I expected Trump +7 or +8. Normally one poll doesn't move my priors, but Selzer is renowned for never herding and for nailing the Iowa margin. I think Harris will get at least the 47% this poll shows even if she doesn't win it.
Iowa tends to move along with its neighbors. It's very culturally similar to Wisconsin, it's just redder because Des Moines and Iowa City are smaller relative to the state than Milwaukee and Madison. At this point I would be shocked if Trump wins Wisconsin, and I think he'll lose Michigan and Pennsylvania by more than he did in 2020. I said earlier that the polls are likely either about right or underestimating Harris. Now I'm 80-90% sure they're underestimating her.
We've been hearing that--erroneously--for multiple election cycles in a row now. It's been as reliable of a tea leaf as you're ever gonna get in telegraphing white working class trends, particularly in the Midwest.
The Iowa polling in 2016 shined a bright spotlight on looming on Midwestern weakness, but we were told Iowa results weren't determinative of the national outcome.
The final Selzer poll in 2020 telegraphed that the previous cycle's weaknesses among working-class white Midwesterners had been locked in place since 2016, but we were told Iowa results weren't determinative of the national outcome.
Aaron's breakdown is likely to be salient again for the same reason. A double-digit Trump lead in Iowa likely portends defeat in Wisconsin and Michigan, and a tight race in Minnesota.....because demographic patterns tend not to conveniently end at state lines.
I'm not at all convinced of that. I suspect the gender gap between white working-class males and white working-class females will be much smaller than the gap between working-class females and females with degrees.
With some latest polls showing Kansas T+5 and OH T+3, I'm cautiously optimistic about the blue wall holding up. Either way, Selzer will shed more light on the how the Midwestern rural whites plan to vote.
Until Trump, Ohio Republicans were always on the moderate end of the party (at least since the 80s)...The last time they ran a hard right candidate for governor (Blackwell), we beat them by 20+ points...I'd like to believe my old state still has some sense left.
We won't have a formal liveblog; Substack is not really the ideal host for the liveblog format. We will, though, be active on social media, and will have liveblog-style coverage on our Discord server. (If you are a paid subscriber, I highly recommend joining the Discord. It's been great!)
Hi Andrew, if you go to this link, I think you should be able to sign in using the same email address you used when you subscribed to the Downballot: https://sidestack.io/the-downballot
If you run into any problems gaining access, let me know!
Great if you would send email notifications to subscribers when The Downballot launches an Open Thread – such as this one, or extra threads this weekend.
I appreciate the suggestion, but we have a pretty large e-mail list and want to be judicious about not hitting up everyone's inboxes more than we need to. For this reason, we don't send out e-mails about Open Threads.
Georgia early vote ends today, and it looks like it’s finishing strong.
Without the results or partisan ID, it is difficult to determine what’s going on. One very clear pattern that we do know - older voters voted as soon as possible (voters 65+ completely dominated the first week of voting, but have significantly fallen off since); young voters tended to wait until later to vote (e.g., voters under 45 made up more than half of the vote today).
Which lines up nicely with the theory/prediction that the election day vote will have decent turnout from young voters as well.
(For the pessimists who call this copium, just go back to pre-2020 election cycles and look at photos on who is standing in line on election day after 6 PM. It is almost always folks under 40)
Going into the final weekend thread I know we're going to see a flurry of predictions or people asking for people's predictions. It's all part of the fun, especially with this community!
I have a bit of a meta-question instead: how does everyone feel about the accuracy of their predictions this year? I know I'm the curmudgeon that refuses to make predictions, but even within my internal thoughts I find this election cycle harder to guess at than usual.
If my typical internal-prediction confidence in past years was 75%, I'd be at 50% or possibly even lower this year. I know part of that is the shock of 2016 combined with 2020 being closer than expected.
There's more to it than those elections. I could go through my list but I don't know that doing so would add much. The simple summary is polling points at a close finish that could see things unresolved for a while, while the non-polling data is largely in our favor, all in an era where polling is increasingly fallible but not so fallible that we should dismiss it. There's an easy emotional appeal to dismiss polls out of hand because that's the worst data point for us, but polls are still valuable and informative.
End result is I think the error bars are larger this year on this what to expect for outcomes. Which leads to me wondering how everyone here feels about the error bars on expectations for this election, both with the media/populace at large, with the community here, and with themselves specifically.
Maybe I'm overthinking things and others feel this election is as knowable and no more prone to surprise than usual, or maybe others feel similar to me.
I'm about 51% confident about my predictions. More states than usual are well within the margin of error, meaning that already unreliable polls are that much more indeterminant. Meanwhile, plenty of tea leaves point to an electorate once again realigning itself just as it did in 2016.
Will the managerial class shift to Harris outnumber the nonwhite shift to Trump or vice versa?
Will the male shift to Trump outnumber the female shift to Harris or vice versa?
Should we really expect more than 155 million people to vote as they did four years ago?
And has the broken state of modern polling somehow managed to capture in any way the correct modeling needed to qualify these shifts?
My lesson from 2016 (and to a lesser degree in 2020) is that our community got lucky in 2012. We mocked the Romney supporters who "unskewed the polls" before the election and we mocked them after the election when the polls vindicated us. But it could have just as easily have been us with the egg on our face if the polling error had ticked their way that year as it did the next two cycles.
My pre-emptive lesson this year is to take warning signs seriously. And right now, the situation in Nevada is a warning sign.....and the reason I'm still 51% confident of my predictions from seven days ago rather than 49%.
It’s hard to assess, and I’ve said consistently this year that it feels like we’re flying a bit blind. It seems - from stuff like Nate Cohn’s article on poll adjustments, and Marquette running a R+5 sample in Wisconsin this week - that pollsters are trying to adjust for 2016/20, but who really knows. Other indicators seem a bit more bullish in our direction, but they’re rarely totally dispositive.
I’d say I’m cautiously optimistic, but bracing myself for disappointment
I'm definitely far more open to a lot of different possibilities than I was in previous elections. Being wrong about the last 2 elections has opened my mind to a lot of different possibilities about how it could play out.
I don't make specific predictions, but I will say I'd much rather be us than them. I felt awful late in the game in 2016. Growing up in western Iowa and living in Des Moines, I could see these communities where Obama was mostly competitive looking like total wipeouts and knowing we were in trouble in the Midwest. The real key for me has been in the House polling. The warning signs started blaring in early to mid-October that we were losing a ton of ground in Midwest battlegrounds. But it was slow to show up in state polling so people dismissed it. I hadn't discovered DKE yet, which was probably for the best because I was very down on our chances. This year looks wildly different. I'm getting the sense the bottom could fall out in the suburbs for MAGA candidates, and I don't think the state polling is accounting for that. Trump has also had the opposite of 2016 in that all of the news down the stretch has been awful for him. It's either been about his mental decline, racist rallies, taking away health care, and so much more.
