The 2024 election is shaping up to be a photo finish according to polling and voting data streaming in from a variety of places. Some people are making predictions one way or the other, suggesting they have insight on whether former President Donald Trump will pull off the greatest comeback in American political history or whether Vice President Kamala Harris will pull off an unprecedented victory after her late entrance into the race when her boss, President Joe Biden, dropped out.
It all comes down to who votes, which party turns out their people, and which theory of the case is right. I’m not going to make a prediction as I think those are useless. But I will do here is lay out what I think the landscape looks like and a compelling theory of the case explaining what I’ve been looking at in the final weeks and will be looking at in the final two days of this election. The answer to the question of which theory is correct we will find out on Tuesday night.
I’m inevitably asked by basically everybody in the lead-up to an election what I think will happen. People who work in the business, and people who just tune in in the final days, everyone who knows me knows this is not my first rodeo with presidential elections. I’ve covered many of them–this is my third one at Breitbart News, and it’s my fourth one working in the news business. I’ve also covered many more midterms, special elections, and off-year elections as well. And people know I obsess over data, from polls and voting patterns, trying to get ahead of the curve on demographic swings or changes that might be coming. My track record is pretty good, I’d argue, especially when it comes to seeing stuff others miss–most notably of course the 2016 election, but also key stuff in 2014, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, and more. I’m also in constant contact with similar folks on both sides of the aisle trying to decipher headwinds, and talk to the various campaign and outside group folks and have a generally good idea of where to get reliable information and where to apply some healthy skepticism.
I don’t like happy talk from either side, and I try to make sense of what’s actually going to happen rather than providing a biased or slanted view. When election night comes and goes, of course, reality will set in no matter what–and someone has to win, and someone has to lose. The biggest question I always inevitably get after 2016 and 2020 both saw major polling industry misses is whether or not that’s going to happen again. There’s a lot of reason to believe it will, but we won’t know for sure until the votes are counted. So what I’m going to do here is something a little bit different than I normally do in news coverage. I’m going to lay the landscape as I see it now and what I expect and am looking for to figure out whose theory of the case is correct–and yes, as you’ve probably already noticed, I’m very much using first person here which is abnormal for me. Please, I beg readers and observers: Hold me to this case when the election is over. While I’m not making a prediction on who ultimately will win, I obviously want Trump to pull it off–I’ve said so publicly and even told the former president when I interviewed him in mid-October I was voting for him myself–and I can see a clear pathway for him to be able to do so. But there’s also a clear case to be made the other way, and yes I hate hedgers but that’s what I’m doing here–hedging, because while there are indeed lots of good signs for Trump that’s what they are: signs. Nobody knows exactly what will happen until it happens, and anyone who claims they can see the future is dead wrong: As far as I can tell, that superpower does not exist in humans at least not yet.
The Landscape on the Final Weekend:
First off, let’s lay out the status of the race as we open Sunday morning two days before election day. On Saturday night, the establishment media gushed over a poll from the Des Moines Register’s vaunted pollster Ann Selzer–she is revered by the political class, seen as an oracle of things to come–that showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa by 3 percent. This came after an Emerson College poll released earlier in the evening in Iowa showed Trump up double digits, and outperforming his 2020 victory margins over Biden there. So this presents us with an interesting question: Which one is right? Both things probably cannot be true except at the most extreme edges of the two surveys’ margins of error, as Nate Silver explained in a column late Saturday evening.
There are a lot of really, really smart people who know Iowa politics really well who think Selzer swung and missed bad:
Shortly after Selzer released her Iowa survey, AtlasIntel released a national poll and battleground state polls. Trump, the Atlas polls show, leads every single battleground state:
Atlas also had Trump up nationally:
Two wildly different worldviews right? While Atlas did not poll Iowa, if Selzer’s theory of the case is correct, there’s no way Atlas’s theory can be right–plenty of folks have rightly pointed out that if Trump has collapsed in Iowa then he probably is in trouble in neighboring Wisconsin too, not leading by more than a percent.
On Sunday morning, more polls came out. An Emerson College national survey shows a tied race nationally at 49 percent for Trump and for Harris:
In the electoral college, this would probably mean a Trump sweep across the battleground states or close to it. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by more than two and a half points but lost the electoral college–and in 2020 Biden won the national popular vote by more than four and a half points and barely won the electoral college. Those are not the only national polls out on Sunday morning. NBC News released one that shows Trump up a percent on Harris in the full field with third party candidates included while the two are tied head-to-head:
But then ABC News released one that shows Harris up 3 percent nationally in the full field:
Then there are New York Times polls from Sunday morning across the battleground states as well that paint an interesting and mixed picture of where things stand. The Times has Trump clearly up in Arizona, Harris barely up in North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nevada, and a tie ballgame in Pennsylvania and Michigan:
Continue reading: Breitbart.com
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