Polls, early voting point to Election Day optimism
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine...
Welcome to a Sunday night edition of Progress Report.
We are now less than two days away from Election Day and the American people are still evenly split between supporting the Republican who has been wearing a garbage collector outfit over his suit all week and the Democrat who is attempting to simultaneously prevent the downfall of democracy and make history of her own.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has largely downplayed the cultural barriers that would be broken by her election, but its significance cannot be overstated: Harris would become the first San Francisco liberal to serve as President of the United States of America.
Whether or not you like the vice president’s politics, the rage-spiral that far-right talking heads and politicians would experience as a woman of color from the city they hate most is inaugurated president should be inducement enough to vote for her. My ideal outcome is watching Harris vanquish Trump, then spending four years working to move her toward progressive populism wherever possible.
Tonight, we’re going to look at reasons why you should be feel some optimism about the election ahead of Tuesday. To do that, we’ll examine the last round of polls, what can be gleaned from early voting, the latest in ballot initiative campaigns, and more.
Tomorrow, I’ll send out a scoresheet for the key races that won’t show up in any cable news election coverage.
Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.
Let your Election Day anxiety melt away…
Tuesday feels like it will be a last stand against MAGA-ism. If Donald Trump loses, he's unlikely to be the GOP nominee again. If he wins, we may find that panic is not an indefatigable resource.
This campaign has been far more toxic than the 2020 race, during which Trump had to put in a few hours of light work a day in the White House. Now, we are bombarded with hourly assaults on our minds: the escalation of his rhetoric; the growing presence of ideological allies eager to implement set society back a century or more; the unwanted omnipresence of Elon Musk’s smug face and teen boy bigotry; Trump babbling like a spray-tanned gorilla… it’s all too much, and not sustainable.
Fortunately, there’s a decent chance that a reprieve is in the way. I’m naturally a pessimist, especially after this year, so I don’t want to suggest that Harris is definitely or is even likely to win. But after feeling fatalistic, I started to see better signs late last week. I’ve put them together, and added new ones, to give you a mostly data-driven look at reasons to not dread Election Day, both at the presidential level and down ballot.
The Final Polls
Harris was riding high after drubbing Trump during the mid-September debate, but instead of going for the kill, she dropped the economic populism and started touring around with Liz Cheney. A month later, Trump had restored parity in most polls, and even taken back the lead in others. It’s been a tug of war ever since, and right now Harris seems to have the momentum after coming out on top the final surveys from the best pollsters in the game.
The biggest splash this weekend was made by pollster Ann Selzer, who has set the standard with her bi-monthly polls of Iowa for the Des Moines Register. Her final numbers have been dead-on over the last handful of election cycles, so her finding that Harris leads Trump by three points in a state where Trump beat Biden by more than eight points in 2020 sent shockwaves throughout the political universe.
Theories quickly zipped across the internet, including potential sampling errors and biased questions. But Selzer had another explanation: Iowa’s six week abortion ban went into effect this summer and really radicalized a lot of more moderate Republican women. This, she said, was consistent with what the Register’s journalists had encountered while reporting from throughout the state.
Nobody anticipated Iowa being anywhere near competitive, so if Harris really were to win the state, it would be part of an Obama-type landslide. Even a close race in Iowa would likely mean that other, more competitive Midwestern states were solidly in the Harris column.
The Blue Wall
Marist, perhaps the most reputable polling firm right now, found Harris up by three points in Michigan and two points in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Harris had a five-point lead in Michigan in September, but she edged upward in the other two Blue Wall states.
The cross-tabs tell an encouraging story that repeats across all three states. In Marist’s Pennsylvania poll, Harris performed a 19-point turnaround with independents, taking a 55%-40% lead after being down by four points in September. She’s only down by four points among white voters (51%-47%), which is significantly better than the 15-point deficit for Biden in 2020.
The small surge seems to be fueled in part by the rise in people who list preserving democracy as their top issue, which is now a close-second to the economy. Immigration, interestingly, is a distant third.
Racism connects, finally
Another factor that could have led to the late shift: Trump’s Nazi rally last weekend at Madison Square Garden.
A new poll from Univision found that 64% of Latinos in Pennsylvania support Harris, while Trump receives the support of a mere 30%. It’s an even bigger deficit among Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, who support Harris by a 67%-27% margin.
These are not percentages of insignificant numbers. Pennsylvania has a rapidly growing Puerto Rican population, with 620,000 people as of 2023. Philadelphia has the second-largest Puerto Rican community of any city on the mainland, and several smaller cities like Reading and Allentown are now majority Hispanic.
Anecdotal reports last week indicated that the “joke” had activated a lot of pissed off Hispanic voters in the state, and the Univision poll indicates that nearly 90% of respondents had heard at least a little bit about the “floating island of garbage” joke made by the bombing right-wing comedian who performed at the rally. A whopping 59% said they’d heard a lot about the joke, while 84% had heard about another crack about Latino immigrants.
It’s still remarkable to me that it was this comment by a low-rent comedian that finally broke through and pissed people off, considering how many horrible things Trump says about Hispanic immigrants in every single speech he makes, but that’s the power of people watching directly and not having a corporate media filter.