Despite all of the worry, EV numbers mostly look good in my opinion when I look closely. Lot of work to got to turn out our voters, so there's always unease. If we don't turnout the story ends poorly. But I'm mostly happy. Even Nevada is looking better this week to me than it does to some, though I'll admit I'm no expert on the Sunbelt states. NC is the state I'm most uncomfortable with guessing. I get the sense there's more room to drop in the rurals there than some of the Midwestern states, but the Triangle has grown. Again though, feel less comfortable there. But I like what I'm seeing out of Milwaukee, and as a Dem consultant told me this week, "you can't swing a dead cat in Philly without hitting someone canvassing for Harris." She's run a great campaign given the unprecedented circumstances. Not perfect, but damn good. Hope I'm right. A few more days of hard work and we'll know.
I will on occasion slip back into a pre-2016 thought process of how to look at campaigns. A few days ago I saw a headline that "Harris challenges Trump to take cognitive test" and for a few seconds it made me a little worried but then I saw the context that she was asked about Trump calling her low iq and this was in her response and I thought that was fine. The reason I got a little worried because I thought if you're talking about Trump's cognitive ability unprompted in the last week of the campaign, that's probably not a good sign.
I bring that up because Trump's such a weirdo that we don't attribute that type of traditional political strategy to his behavior. But if you were to do that, the things he's done this week would suggest that he's headed for a bad loss. Really trying to turn Biden's gaffe (a story that hasn't broken through the political bubble) into the predominant story in the days immediately before the election would only be done by someone that thinks they're about to lose. And on a much lesser note him going to Dearborn, and courting the votes of a community that I belong to, but is also about 2% of the electorate in Michigan and many of us may not vote for Harris but she's still going to get way more votes from us than Trump is also loser behavior.
Less confident. I have six states I'm not sure about going into this. The last few times, I don't think I had more than two question marks although I was wrong about some of them (e.g. the blue wall states in 2016). I'm confident that Harris will win Michigan. I'm about 80% sure she wins Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. I think she's slightly favored in Georgia and Nevada, but they're still basically tossups. I have no idea about Arizona and North Carolina.
I'm fairly confident that the polls are either basically right or underestimating Harris, but that leaves a lot of room for uncertainty. Why I think Harris might do better than the polls suggest:
(1) Spending patterns and pundit ratings on congressional races suggest an environment close to 2020, while polling suggests something in between 2020 and 2022.
(2) By all accounts, Harris has a much better ground game than Trump does. Even if polling accurately reflects intentions, ground game can turn intentions into votes.
(3) There is some evidence that late undecideds (not just Puerto Ricans) are mostly breaking for Harris, and that she's won a higher share of early voters than registration splits would suggest.
Nevada is likely going to be another repeat of 2022 where the election will be really close. Hard to say right now officially who will win NV but instinctively, I have a gut feeling neither Harris nor Trump is going to win by a sizable margin.
Is my memory failing me or are we seeing vastly more open speculation this year about whether the country is ready for a woman President than we did in the general election campaign eight years ago? And far more people with microphones in front of their face admitting that either they won't support a woman or "have friends" who won't support a woman?
I don't remember this with Hillary and frankly I'm a bit surprised to be hearing as much of it as I am this year. I'm sure Harris's race amplifies this criticism even more with certain voters, but any theories on what other reasons might be? #MeToo backlash? Podcast bros reaching critical mass in a way they hadn't in 2016?
Sounds like a case of social media algorithms self-reinforcement, where if you keep seeing videos of the same "JRE bro" viewpoints over and over you start believing everyone in the whole world thinks like that. Which is obviously not the case.
I'm pretty sure 2016 was worse since Wikileaks, FB misninfo, and Comey successfully counterprogrammed the Access Hollywood scandal. Also, we were in the aftermath of that horrendous waste of time called "gamergate" which was finessed by Bannon.
I think I recall you way back then expressing worry about how some people in a newsroom focus group were somehow more aware of Wikileaks stuff than Trump's candid dishing on his sexual harassment game.
Correct. I predicted Wikileaks would have more impact on Hillary than the Access Hollywood tape would on Trump. Nonetheless, I don't recall open displays of voter sexism or hand-wringing by Hillary's campaign that she didn't think large numbers of voters wouldn't vote for her because she's a woman.
They were more subtle I think. They portrayed her as man-ish, a shrew, a snarling cur, and an alcoholic (which is only an object of mockery for those people when it's a woman).
Yes I do remember that. But again, I'm asking specifically about voters expressing reticence in voting for a woman.....or Hillary's campaign expressing that it was a concern that people wouldn't vote for a woman the way some in Harris's campaign is now. I don't recall those conversations eight years ago.
I do think Mark has a point that the emergence of the manosphere in the last 2-3 years has made such proclamations louder than they might have been in a previous cycle
Like you’ve got people outright saying women shouldn’t be allowed to vote now 105 years after the 19th amendment, that was sure as shit not a thing in 2016
The same kind of unsubtle people as the ones who made a fancam of DeSantis with the Nazi Black Sun symbol superimposed over his face and didn't understand why that was a horrible thing.
It was just bad timing. Reverse the tape and the Comey letter and Hillary wins, probably while picking up the Senate as well.
But ultimately the tape was basically the last bad news for Trump, while Clinton got the wikileaks for a couple of weeks, then bad Obamacare news (HUGE rate increases announced right before the election at a time when that was still politically meaningful), then Comey.
It was such a barrage of bad headlines for Clinton that it got drowned out - but this was at the time that the ACA was still a big thing - so if you are using the ACA insurance market at the time and Hillary is saying - this is as good as it gets and Trump is saying - we can do better - well maybe you believe him.
"Is my memory failing me or are we seeing vastly more open speculation this year about whether the country is ready for a woman President than we did in the general election campaign eight years ago?"
I think your memory is failing you. That was a huge issue 8 years ago and a major reason that Hillary didn't win all the right states.
Another thing about Norway: the country had a gay Finance Minister (Per-Kristian Foss from the Conservative Party) serving under a Prime Minister who was a Christian Democrat (Kjell Magne Bondevik). And that was 20 years ago.
