Election Day Reading

Inane things you’ll hear tonight, and other nuggets of insight as we await the tally

It’s Election Day!  

Hopefully, you are knocking doors, making phone calls or texting your friends … assuming you’ve already voted. However, since we are likely to be in for a bit of a wait until the media calls the state that will provide one or the other candidate their 270th electoral vote, I’m offering this Weekend Reading edition for those with some time to kill. 

In the two years since I started this public Substack, I somehow managed to turn out 56 editions, almost half of those having to do with today's election. Here we will revisit some things we’ve learned from those editions to amuse you as you await the tally. 

• Did you take the cure for mad poll disease? 

• Did you spend any time worrying about the Electoral College penalty?

• Did you take the cure for turnout terror? 

• So, what’s going to happen?!

• Four inane things you will hear tonight.

• What the exit polls don’t ask can hurt us all.

• How the f--k did we get here? 

Did you take the cure for mad poll disease? 

In September of last year, I wrote A Cure for Mad Poll Disease, explaining that instead of obsessing over the ups and downs of every horse race poll, we should ignore horse race polls entirely. This is because, as I wrote then, and again, and again, and again:

1. The Electoral College will most likely be decided by margins that were too narrow to be accurately seen on Election Day 2016 or 2020 (let alone more than a year away) in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.¹ 

2. Who prevails will depend on whether the anti-MAGA majorities who turned out to reject Trump in 2020, and his MAGA candidates in 2018 and 2022, turn out again in those key states. 

3. Every election within the margin of error is within the margin of our efforts to shape the outcome.  

And so, here we are. Even if you had read all 271 articles on the NYT/Siena poll coverage page, and if you spent the past 2-½ years faithfully studying every survey crosstab asking “if the 2024 presidential election were held today who would you vote for…”, you would know nothing more than if you had skipped it all. Actually, maybe less … because along the way, you consumed many false narratives, which were either an earnest but misguided attempt to “detect” some epic development out of statistical noise, or a cynical effort to cherry pick from the noise to “prove” some ideological hobby horse. 

Even in the months leading up to the election, it’s impossible to know which swings, if any, are significant. Case in point: the Economist’s election forecast model² had the same 50/50 forecast on November 4th as it did back on August 11th, even though the model showed dramatic swings in both September and October.  

Many people analogize following the polls closely to riding a roller coaster because of all the ups and downs. I would add to that: in the end, you arrive exactly where you began. 

Did you spend any time worrying about the Electoral College penalty? 

You might have heard claims that Harris “has to” win the national popular vote by X number of points if she wants to overcome the “Electoral College penalty” (a metric that subtracts the winning candidate’s margin in the tipping-point state that wins them the Electoral College from the margin they won the national vote by). If you took this metric seriously, you might have looked at national horse race polls and mentally subtracted a point or three from Harris’s putative lead, causing you to panic even at “good” polls for Harris. 

The truth is, the Electoral College gods are fickle. I’m old enough to remember when the “Electoral College Penalty” wasn’t considered a predictive factor before Election Day, but rather a metric computed after the election as a way to quantify just how undemocratic the Electoral College is.

Even super savvy Nate Silver doesn’t get it – if you are old enough to remember 2 months ago: 

Take a deep breath: the Electoral College penalty is not a factor that affects the outcome; it is not something you have to worry about (today). We do have to worry about it tomorrow because the existence of the Electoral College is such a corrosive factor in our toxic politics.

Here’s how it actually works. To win the Electoral College, Harris has to win the tipping point state, the one that gets her to 270. Let’s call it Pennsylvania. Harris will win Pennsylvania by winning a majority of the people who actually live in Pennsylvania, not by doing less well in the states that she or Trump are going to win anyway in order to reduce the Electoral College penalty.

My hunch is that regardless of the outcome, we will find the Electoral College penalty has nearly disappeared because of how much less well Harris will do in those former Confederate states in which she, the first African American, South Asian woman to run for president, did very little campaigning. I’ll leave it to you to speculate about why that might be the case. 

The “Electoral College penalty” is just one of the many tropes wielded by political opiners to create the appearance of access to secret knowledge or expertise. 

Did you take the cure for turnout terror?

Another goblin concocted to terrorize us was the idea that Democrats need a low-turnout election to win. This is another one that required privileging polls over actual voting, and ignoring how turnout actually works. There was never any way that 2024 was going to be a low turnout election by historical standards; but that didn’t matter to the terrorizers, because they never actually specified what would constitute a high or low turnout election. More hand waving. To reprise one of my favorite graphs: 

Since 2016, elections have just changed profoundly. But those writing about them do their Procrustean³ best to make believe that if turnout matters at all, it matters in a simplistic hydraulic way. In other words, as I wrote:

It would be a mistake to think that the portion of these less likely voters was dependent only on how large the turnout ladle that scoops them up in November will be. Rather, turnout rates will depend on what motivates those less likely voters to vote, given they have been all but sitting out the last three elections. In our current political era, knowing and believing what Trump and MAGA plans to do makes people more likely to vote: for better or worse. 

