them over the top. That’s a bit less likely with Kamala Harris, who seems stronger in the Sun Belt states than Biden, heading the ticket, but it’s still feasible.

It’s certainly worth noting that Tim Walz is headed to Omaha for campaign appearances this very weekend. This could present Nebraska Republicans with a red flag (or perhaps more appropriately a blue flag; the Second District is often called “the blue dot” in the red map of Nebraska) that motivates them to act, or perhaps just a vivid Harris-Walz demonstration that the heartland does not entirely belong to Trump.