She has been verrrrryyyyy disciplined with that. And I think that's "Obama campaign people" influence. I recall Obama talking about anytime he brought up "race" - no matter how innocuously - his approvals dropped 10 points.
Obama and Harris are in fact the only major party presidential nominees we've had who were born after the 1940s. Of those in the 21st century who have fallen short, Gore, Kerry, Romney, and HIllary Clinton were all born between 1943-48, and McCain in 1936 (he's also the only now-deceased major party presidential nominee this century.)
HRC played Katy Perry songs at all of her events (especially the ones with feminist themes), and frequently wore full white pantsuits to honor the suffragists, including at the 3rd debate and reportedly on election night.
Just on the topics of clothes alone, Harris has hardly worn white since the DNC I think. Mostly darker colors (which kind of fits the era of crisis we have been living in for the last 8 years).
Yes. The fundamental difference this time around is that Harris is just tougher than Clinton and is proactive in targeting wide variety of voters while staying true to her principles.
Trump and the GOP have been having a HARD time trying to define Harris. What, how she laughs is bad? That’s it?
another avenue of negativism that simply is not true,,,remember: even in the best case scenario for KH tfg will likely get 70 MILLION votes...of course there will be a substantial number numbskulls who will say crap like that...but it is far from a signifcant issue this time around; and those who say that would almost certainly be voting for the felon anyway...no matter who the Dem nominee is!
I've wondered why Americans have such difficulty picturing a woman as president. It is not unusual worldwide. Countries that have had a woman leader include the UK, Germany, Italy, Israel, India, Pakistan, Finland, Norway, Greece, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Ireland, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, Latvia, Finland, Philippines, et.al. Why is it even an issue here?
If I had to guess, I’d say part of it is because of the size of our military compared to other countries around the world. Many voters in this country have reservations about a woman being the Commander in Chief of the world’s largest military. This issue is not as relevant in other countries with smaller militaries.
Maybe not specifically military, but I think you are onto something here. All the countries listed here were/are not the #1 world power/top economy when the women became leaders. (Thatcher was long after the UK's peak in the 1910s.)
Perhaps it is about people not trusting a women to run the "most important office in the world". After all, the CEOs of the world's largest corporations are also almost exclusively male, although they at least have an excuse that their "electorates" (employees) are male-dominated.
I really don't see the sense in voters in other countries being less reluctant to vote for women as leaders because they think their own countries are less important than the U.S. Think about how that sounds when I reflect it back to you this way.
Nearly all of those countries listed (with the exception of Scandinavia) have only had 1 woman leader, so it might just be a case of us being a statistical outlier that is bound to correct itself eventually.
In addition to both of your guesses - which I think are both correct and related to each other you also have the fact that a bunch of people who didnt vote for Hillary did vote for Biden.
In 2008 the counter to "is America ready to elect a woman" was "yes of course. No one thought America was ready to elect a black person, and yet they did just last election".
Also, I think 9 years of Trump has just removed the filter for alot of people to say things in public that they would only say in private before.
That answer was true for a majority of voters, but not in the right states, and there were clearly many people who would vote for a Black man but not a feminist woman.
You could see it in the election results too, in the suburbs where a lot of educated squishy moderate types purposely voted R downballot to "keep Hillary in check", as if giving her a trifecta would be akin to handing the keys to the asylum over to the inmates.
Ironically, we did end up with a madman and his clowns taking the trifecta (for two years), and they were predictably met with a furious backlash from those very same voters.
"When their results come in very blue, they don’t believe it. And frankly, I share that same feeling: If our final Pennsylvania poll comes in at Harris +7, why would I believe it? As a result, pollsters are more willing to take steps to produce more Republican-leaning results.”
It's good that he's candid about this, but what it means is that he is deliberately putting his finger on the scale in favor of the Republicans, and so are the others, or most of them. I hope they end up with a huge quantity of egg(s?) on their face.
Agreed and that's why I'd really like to see the new Selzer poll( right or wrong; she's going to put out her actual results with no nonsense; like Nate Silver's 'feelings')
I should note that this is how the campaign is modeling their turnout too, if I understand Plouffe and JOD correctly. Better to have the most conservative assumptions possible than another 2016/20
A singular poll should not supersede the makeup of the state and its history. So if I saw a PA poll showing a +7 result I wouldn't believe it either. The asymmetry of it, where Cohn says they specifically wouldn't believe it if it was Harris +7 and nothing of Trump +7 is more interesting.
From a Harris campaign perspective if you ignore a +7 poll and continue to treat it as a 2 point race is almost all upside. The only downside to it would be if whatever advantage you have in that state is largely singular. If Kamala wins PA by 7 I don't think there's any way she loses MI or WI. But maybe that really doesn't extend to the Sun Belt and she ends up losing NV by a point and Jackie Rosen loses by 0.5. Then I think you'd see some people saying they should've trusted their numbers and reallocated resources. But that's very unlikely and would also mean the worst has been averted.
From a media perspective it is interesting but I think unsurprising. The polling being too Republican and then ending up being wrong is just going to result in some people laughing at you on social media. The polling being too Democratic might result in you being hauled in front of congress.
This person has been very responsible for posting polls so I do trust him here but there is apparently a poll from a known pollster showing Trump at 49% and +3 in Ohio. Harris is at 46%
Harris ground organization = BIG. Also, Comey Letter broke through and Puerto Rico broke through to undecided voters who don’t pay attention to politics. Honestly, but pleasantly surprised on that last one.
Top Harris brass says their organizing operation has knocked on 13 million doors across the battleground states. In October, they made 100m calls into battleground states
In PA alone, their team is on track to knock 5m doors and have 1m conversations with voters by election day
I'm glad Puerto Rico broke through from the standpoint of "taking a win when you can get it", but I'm just as annoyed that people only got upset when it took some random comedy sideshow act to get people upset for using the same kind of language Trump has been using daily for months.
Re your 4th point, I think that the boardrooms of the corporate MSM are secretly as pro-Trump as anyplace outside a MAGA rally. They absolutely long for the days when they could simply post one of his outrageous tweets and publicly clutch their pearls while privately smiling all the way to the bank.
Then-CBS head Les Moonves was widely criticised in 2016 when he said that "Trump may be bad for the country, but he's damn good for CBS", but such criticism was pretty hypocritical coming from the others in the media. He only slipped by saying the proverbial quiet part out loud.
Those media folks remind me of the apparently apocryphal alleged quote by Lenin that a capitalist will sell the means of his own destruction. Because if Trump actually got back into office, they will be subject to arbitrary arrest and worse, and their publications could be forcibly discontinued.