Moreover, pundits brush right over the fact that in 2020 Biden would have lost the Electoral College without the unprecedented turnout of less likely voters, or that Democrats would have done much worse in the 2022 midterms if turnout had been as low in the battleground states as it was in the rest of the country (Red Wave, Blue Undertow).

These newly engaged voters make up the core of what I have called the anti-MAGA majority that has been key to Democratic overperformance since 2018.  

So, what’s going to happen?!

While I can’t tell you who is going to win each Electoral College state, I can tell you this: 

• For the third straight time, a majority of Americans will reject Donald Trump as their president and the MAGA agenda for their future. This will be the fifth consecutive Republican popular vote loss, which has happened only once before, and their eighth such loss in the last nine elections, which has never happened.

• Kamala Harris will be the landslide winner of Blue America, winning by double digits (a similar margin to Biden, Clinton, and Obama before her).⁴

• For the third straight time, Donald Trump will be the landslide winner of Red America, also winning by double digits.

• It’s likely that for the third straight time, a shift of 100,000 or so votes in a couple of states would change the winner of the Electoral College. 

• If Republicans win control of the Senate, it will be for the 9th time in the last 17 elections. Yet only once in those 9 Senate majorities did Republicans represent states with more than half the population.⁵

Four Inane Things You’ll Hear Election Night

1. Any conclusion about any demographic group.

If you follow American politics at all, you’ve been inundated with analyses of how the two candidates or parties are doing with specific demographic subgroups—Latinos, non college voters, and so on. Here’s why you shouldn’t put any stock in those analyses, especially when it comes to exit polls. 

Beware the margin of pollster: 

We very often see very wide variations between subpopulations in different surveys that have exactly the same result for the horse race – even for the final results. 

This chart shows the very large variation in subgroup margins among five very high-quality surveys for the 2022 midterms. (I compared post-election data from Pew, Catalist, CNN, and VoteCast, as well as the final pre-election New York Times/Siena survey.) This reflects what I call “squeezing the balloon” – the downstream consequences of the pollsters’ decisions about how to weight what is inevitably an unrepresentative sample. 

In September, I took advantage of the fact that two of the most highly regarded pollsters came to similar results in the horse race, but radically different results for key subgroups, to illustrate how easily we can be fooled by the margin of pollster. In the chart below, “April” is actually the results of a Pew survey of registered voters, and “September” is a New York Times survey of registered voters – both fielded over almost exactly the same time period: 

For much more on why most demographic political analyses are doomed to fail, see (for starters) “All Politics Is Local; All Political Data Is National” and “Terrible Food, and Such Small Portions.” 

2. Any nationwide conclusion about any demographic group.

National aggregates hide very different realities in Blue and Red states. We can see this clearly through the Nationscape poll in 2020. As you can see, Biden did better with white non-college voters in Blue states than he did with white college voters in Red states.

And that urban-rural divide? These are the actual results (as opposed to polling) from 2020:

• Blue rural counties favored Biden by more than all Red states together. In other words, however conservative you think all of Red America is, rural Blue America is less so. 

• Urban Red America favored Biden by less than all of Blue America. In other words, however “blue” you think “Austin and Houston and Dallas and Miami and Nashville” counties are, they favored Biden by less than ALL of Blue America. 

3. Any conclusion about what “issue” mattered most.

Polls can tell us what voters tell pollsters they care about, in response to forced-choice questions that may or may not represent what occupies those voters’ minds on a daily basis. But polls cannot tell us what will determine whether an infrequent voter casts a ballot or stays home. And, again, infrequent voters are key to the anti-MAGA majority. There’s a huge difference between a voter saying which candidate is better in a forced choice, and a voter believing that whomever is “better” is better enough to turn out and vote for.

Let’s take two infrequent or contingent voters, who I’ll call Tom and Susan. Tom says his top issue is “inflation/prices,” and Susan says “abortion.” Neither has a favorable view of either candidate, and neither is sure if they will vote this year. Thus, it’s pretty likely that even though inflation/prices is Tom’s top issue – and even if he said “Trump” when asked in another question who he thought was better on the inflation/prices issue – that’s different from him believing that Trump would actually solve inflation/prices, or believing it strongly enough to bother turning out to vote for Trump. On the other hand, whatever else Susan may think about both candidates, if she hasn’t decided yet, and if her most most important issue is abortion, whether she votes is very likely to depend on whether she believes that Trump would enact a national abortion ban (if she’s pro-choice) or how much she believes Harris would codify Roe (if she’s not).

Why is abortion more likely to drive Susan to vote than prices to drive Tom? One of the most solid findings in behavioral science is the power of loss aversion on human beings. By loss aversion, I mean that most of us are wired to be more likely to act to avoid loss (such as losing a fundamental right) than we are to act in pursuit of gains (such as possibly seeing a lower grocery bill). That’s why awareness of the consequences of the MAGA governing agenda has been the driver of the highest sustained turnout rates in the modern era over the last three cycles. This surge of new and infrequent voters has been consistently anti-MAGA by large margins—but they only show up if the MAGA stakes are clear.  