Back to that Blue Wall
In Marist’s Michigan poll, Harris has a smaller six-point lead among independents, the same margin that Biden took in 2020. But she does far better among white voters, trailing Trump by only three points, whereas Biden was down by 11 points. One interesting tidbit: Biden actually did better than Harris is performing among women voters.
Meanwhile, an equal percentage of voters in Michigan list inflation and preserving democracy as their chief issues, at 30% apiece.
Perhaps the biggest shift in Michigan was clocked by Mitchell Research, a local polling firm that admitted to flaws in its modeling of the 2024 electorate.
“It seems clear now that we are under sampling women, African Americans, and the City of Detroit based on absentee ballot returns and early voting,” the firm’s founder, Steve Mitchell, said in the write-up of the final poll. They kept the sampling percentages to maintain consistency, yet Harris still wound up flipping Trump’s small lead to take a two-point edge of her own.
Curiously, the New York Times’s final poll found things all tied up in Michigan and Pennsylvania, but gave Harris solid leads in Nevada (49%-46%) and North Carolina (48%-46%), along with a smaller edge in Georgia (48%-47%). Those sunbelt states have largely been seen as friendlier to Trump.
The Early Vote
There have already been 75 million Americans to cast a ballot in this presidential election, and in many states, a majority of ballots have been cast. Some polls account for that — Marist found that two-thirds of Michiganders either cast their vote or intended on doing so before Election Day — but some don’t get into that wrinkle.
Republicans are voting early at a much higher clip than they did in 2020, but the big question is whether they’re scoring new voters or simply seeing a shift in when their 2020 voters cast their ballots. If it’s the latter, it won’t make much of a difference unless they’re picking off a lot of Democratic voters, something that polls haven’t suggested is happening.
There are some solid indicators of how things are going, though, including gender breakdown of new and early voters. In Pennsylvania, new voter registrations are dominated by women, who have signed up as Democrats by a more than 2:1 margin.
Raw numbers of ballots returned also tell a solid story in Pennsylvania. Democratic voters have a 406,000-vote lead over Republicans, and it’s likely to hit half a million by Election Day thanks to an influx of ballots from big cities.
That’s no guarantee of a victory, but it’s in line with what some experts suggested would be a solid firewall ahead of Election Day voting, which Republicans tend to dominate.
There also seems to be a real problem for Republicans unfolding in North Carolina. Trump spent his entire weekend in the state, holding rally after rally in an effort to goose turnout in a state that Republicans haven’t lost since Barack Obama was on the ticket. The GOP is experiencing flagging turnout in the 13 counties that were hit by Hurricane Helene, while Democrats are thus far over-performing in those counties.
That may not wind up mattering, as Republicans still have a 4.5% ballot return lead in the state. But it’s an indication of a more competitive race in many rural counties, which is part of why Pennsylvania has gone well thus far for Democrats.
Ballot initiatives
I’m tracking dozens and dozens of ballot initiatives right now, but the quality and frequency of polling on these things, regardless of how pivotal a role they play in peoples’ lives, is often spotty at best. Still, expand the aperture to surveys conducted over the past month and you can get a decent idea of what voters think about these issues and how campaigns are connecting in their states.
Most eyes will be on the ten abortion-related ballot measures put to voters this week. In Arizona, a constitutional amendment to expand reproductive rights up to the point of fetal viability enjoys support from 57% of voters, putting it well in line to pass. Right now, the state bans abortion after 15 weeks.
In Missouri, where Republicans instituted a full-out ban on abortion, a poll released in mid-October found that 52% of voters back an amendment that enshrines abortion rights in the state constitution. Internal polling may be even worse, as right-wing, anti-abortion campaigners have been attacking trans people in a desperate attempt to sink the amendment.
Here’s a stunning number for you: 60% of Montanans support their state’s abortion amendment.
Things are more complicated in Nebraska, where there are competing abortion amendments; one would codify the state’s 12-week ban, while the other would expand the right up to fetal viability. They both have around 44% support amid plenty of confusion.
There’s also a lot of confusion in Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly support a ballot amendment that would ban gerrymandering but are being turned around by misleading ballot language written by Secretary of State Frank La Rose and approved by the state’s hack conservative Supreme Court.
Where there is far less confusion is the Nebraskan public’s feelings on school privatization: 60% of voters polled said they opposed providing state funds for private schools. That bodes well for the ballot initiative to repeal the GOP’s nascent voucher program, which several conservative billionaires are spending big to save.
Oregonians have been inundated with ads and Democratic denouncements of a corporate tax that would fund a universal basic income for people in the state. The initiative’s flawed language could have unintended consequences, nonpartisan experts have said, and voters have lined up against it.
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Your segment on Missouri, in which the accompanying article shows that MO’s legislature overturns the will of the people (who voted FOR things the ultra-conservative state legislature is against), is a perfect example of WHY it is so important to vote down ballot, as well as for the national candidates. As I say, local is PERSONAL.