6) While the Trump Campaign vetted Hinchcliffe’s act and removed a "joke" calling Kamala the C-word, they uploaded his Puerto Rico "joke" to his teleprompter.
I've gradually become more optimistic about the election over the last week, for reasons ranging from polls to Democratic early vote/GOTV activity to aspects of Trump's campaign (including but not limited to the infamous MSG rally) which make one wonder if he's even trying to win anymore. But I can't enjoy election related things or feel confident yet. It's like we're chained to the Ghost of Elections Eight Years Past.
At least I have some other things to do, including the DC Beer Fest at Nats Park tomorrow afternoon and evening. Oh, and fill out and drop off my mail ballot which I received several weeks ago.
I've gone from about 65% to 75% over the last few days. Mix of Trump imploding among Puerto Ricans and apparently other Latinos, some good results from high-quality polls, and reporting that polls may be deliberately underestimating Harris.
Still the same person as on DK, enthusiast in foreign affairs, as well as transportation/urban development, and luckily I was able to retain the same username. Quite fitting, I return from the dead the day after Halloween.
Probably will not be joining the Discord server for the time being, I was a "completionist" back in the DKE era (reading every comment in all the digests), so keeping up with all the conversations would just be too daunting a task. A few hundred posts a day is good enough political diet for me.
In an era where traditional media is in serious trouble (see this week's crisis at the Washington Post for the latest example when corporate ownership interferes with editorial decisions), it is great to see a place where detailed, thoroughly-researched content is presented for all to enjoy. My personal favorite are the quarterly House/Senate fundraising summary charts. To find those manually on the FEC website requires many clicks and then searching through the lines like a 1040 tax form. The best part was, I made some internal predictions on which races would be triaged by the respective party committees, and then a few days later, the DB reported on that very topic!
On a side note, I would like the add the one place where independent news is doing fine is college/university newspapers. Obviously, having a dedicated funding stream is the main factor of stability, but it also helps to have a large pool of workers (students) willing to work for free or at lower rates of compensation. Of course, the coverage is more local-focused, but on larger campuses it can basically serve as the paper of record for the whole city or metro area.
That's a brilliant observation that frankly I haven't thought of; I will now make it a duty to read my student newspaper, 'The Independent Florida Alligator' in the future
Hi NewDem07, I also did read every comment in DKE Live Digest. On my commute home I would read every previous day's comments. The Substack Morning Digest seems to take that role. But unfortunately, it is one day delayed. The Discord is a whole lot of fun on active nights: the debate, DNC, RNC, etc. but I don't visit outside those occasions.
But what’s making this presidential election different is the sheer number of voters who don’t officially identify with either party. Thanks to the state’s relatively new automatic voter registration law, nonpartisan voters became Nevada’s largest voting bloc in 2022, outpacing both Democratic and Republican registrations.
Abortion beats immigration 15-13 as the second most important issue after the economy. Independent voters find health care to be the second most important issue
Excuse me what
Det här är lika omvälvande som om Oluf Palme återvände.
If this is even close to accurate, maybe it helps explain the apparent closeness of the Nebraska senate race.
The NE01 section of the poll also would match up to this, having R’s up only 5 there.
What a coincidence: Emerson has an Iowa poll out withTrump leading by 10. https://emersoncollegepolling.com/november-2024-iowa-poll-trump-53-harris-43/
Wow did not see this coming.
Was expecting T +5/6 to be honest.
Same. And that was my absolute max optimism case
I expected Trump +7 or +8. Normally one poll doesn't move my priors, but Selzer is renowned for never herding and for nailing the Iowa margin. I think Harris will get at least the 47% this poll shows even if she doesn't win it.
Iowa tends to move along with its neighbors. It's very culturally similar to Wisconsin, it's just redder because Des Moines and Iowa City are smaller relative to the state than Milwaukee and Madison. At this point I would be shocked if Trump wins Wisconsin, and I think he'll lose Michigan and Pennsylvania by more than he did in 2020. I said earlier that the polls are likely either about right or underestimating Harris. Now I'm 80-90% sure they're underestimating her.
My prediction for Iowa last week was Trump +11 which is right on the edge for your "close election nationally"
I'm similar. Trump +9 in Iowa.
I'm not sure Iowa election results are determinative of the national outcome.
We've been hearing that--erroneously--for multiple election cycles in a row now. It's been as reliable of a tea leaf as you're ever gonna get in telegraphing white working class trends, particularly in the Midwest.
The Iowa polling in 2016 shined a bright spotlight on looming on Midwestern weakness, but we were told Iowa results weren't determinative of the national outcome.
The final Selzer poll in 2020 telegraphed that the previous cycle's weaknesses among working-class white Midwesterners had been locked in place since 2016, but we were told Iowa results weren't determinative of the national outcome.
Aaron's breakdown is likely to be salient again for the same reason. A double-digit Trump lead in Iowa likely portends defeat in Wisconsin and Michigan, and a tight race in Minnesota.....because demographic patterns tend not to conveniently end at state lines.
Bizarrely enough, people tend to ignore the fact that in 2024 these are two very disparate groups:
– The White male working class
– The White female working class
The latter is really pissed off and voting overwhelmingly for Harris!
I'm not at all convinced of that. I suspect the gender gap between white working-class males and white working-class females will be much smaller than the gap between working-class females and females with degrees.
Smaller does not mean small!
Agree. I'm a WI native, and have lived in MN and MI. The voters have little identification with DC, and are more affiliated with their neighbors.
Well, I guess you're happy about her numbers, then.
Yes I'm certainly pleased with the numbers.
With some latest polls showing Kansas T+5 and OH T+3, I'm cautiously optimistic about the blue wall holding up. Either way, Selzer will shed more light on the how the Midwestern rural whites plan to vote.
Curious to see how Ohio shakes out. I can see decent cases for it getting worse or Harris closing the gap somewhat.
Until Trump, Ohio Republicans were always on the moderate end of the party (at least since the 80s)...The last time they ran a hard right candidate for governor (Blackwell), we beat them by 20+ points...I'd like to believe my old state still has some sense left.
I think there should be an open thread for Saturday and another for sunday.
Probably so, this weekend, considering all the volume of posts.
What is the plan for Tuesday? Is there going to be a live blog similar to DKE?
We won't have a formal liveblog; Substack is not really the ideal host for the liveblog format. We will, though, be active on social media, and will have liveblog-style coverage on our Discord server. (If you are a paid subscriber, I highly recommend joining the Discord. It's been great!)
