NBC has called the Ohio Senate race for Moreno over Brown, which gets the Republicans to 49 with all of the swing-state races and Montana still uncalled.
North Carolina has been called for Trump. He is ahead 50.8 – 48.1 with 89% of the vote in.
Right now Harris is trailing in Georgia (48.3 – 51.0), Pennsylvania (47.9 – 51.2), Michigan (46.0 – 52.2), and Wisconsin (47.7 – 50.8). Some are speculating that Trump will win the national popular vote, but it will be a long time before we know that.
While the AP has not yet made a call, NBC has called Iowa for Trump, who is currently leading 55.7 – 43.0 with 51% of the vote in; so much for the Des Moines Register poll.
The swing states are not looking particularly good for Harris, and the NYTimes’ live model is up to 87% for Trump.
The Republicans are already at 48 seats called in the Senate, and Brown is behind 45.5 – 51.1 in Ohio with 82% of the vote in. While Osborn is ahead of Fischer 51.3 – 48.7 in Nebraska with 54% of the vote in, a surprise victory here might not be enough to keep the Senate out of Republican hands.
In the House, with 54% of the Wisconsin 3rd’s vote in, Cooke is behind the Republican incumbent Van Orden, 49.4 – 50.6. Down in the Nebraska 2nd, with 76% of the vote in Vargas is ahead of the Republican incumbent Bacon, 51.5 – 48.5.
Pennsylvania is behaving differently than it had four years ago, from a timing standpoint. Much of the early vote has actually been counted already, so with 33% of the vote in Harris has a 51.6 – 47.5 lead; but, per the NYTimes’ Nate Cohn, the race should tighten from here and Trump may yet come back. Contrast that with last year, where Trump was 8% ahead at noon the day after the election, but Biden eventually won as the early vote was very late to count.
NBC just moved GA, MI, PA, and WI from “too early to call” to “too close to call”, while NC remains “too early to call”. The Senate races in MI, PA, and WI are also now “too close to call.”
The NYTimes live model thinks Trump is now a 69% favorite to win.
Florida was called for the Republicans in both the Presidential and Senate elections, closing one of the paths to the Democrats retaining control of the Senate. One of the other paths is in Texas, where right now Cruz is ahead of Allred 51.1 – 47.0 with 53% of the votes in. Allred is at least running ahead of Harris, who is currently trailing Trump 45.1 – 53.6, and as I was writing this NBC called Texas for Trump.
Georgia and North Carolina are both looking more likely for Trump than for Harris at this point, but it is still early.
Four non-competitive states whose polls close very early have been called: IN, KY, and WV for Trump, and VT for Harris. Early vote is starting to filter in from Georgia, but it’s too early to form any conclusions. Of the swing states, Georgia and North Carolina are the ones for which the vote is expected to be counted relatively swiftly.
The one thing we do know so far that we didn’t know before polls started closing is that miracles are not forthcoming in Florida. With 73% of the vote in (largely early vote), Trump leads Harris 54.1 – 45.1, and Senator Scott leads Mucarsel-Powell 53.7 – 44.9, although neither race has been called yet. The abortion amendment in Florida is currently ahead 58.3 – 41.7, but it would require 60% to pass.
It’s about 4pm the day before the election, and while Nate Silver may yet push through one more additional run of his model, I thought this would be a good time to memorialize the state of the race going into tomorrow, as his model sees it.
Right now he has Trump as the narrowest of favorites, with a 50.4% chance to win 270+ EV, versus a 49.2% chance for Harris to win 270+ EV, and a 0.4% chance of a 269-269 tie. This is in spite of Harris having a 2.3% projected edge in the national vote share, as well as a 5 EV edge in the weighted-average outcome, 271.5 to 266.5.
As I had done back in August, I’ll start by listing the “very safe” states, namely those for which Silver’s model projects at least a 95.5% (two-sigma) chance of victory for one party or the other. In most cases, these states’ probabilities are closer to 1.0 than they had been in August, presumably reflecting a reality that the extreme things that would have had to happen to get those states to break the other way haven’t occurred. Italicized states are ones that have moved into “very safe” territory between August and now; none have defected from “very safe”.
Very Safe Democrat (191): California (100.0%), Colorado (97.3%), Connecticut (99.7%), Delaware (99.9%), District of Columbia (100.0%), Hawaii (96.4%), Illinois (99.9%), Maine-1 (99.3%), Massachusetts (99.8%), Maryland (100.0%), New Jersey (99.4%), New York (99.8%), Oregon (97.2%), Rhode Island (99.3%), Vermont (99.8%), Washington (99.7%)
Very Safe Republican (116): Alabama (99.8%), Arkansas (99.6%), Idaho (99.9%), Indiana (99.9%), Kansas (99.8%), Kentucky (99.9%), Louisiana (99.3%), Missouri (99.9%), Montana (98.0%), Nebraska at large (99.8%), Nebraska-1 (99.8%), Nebraska-3 (99.9%), North Dakota (99.2%), Oklahoma (100.0%), South Carolina (98.7%), South Dakota (99.2%), Tennessee (100.0%), Utah (99.1%), West Virginia (99.7%), Wyoming (99.9%)
Now, from Trump’s perspective, the path to get from 116 towards 270 starts like this, in descending likelihood order:
Whereas from the Harris perspective, the path from 191 towards 270 starts like this:
As such, before we get into the 7 canonical swing states, if everything breaks according to expectation Harris would have a 226-219 lead.