4. Any conclusion about Latino (or AAPI, or … ) voters.

This might sound redundant because “any conclusion about Latino voters” is a subset of “any conclusion about any demographic group,” but there’s another specific point I want to make here:

Identity matters. Demographics don’t. Just because a person can be described by pollsters and pundits as being part of a group, doesn’t mean that that person identifies as a member of that group. Democrats continue to rack up big margins with voters who strongly identify as “Latinos,” and do less well with those defined as such by demographers and lumped together in survey crosstabs. 

A key question in the most recent NYT/Siena survey asks, “How important is being [race/ethnic group] to how you think about yourself?” The following graphs show that Blacks and Latinos for whom their racial identity is “extremely” or “very important” support Harris by a slightly larger margin than they recall supporting Biden by in 2020. 

For much more on this, read here. 

What the exit polls don’t ask can hurt us all

Actually, this is true of all the polling we read in the media. Take an additional second to consider how at once compelling and vacuous the standard questions are:⁶

• Asked: Do you want change?  

Not asked: What kind of change do you want? What kind of change would Trump/Harris make? 

• Asked: Who can better handle the economy (or any other issue, or what is your top issue)? 

Not asked: What does “the economy” mean to you? What would Trump/Harris do on the economy? Will what Trump/Harris do matter much? Do you think the other’s plans are just not as good, or will actually hurt you?

• Asked: Do you support mass deportation?

Not asked: Do you support using the military to round up and deport immigrants who have lived here for decades? (For much more on this, “Poll-Washing Trump's Fascist Plans.” )

You get the picture.

And, of course, because they can’t ask a single question like, “Are you someone who would never vote for a woman?”, those attitudes don’t become part of the explanation. But the rationalizations made by those for whom voting for a woman is a non-starter get tallied in some other bucket, leading to post-election stories like “Voters felt they didn’t know Harris.”

And most important of all, the exit polls do nothing to understand the 20 or so million who voted at least once in the last four elections but are sitting this one out, or the 40 or so million who could have voted but didn’t. 

How the f--k did we get here?

Over the last few weeks I’ve been asked by various publications to offer my pre-autopsy for either outcome. Here’s mine for Trump.

If Donald Trump becomes president again it will be for reasons both obvious and scrupulously ignored by a mainstream media dominated by publications, networks, and platforms owned by billionaires and conglomerates. 

Indeed, it should be astonishing to be asked about what faction of the Democratic Party is to blame when, had we seen the last year play out in Turkey, Hungary, or any other country in the world, we would instantly recognize what happened for what it is: A constitutional coup – a president losing a free and fair election incites an insurrection to stay in power and then is shielded from prosecution by a Supreme Court majority, half of which he appointed. (And of course there’s much more there than just that.) 

In the last two years: 

• Every time Trump’s actions have come before a grand jury, he has been indicted; 

• Every time he has faced a trial jury, he has been convicted; 

• Every time he has had an important case heard by judges he did not appoint, including those appointed by other Republican presidents, he has lost; 

• Each time surveys have asked whether he had committed crimes, a majority say he has; 

BUT: 

• Every time he has come before the Supreme Court justices or federal judges he appointed, he has had his way. (If you’re wondering why I didn’t count the 2020 election cases that went against Trump, see Politicians in Robes III for more on these and other “exceptions” that prove the rule.)

Over the past 14 years the Federalist Society Supreme Court Justices have systematically, and without any democratic process or accountability, given their sponsors much more power to dominate elections with their money (Citizens United) and much less risk of being held accountable for their corruption (corruption cases) at the same time they have taken power away from average Americans in the political sphere (Rucho, Shelby) and everywhere else (class actions, NDAs etc). 

Consider that in this election, outside spending (think Super PACs), which was essentially illegal until 2010, will be greater in every toss-up Senate race and 85 percent of the toss-up House races than spending by the candidates in those races; that 60 percent of all spending now on behalf of Trump is by outside groups, not Trump; and that funding by the top 1 percent accounts for well over 90 percent of the resources deployed by those outside groups. And it’s actually much worse than that, as other Roberts 5-4 decisions have made it easier to deploy untraceable dark money. 

Weekend Reading is edited by Emily Crockett, with research assistance by Andrea Evans and Thomas Mande.

1. For why I didn’t include North Carolina, see The Electoral College Landscape.

2. Harris v Trump: 2024 presidential election prediction model | The Economist

3. I use this term because in the Greek myth of Procrustes, a robber forced his victims to “fit” an iron bed by either cutting off limbs that were too long or stretching those that were too short. Similarly, most of the people whose job it is to tell us what is true about elections have struggled to make what just happened in the midterms fit into the Procrustean bed of the usual formulas they always rely on.

4. Blue and Red America are those states Biden and Trump won in 2020 other than Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

5. According to the Daily Kos calculation, Republican senators have not won a majority of voters in that period. By my calculation, they did barely, once, in 2002.

6. Obviously, these are not the exact ways they are asked on the surveys; I’ve simplified for clarity.