I concur. The live chat on Discord is pretty awesome!
As a paid subscriber, how do you access that?
Hi Andrew, if you go to this link, I think you should be able to sign in using the same email address you used when you subscribed to the Downballot: https://sidestack.io/the-downballot
If you run into any problems gaining access, let me know!
Just do it at kos. Take turned. I’m at a watch party in chile with Dem abroad
What's wrong with Substack as a liveblogging format? Maybe you can address this in the current open thread.
For this particular weekend, absolutely.
We'll keep an eye on things! If the comments section on this thread gets too portly, I'll add another one.
Great if you would send email notifications to subscribers when The Downballot launches an Open Thread – such as this one, or extra threads this weekend.
I appreciate the suggestion, but we have a pretty large e-mail list and want to be judicious about not hitting up everyone's inboxes more than we need to. For this reason, we don't send out e-mails about Open Threads.
That makes sense. Thank you for your response!
https://x.com/Tim_Walz/status/1852459446577844439
Georgia early vote ends today, and it looks like it’s finishing strong.
Without the results or partisan ID, it is difficult to determine what’s going on. One very clear pattern that we do know - older voters voted as soon as possible (voters 65+ completely dominated the first week of voting, but have significantly fallen off since); young voters tended to wait until later to vote (e.g., voters under 45 made up more than half of the vote today).
Which lines up nicely with the theory/prediction that the election day vote will have decent turnout from young voters as well.
(For the pessimists who call this copium, just go back to pre-2020 election cycles and look at photos on who is standing in line on election day after 6 PM. It is almost always folks under 40)
I have an unproven theory that young people are just more likely to procrastinate
I think this is true more generally of Democratic voters, all else equal.
I work with young people. I can prove your theory! 😁
Going into the final weekend thread I know we're going to see a flurry of predictions or people asking for people's predictions. It's all part of the fun, especially with this community!
I have a bit of a meta-question instead: how does everyone feel about the accuracy of their predictions this year? I know I'm the curmudgeon that refuses to make predictions, but even within my internal thoughts I find this election cycle harder to guess at than usual.
If my typical internal-prediction confidence in past years was 75%, I'd be at 50% or possibly even lower this year. I know part of that is the shock of 2016 combined with 2020 being closer than expected.
There's more to it than those elections. I could go through my list but I don't know that doing so would add much. The simple summary is polling points at a close finish that could see things unresolved for a while, while the non-polling data is largely in our favor, all in an era where polling is increasingly fallible but not so fallible that we should dismiss it. There's an easy emotional appeal to dismiss polls out of hand because that's the worst data point for us, but polls are still valuable and informative.
End result is I think the error bars are larger this year on this what to expect for outcomes. Which leads to me wondering how everyone here feels about the error bars on expectations for this election, both with the media/populace at large, with the community here, and with themselves specifically.
Maybe I'm overthinking things and others feel this election is as knowable and no more prone to surprise than usual, or maybe others feel similar to me.
I'm about 51% confident about my predictions. More states than usual are well within the margin of error, meaning that already unreliable polls are that much more indeterminant. Meanwhile, plenty of tea leaves point to an electorate once again realigning itself just as it did in 2016.
Will the managerial class shift to Harris outnumber the nonwhite shift to Trump or vice versa?
Will the male shift to Trump outnumber the female shift to Harris or vice versa?
Should we really expect more than 155 million people to vote as they did four years ago?
And has the broken state of modern polling somehow managed to capture in any way the correct modeling needed to qualify these shifts?
My lesson from 2016 (and to a lesser degree in 2020) is that our community got lucky in 2012. We mocked the Romney supporters who "unskewed the polls" before the election and we mocked them after the election when the polls vindicated us. But it could have just as easily have been us with the egg on our face if the polling error had ticked their way that year as it did the next two cycles.
My pre-emptive lesson this year is to take warning signs seriously. And right now, the situation in Nevada is a warning sign.....and the reason I'm still 51% confident of my predictions from seven days ago rather than 49%.
I don’t make predictions as a general rule.
It’s hard to assess, and I’ve said consistently this year that it feels like we’re flying a bit blind. It seems - from stuff like Nate Cohn’s article on poll adjustments, and Marquette running a R+5 sample in Wisconsin this week - that pollsters are trying to adjust for 2016/20, but who really knows. Other indicators seem a bit more bullish in our direction, but they’re rarely totally dispositive.
I’d say I’m cautiously optimistic, but bracing myself for disappointment
I'm definitely far more open to a lot of different possibilities than I was in previous elections. Being wrong about the last 2 elections has opened my mind to a lot of different possibilities about how it could play out.
I don't make specific predictions, but I will say I'd much rather be us than them. I felt awful late in the game in 2016. Growing up in western Iowa and living in Des Moines, I could see these communities where Obama was mostly competitive looking like total wipeouts and knowing we were in trouble in the Midwest. The real key for me has been in the House polling. The warning signs started blaring in early to mid-October that we were losing a ton of ground in Midwest battlegrounds. But it was slow to show up in state polling so people dismissed it. I hadn't discovered DKE yet, which was probably for the best because I was very down on our chances. This year looks wildly different. I'm getting the sense the bottom could fall out in the suburbs for MAGA candidates, and I don't think the state polling is accounting for that. Trump has also had the opposite of 2016 in that all of the news down the stretch has been awful for him. It's either been about his mental decline, racist rallies, taking away health care, and so much more.
Despite all of the worry, EV numbers mostly look good in my opinion when I look closely. Lot of work to got to turn out our voters, so there's always unease. If we don't turnout the story ends poorly. But I'm mostly happy. Even Nevada is looking better this week to me than it does to some, though I'll admit I'm no expert on the Sunbelt states. NC is the state I'm most uncomfortable with guessing. I get the sense there's more room to drop in the rurals there than some of the Midwestern states, but the Triangle has grown. Again though, feel less comfortable there. But I like what I'm seeing out of Milwaukee, and as a Dem consultant told me this week, "you can't swing a dead cat in Philly without hitting someone canvassing for Harris." She's run a great campaign given the unprecedented circumstances. Not perfect, but damn good. Hope I'm right. A few more days of hard work and we'll know.
I will on occasion slip back into a pre-2016 thought process of how to look at campaigns. A few days ago I saw a headline that "Harris challenges Trump to take cognitive test" and for a few seconds it made me a little worried but then I saw the context that she was asked about Trump calling her low iq and this was in her response and I thought that was fine. The reason I got a little worried because I thought if you're talking about Trump's cognitive ability unprompted in the last week of the campaign, that's probably not a good sign.