The 7 swing states, ordered from Trump’s perspective:
And the same 7 states, but ordered from the Harris perspective:
For 6 of the 7 swing states, the expected margin of victory from Silver’s model is 1.2% or less; the exception is Arizona, where Silver now sees Trump as a 2.4% favorite. As such, if we posit a 1.5% “uniform swing” towards Harris relative to the model’s expectation, Harris would win 308-230 (with Trump’s only swing-state victory being Arizona). On the other hand if we instead posit a 1.5% uniform swing towards Trump, then Trump would win 312-226 (with Harris losing all 7 swing states).
I’ll end with a fantasy scenario for Harris… Silver’s model has Trump as a 5.2% favorite in Iowa, whereas the Des Moines Register poll has Harris by 3 in Iowa. If there’s something systemic, rather than Iowa-specific, behind that result, then we’d be talking about roughly an 8% uniform swing towards Harris relative to the model; and at that point she’d be winning not only the swing states and Iowa, but also Florida, Maine-2, Ohio, and Texas for a 413-125 landslide. As much as I’d like to believe Harris ought to be competitive in all of those states, that seems pretty rich.
I cast my ballot several days ago, although not immediately after my most recent post as I had suggested. On that Friday afternoon I had only a 30-minute window in which I would have time to vote, but after 30 minutes in line I was still 10-15 minutes from being through, so I had to leave without voting. I came back on Monday morning, and that time it only took about 20-25 minutes to vote.
Early voting turnout has indeed been robust, particularly in states like Georgia and North Carolina that had not embraced alternative voting mechanisms in 2020 as much as many other states had. It seems unwise to attempt to draw any conclusions from this year’s early voting patterns, though, as voter behavior appears to be changing more rapidly than we have data points from which to extrapolate.
A week ago tonight Trump had his rally at Madison Square Garden, which will be best remembered for one of his warm-up acts having told a (supposed) joke in which he referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” A NYTimes headline referred to the rally as “a closing carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.” Two days later, Harris gave her last major speech of the campaign before a reported crowd of 75,000 at the Ellipse in D.C. More recently, last night she made a surprise appearance in the cold open of Saturday Night Live, appearing with former cast member Maya Rudolph, who has been providing the show’s Harris impression this fall.
None of these last-minute activities appear to have changed the underlying dynamics of the race, which remains tight tight tight. Possibly too tight; Nate Silver and other armchair observers have recently noted that the spread of reported polls in swing states is actually far too narrow than what one would expect to see from polling a race that was a dead heat, raising the possibility that pollsters are, consciously or unconsciously, massaging poll results so that they do not deviate much from the conventional wisdom.
Not every poll of late has been boring, mind you. The Des Moines Register’s polling operation has one of the best reputations in the business, and in particular did fairly well this spring with its final poll of the four-way race in the Republican Iowa caucus. Yesterday they published their final presidential poll of Iowa, with the startling result that Harris was ahead, 47-44. For what it’s worth, the same outfit’s final poll 4 years ago was Trump 48-41, and the final result in Iowa was Trump 53-45. Back in August Iowa was on the list of states that I categorized as “expected Republican” (meaning an 80% to 95% chance of Trump victory in Silver’s model), the same category as Ohio and Texas – a set of three former and perhaps future swing states that, in the politics of the early 2020s, look staunchly red. As such Iowa has been getting next to no attention in this campaign, although I imagine ads from the Blue Dot have been filtering into the western counties.
But if a first-rate pollster is showing Harris with a lead in Iowa… well, just maybe we’re in a for a very different election night than we thought we were. Of course, never forget that in late October 2020 there was a poll from ABC and the Washington Post showing Biden ahead 57-40 in Wisconsin, a state he would ultimately win by only 0.63%.
The Senate race continues to look more rosy for the Republicans than the Democrats. The Democrats have a tough parlay to get to 50 Senate seats. First, there are three swing-state incumbents that need to win re-election: Rosen in Nevada, Casey in Pennsylvania, and Baldwin in Wisconsin. Next, the Democrats have to defend two open swing-state seats, namely Simena’s old seat in Arizona and Stabenow’s seat in Michigan, as well as an open blue-state seat in which the Republicans have run a compelling candidate, namely Cardin’s seat in Maryland. If all that happens, the Democrats should be at 48, so two of the following five things would also need to happen: Brown holds Ohio; Tester holds Montana; Allred upsets Cruz in Texas; Mucarsel-Powell upsets Scott in Florida; and independent candidate Osborn prevails over Fischer in Nebraska. (Moreover, it is not clear that Osborn would caucus with the Democrats if he were to win.) All of this seems like a parlay that certainly could happen on a very good night for the Democrats, but feels less likely than not to actually happen. Senate Republicans are set to vote on November 13th between Cornyn, Thune, and (assuming he wins) Florida’s Scott as the replacement for McConnell as Senate GOP head and, perhaps, the new Majority Leader.
And then there’s the House, which is too chaotic to really model with confidence. There will be no shortage of interesting seats to watch on election night and beyond. In addition to warily watching my own seat (Craig’s MN-02), I will be very interested in the neighboring seat of WI-03, where an appealing young woman Democrat named Cooke is challenging the incumbent freshman Republican, Van Orden. My instinct is that Hakeem Jeffries is a slight favorite to become Speaker, but we shall see.