I bring that up because Trump's such a weirdo that we don't attribute that type of traditional political strategy to his behavior. But if you were to do that, the things he's done this week would suggest that he's headed for a bad loss. Really trying to turn Biden's gaffe (a story that hasn't broken through the political bubble) into the predominant story in the days immediately before the election would only be done by someone that thinks they're about to lose. And on a much lesser note him going to Dearborn, and courting the votes of a community that I belong to, but is also about 2% of the electorate in Michigan and many of us may not vote for Harris but she's still going to get way more votes from us than Trump is also loser behavior.
Less confident. I have six states I'm not sure about going into this. The last few times, I don't think I had more than two question marks although I was wrong about some of them (e.g. the blue wall states in 2016). I'm confident that Harris will win Michigan. I'm about 80% sure she wins Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. I think she's slightly favored in Georgia and Nevada, but they're still basically tossups. I have no idea about Arizona and North Carolina.
I'm fairly confident that the polls are either basically right or underestimating Harris, but that leaves a lot of room for uncertainty. Why I think Harris might do better than the polls suggest:
(1) Spending patterns and pundit ratings on congressional races suggest an environment close to 2020, while polling suggests something in between 2020 and 2022.
(2) By all accounts, Harris has a much better ground game than Trump does. Even if polling accurately reflects intentions, ground game can turn intentions into votes.
(3) There is some evidence that late undecideds (not just Puerto Ricans) are mostly breaking for Harris, and that she's won a higher share of early voters than registration splits would suggest.
Nevada is likely going to be another repeat of 2022 where the election will be really close. Hard to say right now officially who will win NV but instinctively, I have a gut feeling neither Harris nor Trump is going to win by a sizable margin.
Equally confident. Two states I'm undecided on POTUS, zero undecided on US Senate, and eight or ten undecided on US House.
SCROTUS denies the RNC’s request for emergency relief in the Pennsylvania “naked ballots” case.
https://x.com/steve_vladeck/status/1852480552504570363
It always amazes me that Republican try to 'nakedly' suppress votes; imo in many cases, they wind up suppressing their OWN voters
If the “voter fraud” thought wasn’t so ingrained into them, I would agree.
Is my memory failing me or are we seeing vastly more open speculation this year about whether the country is ready for a woman President than we did in the general election campaign eight years ago? And far more people with microphones in front of their face admitting that either they won't support a woman or "have friends" who won't support a woman?
I don't remember this with Hillary and frankly I'm a bit surprised to be hearing as much of it as I am this year. I'm sure Harris's race amplifies this criticism even more with certain voters, but any theories on what other reasons might be? #MeToo backlash? Podcast bros reaching critical mass in a way they hadn't in 2016?
It’s def the podcast bros
Sounds like a case of social media algorithms self-reinforcement, where if you keep seeing videos of the same "JRE bro" viewpoints over and over you start believing everyone in the whole world thinks like that. Which is obviously not the case.
I'm pretty sure 2016 was worse since Wikileaks, FB misninfo, and Comey successfully counterprogrammed the Access Hollywood scandal. Also, we were in the aftermath of that horrendous waste of time called "gamergate" which was finessed by Bannon.
If that's true, it wasn't on my radar at all in 2016.
I think I recall you way back then expressing worry about how some people in a newsroom focus group were somehow more aware of Wikileaks stuff than Trump's candid dishing on his sexual harassment game.
Correct. I predicted Wikileaks would have more impact on Hillary than the Access Hollywood tape would on Trump. Nonetheless, I don't recall open displays of voter sexism or hand-wringing by Hillary's campaign that she didn't think large numbers of voters wouldn't vote for her because she's a woman.
They were more subtle I think. They portrayed her as man-ish, a shrew, a snarling cur, and an alcoholic (which is only an object of mockery for those people when it's a woman).
Remember Trump saying she was a "nasty woman"?
Yes I do remember that. But again, I'm asking specifically about voters expressing reticence in voting for a woman.....or Hillary's campaign expressing that it was a concern that people wouldn't vote for a woman the way some in Harris's campaign is now. I don't recall those conversations eight years ago.
I do think Mark has a point that the emergence of the manosphere in the last 2-3 years has made such proclamations louder than they might have been in a previous cycle
Like you’ve got people outright saying women shouldn’t be allowed to vote now 105 years after the 19th amendment, that was sure as shit not a thing in 2016
The same kind of unsubtle people as the ones who made a fancam of DeSantis with the Nazi Black Sun symbol superimposed over his face and didn't understand why that was a horrible thing.
You know I’d forgotten about that
I remember all kinds of sexism in 2016 but I think they played up the baggage from the Clinton years more loudly and effectively.
Having mostly gotten away with a huge amount of shit, they're going much further now.
Agreed but with zero subtlety(my gut here tells me that is not helpful to them; I still feel on a basic level that the average American is 'decent')
I also think that Hillary, by virtue of who she’s married to, was uniquely ill-equipped to take advantage of Access Hollywood.
It does make me feel old that Gen Zers are apparently hearing about the tape for the first time in TikTok since they were 10-15 when it came out 😵💫
It was just bad timing. Reverse the tape and the Comey letter and Hillary wins, probably while picking up the Senate as well.
But ultimately the tape was basically the last bad news for Trump, while Clinton got the wikileaks for a couple of weeks, then bad Obamacare news (HUGE rate increases announced right before the election at a time when that was still politically meaningful), then Comey.
Yup. Disastrous last two weeks of headlines, zero momentum into E-Day
man I don't remember that Obamacare thing
It was such a barrage of bad headlines for Clinton that it got drowned out - but this was at the time that the ACA was still a big thing - so if you are using the ACA insurance market at the time and Hillary is saying - this is as good as it gets and Trump is saying - we can do better - well maybe you believe him.
"Is my memory failing me or are we seeing vastly more open speculation this year about whether the country is ready for a woman President than we did in the general election campaign eight years ago?"
I think your memory is failing you. That was a huge issue 8 years ago and a major reason that Hillary didn't win all the right states.
Yeah, it was a massive issue in 2016. I hear minimumal grumbling now, at least comparatively.
Another thing about Norway: the country had a gay Finance Minister (Per-Kristian Foss from the Conservative Party) serving under a Prime Minister who was a Christian Democrat (Kjell Magne Bondevik). And that was 20 years ago.
Harris has mentioned that she would be the first woman President a lot less than Hillary did.
Way way way less
Yes, way way way less
She has been verrrrryyyyy disciplined with that. And I think that's "Obama campaign people" influence. I recall Obama talking about anytime he brought up "race" - no matter how innocuously - his approvals dropped 10 points.
Remember that Hillary's election night venue literally had a glass ceiling above it? She was leaning into the symbolism. I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I don't get the same vibe from the Harris campaign at all. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/us/politics/hillary-clinton-election-night.html
Harris has leaned much more into the generational aspect than gender or race
For good measure, Obama is the only president we have had born after 1946 and there seems to be quite the pent-up demand to move on.
Obama and Harris are in fact the only major party presidential nominees we've had who were born after the 1940s. Of those in the 21st century who have fallen short, Gore, Kerry, Romney, and HIllary Clinton were all born between 1943-48, and McCain in 1936 (he's also the only now-deceased major party presidential nominee this century.)
HRC played Katy Perry songs at all of her events (especially the ones with feminist themes), and frequently wore full white pantsuits to honor the suffragists, including at the 3rd debate and reportedly on election night.
Just on the topics of clothes alone, Harris has hardly worn white since the DNC I think. Mostly darker colors (which kind of fits the era of crisis we have been living in for the last 8 years).
Pepperidge Farms remembers. One of her big closing ads was essentially a 1 minute music video set to Katy Perry's "Roar"! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKDHioNLb4I
Yes. The fundamental difference this time around is that Harris is just tougher than Clinton and is proactive in targeting wide variety of voters while staying true to her principles.
Trump and the GOP have been having a HARD time trying to define Harris. What, how she laughs is bad? That’s it?
another avenue of negativism that simply is not true,,,remember: even in the best case scenario for KH tfg will likely get 70 MILLION votes...of course there will be a substantial number numbskulls who will say crap like that...but it is far from a signifcant issue this time around; and those who say that would almost certainly be voting for the felon anyway...no matter who the Dem nominee is!
I've wondered why Americans have such difficulty picturing a woman as president. It is not unusual worldwide. Countries that have had a woman leader include the UK, Germany, Italy, Israel, India, Pakistan, Finland, Norway, Greece, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Ireland, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, Latvia, Finland, Philippines, et.al. Why is it even an issue here?
If I had to guess, I’d say part of it is because of the size of our military compared to other countries around the world. Many voters in this country have reservations about a woman being the Commander in Chief of the world’s largest military. This issue is not as relevant in other countries with smaller militaries.
I disagree. It's pure sexism. You think the military is less important in countries like Israel, Pakistan and South Korea?
Maybe not specifically military, but I think you are onto something here. All the countries listed here were/are not the #1 world power/top economy when the women became leaders. (Thatcher was long after the UK's peak in the 1910s.)
Perhaps it is about people not trusting a women to run the "most important office in the world". After all, the CEOs of the world's largest corporations are also almost exclusively male, although they at least have an excuse that their "electorates" (employees) are male-dominated.
I really don't see the sense in voters in other countries being less reluctant to vote for women as leaders because they think their own countries are less important than the U.S. Think about how that sounds when I reflect it back to you this way.
Also Bangladesh, Estonia, Chile, Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey, Sierra Leone, Barbados, Peru...
Is it not an issue in those countries, or did other factors allow those leaders to defeat the sexists there?
Nearly all of those countries listed (with the exception of Scandinavia) have only had 1 woman leader, so it might just be a case of us being a statistical outlier that is bound to correct itself eventually.
Hopefully, we correct it this week.
Most of those countries have parliamentary systems where people aren't voting DIRECTLY for the leader even if they know who it is going to be.
In addition to both of your guesses - which I think are both correct and related to each other you also have the fact that a bunch of people who didnt vote for Hillary did vote for Biden.
In 2008 the counter to "is America ready to elect a woman" was "yes of course. No one thought America was ready to elect a black person, and yet they did just last election".
Also, I think 9 years of Trump has just removed the filter for alot of people to say things in public that they would only say in private before.
That answer was true for a majority of voters, but not in the right states, and there were clearly many people who would vote for a Black man but not a feminist woman.
You could see it in the election results too, in the suburbs where a lot of educated squishy moderate types purposely voted R downballot to "keep Hillary in check", as if giving her a trifecta would be akin to handing the keys to the asylum over to the inmates.
Ironically, we did end up with a madman and his clowns taking the trifecta (for two years), and they were predictably met with a furious backlash from those very same voters.
I’m not seeing this
Noble Predictive Insights has Dems up by 2 in NV President and Senate (ok, it narrows to 1 point for President when people are pushed): https://www.noblepredictiveinsights.com/post/nevada-poll-of-record-harris-1-rosen-2
Hmmmm....first poll I've see that didn't show a sizable spread between the President and Senate race in Nevada. Not loving it.
Probably the only one. But they're a solid pollster in the southwest iirc.
I always suspected the only Senate Dems that would significantly outpace the top of the ticket would be Brown and Tester.
And amongst Dem challengers: Allred and Mucarsel-Powell.
https://politicalwire.com/2024/11/01/is-polling-broken/
Nate Cohn:
"When their results come in very blue, they don’t believe it. And frankly, I share that same feeling: If our final Pennsylvania poll comes in at Harris +7, why would I believe it? As a result, pollsters are more willing to take steps to produce more Republican-leaning results.”
It's good that he's candid about this, but what it means is that he is deliberately putting his finger on the scale in favor of the Republicans, and so are the others, or most of them. I hope they end up with a huge quantity of egg(s?) on their face.
Agreed and that's why I'd really like to see the new Selzer poll( right or wrong; she's going to put out her actual results with no nonsense; like Nate Silver's 'feelings')
I should note that this is how the campaign is modeling their turnout too, if I understand Plouffe and JOD correctly. Better to have the most conservative assumptions possible than another 2016/20
That's exactly what Plouffe has been saying; taking all of worst case scenarios as the baseline
Yes, that's what I basically heard him say, too.
Heard or herd?
I see what you did there!
Yeah, better safe than sorry, but it seems to be causing herding?
A singular poll should not supersede the makeup of the state and its history. So if I saw a PA poll showing a +7 result I wouldn't believe it either. The asymmetry of it, where Cohn says they specifically wouldn't believe it if it was Harris +7 and nothing of Trump +7 is more interesting.
From a Harris campaign perspective if you ignore a +7 poll and continue to treat it as a 2 point race is almost all upside. The only downside to it would be if whatever advantage you have in that state is largely singular. If Kamala wins PA by 7 I don't think there's any way she loses MI or WI. But maybe that really doesn't extend to the Sun Belt and she ends up losing NV by a point and Jackie Rosen loses by 0.5. Then I think you'd see some people saying they should've trusted their numbers and reallocated resources. But that's very unlikely and would also mean the worst has been averted.
From a media perspective it is interesting but I think unsurprising. The polling being too Republican and then ending up being wrong is just going to result in some people laughing at you on social media. The polling being too Democratic might result in you being hauled in front of congress.
If Trump were to win, it could result in much worse than that.
This person has been very responsible for posting polls so I do trust him here but there is apparently a poll from a known pollster showing Trump at 49% and +3 in Ohio. Harris is at 46%
Brown leads by 2% at 48% in the Senate race.
https://x.com/lxeagle17/status/1852513895476556275
I am now very curious about the Iowa poll this Saturday.
Probably not great if Harris and Brown are running that close together
I mean if she can get up to 46% that gives Brown a fighting chance
Not a good poll for Brown. He needs to outrun Harris by more than that to win.
I'm going to take a guess that if this is indeed real, its YouGov
it ended being from the University of Miami of Ohio that released the poll
He's a credible guy; co-founder of SplitTicket.org. His post sounds like he is leaking an internal, probably from Brown.
Does anyone know if it actually was posted with more information? And yes the Iowa poll is big to me also
Harris ground organization = BIG. Also, Comey Letter broke through and Puerto Rico broke through to undecided voters who don’t pay attention to politics. Honestly, but pleasantly surprised on that last one.
Top Harris brass says their organizing operation has knocked on 13 million doors across the battleground states. In October, they made 100m calls into battleground states
In PA alone, their team is on track to knock 5m doors and have 1m conversations with voters by election day
https://x.com/CharlotteAlter/status/1852400409400275341
I'm glad Puerto Rico broke through from the standpoint of "taking a win when you can get it", but I'm just as annoyed that people only got upset when it took some random comedy sideshow act to get people upset for using the same kind of language Trump has been using daily for months.
Re your 4th point, I think that the boardrooms of the corporate MSM are secretly as pro-Trump as anyplace outside a MAGA rally. They absolutely long for the days when they could simply post one of his outrageous tweets and publicly clutch their pearls while privately smiling all the way to the bank.
Then-CBS head Les Moonves was widely criticised in 2016 when he said that "Trump may be bad for the country, but he's damn good for CBS", but such criticism was pretty hypocritical coming from the others in the media. He only slipped by saying the proverbial quiet part out loud.
Those media folks remind me of the apparently apocryphal alleged quote by Lenin that a capitalist will sell the means of his own destruction. Because if Trump actually got back into office, they will be subject to arbitrary arrest and worse, and their publications could be forcibly discontinued.
6) While the Trump Campaign vetted Hinchcliffe’s act and removed a "joke" calling Kamala the C-word, they uploaded his Puerto Rico "joke" to his teleprompter.
Enough said! Trump owns this.
On this, we 1000% agree! He NEVER should have been considered by more than 40% of voters, but we don’t live in that world sadly.
Daily for years
Are there even 5 million doors in PA?
there are if you count back doors! :=)
The estimate is there are just shy of 5.2 million households in the state so 200,000 more to go, then another pass :).
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/PA/PST045223
I've gradually become more optimistic about the election over the last week, for reasons ranging from polls to Democratic early vote/GOTV activity to aspects of Trump's campaign (including but not limited to the infamous MSG rally) which make one wonder if he's even trying to win anymore. But I can't enjoy election related things or feel confident yet. It's like we're chained to the Ghost of Elections Eight Years Past.
At least I have some other things to do, including the DC Beer Fest at Nats Park tomorrow afternoon and evening. Oh, and fill out and drop off my mail ballot which I received several weeks ago.
Same. My confidence level has skyrocketed from 55% to 57%.
I've gone from about 65% to 75% over the last few days. Mix of Trump imploding among Puerto Ricans and apparently other Latinos, some good results from high-quality polls, and reporting that polls may be deliberately underestimating Harris.
Hello everyone, NewDem07 here!
Still the same person as on DK, enthusiast in foreign affairs, as well as transportation/urban development, and luckily I was able to retain the same username. Quite fitting, I return from the dead the day after Halloween.
Probably will not be joining the Discord server for the time being, I was a "completionist" back in the DKE era (reading every comment in all the digests), so keeping up with all the conversations would just be too daunting a task. A few hundred posts a day is good enough political diet for me.
In an era where traditional media is in serious trouble (see this week's crisis at the Washington Post for the latest example when corporate ownership interferes with editorial decisions), it is great to see a place where detailed, thoroughly-researched content is presented for all to enjoy. My personal favorite are the quarterly House/Senate fundraising summary charts. To find those manually on the FEC website requires many clicks and then searching through the lines like a 1040 tax form. The best part was, I made some internal predictions on which races would be triaged by the respective party committees, and then a few days later, the DB reported on that very topic!
On a side note, I would like the add the one place where independent news is doing fine is college/university newspapers. Obviously, having a dedicated funding stream is the main factor of stability, but it also helps to have a large pool of workers (students) willing to work for free or at lower rates of compensation. Of course, the coverage is more local-focused, but on larger campuses it can basically serve as the paper of record for the whole city or metro area.
That's a brilliant observation that frankly I haven't thought of; I will now make it a duty to read my student newspaper, 'The Independent Florida Alligator' in the future
Hi NewDem07, I also did read every comment in DKE Live Digest. On my commute home I would read every previous day's comments. The Substack Morning Digest seems to take that role. But unfortunately, it is one day delayed. The Discord is a whole lot of fun on active nights: the debate, DNC, RNC, etc. but I don't visit outside those occasions.
But what’s making this presidential election different is the sheer number of voters who don’t officially identify with either party. Thanks to the state’s relatively new automatic voter registration law, nonpartisan voters became Nevada’s largest voting bloc in 2022, outpacing both Democratic and Republican registrations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/01/us/politics/nonpartisan-voters-nevada.html
I can't seem to find the latest Marquette\Wisconsin poll; was there one dropped in the last 3 days or so? Help please(and thank you)
https://law.marquette.edu/poll/2024/10/30/final-marquette-law-school-poll-before-election-day-finds-harris-supported-by-50-of-likely-wisconsin-voters-trump-by-49/
Abortion beats immigration 15-13 as the second most important issue after the economy. Independent voters find health care to be the second most important issue
Harris 50-49. Baldwin 51-49.