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GOP pickups: AZ GA MI NV PA WI

News of the Day

Donald Trump didn't really think he was going to win in 2016. Between that, and the fact that he and his operation were pretty amateurish back then, it took a while to start putting an administration together. This year, he and his team expected a victory, and—nearly 10 years in—the amateurism is (mostly) gone. So, the picks for various slots in the administration are being made at a rapid clip. Here's a rundown of the Tuesday news:

And that's the way it is. (Z)

How Well Did the Pollsters Do?

After every election, there are a lot of people screaming: "The polls were all wrong—again!" So, let's take a look. The #1 ranked pollster at FiveThirtyEight is Siena College. Its polls are done in coordination with The New York Times, specifically with Nate Cohn and Ruth Igielnik, two polling experts. A poll gives a range, the predicted value plus or minus the margin of error (MoE), separately for each candidate. Here are the predicted ranges, the actual vote percentage, and the actual value minus the predicted value for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, for Siena's final polls of the swing states:

President
 
Harris
  
Trump
State Low Mean High Actual Diff Error?   Low Mean High Actual Diff Error?
Arizona 41.5% 45.0% 48.5% 46.8% -0.2% No   45.5% 49.0% 52.5% 52.3% 3.3% No
Georgia 44.5% 48.0% 51.5% 48.5% 0.5% No   43.5% 47.0% 50.5% 50.7% 3.7% Error
Michigan 43.5% 47.0% 50.5% 48.3% 1.3% No   43.5% 47.0% 50.5% 49.8% 2.8% No
Nevada 45.5% 49.0% 52.5% 47.2% -1.8% No   42.5% 46.0% 49.5% 50.9% 4.9% Error
North Carolina 44.5% 48.0% 51.5% 48.5% 0.5% No   42.5% 46.0% 49.5% 51.0% 5.0% Error
Pennsylvania 44.5% 48.0% 51.5% 48.5% 0.5% No   44.5% 48.0% 51.5% 50.4% 2.4% No
Wisconsin 45.5% 49.0% 52.5% 48.8% -0.2% No   43.5% 47.0% 50.5% 49.6% 2.6% No
Average         0.4%             3.5%  


For those readers who were not math majors, sorry for all the numbers, but when we are discussing how well the polls did, well, we need a lot of numbers. That is what polling is about. As an example, let's consider Wisconsin. The poll said 49% Harris, 47% Trump. In the Wisconsin line above, in the column "Mean," there is a 49.0% entry in the row Wisconsin. "Mean" does not mean that Harris is a mean person. It is what mathematicians mean when they add up all the numbers and divide by how many there are. It means "average," as opposed to "median" (that's the number in the middle of the sample, with half above and half below) or "mode" (the most common number in the sample).

The margin of error for this poll was 3.5% (that is, the standard deviation of the sample was 1.75%) and by convention the margin of error is two standard deviations. The mean for the Wisconsin survey was 49.0% and the MoE was 3.5% so what the pollster is saying is that the probability of Harris' vote score being between the lower bound (45.5%) and the upper bound (52.5%) is 95%. When Harris got 48.8% in Wisconsin (the number in the "Actual" column), the pollster would say, "48.8% indeed falls in the range 45.5% to 52.5%, so we nailed it. Our error was 1.8% (the "Diff" column) and that is well within the ±3.5% MoE." Similarly, Trump's score for Wisconsin was predicted to be in the range 43.5% to 50.5% and, sure enough, his actual score was 49.6%, so the pollster would say they nailed both of them and the poll got it right.

Note that the pollster did not predict that Harris would win Wisconsin, only that each candidate would end up at the predicted value ±3.5%, and that happened. So someone who doesn't understand polling might say: "Trump won, so you got it wrong," but the pollster would say: "We didn't try to predict who would win, we just predicted what ranges the two scores would fall in with 95% probability, and we did it." Please note that this is not necessarily a zero-sum game because Trump going up does not imply Harris going down due to the variable third-party vote.

The same discussion above applies to every state independently. Note that for Harris, all the values in the Diff column are under 3.5%, so the pollster got all of them right. The average error is only 0.4%, so the polls predicted Harris' score in the swing states extremely well. The column "Error" indicates whether the pollster blew it—that is, the poll was off by the MoE. None of the Harris scores were off by more than the MoE, so we put "No" there.

Now look at the Trump scores. The differences between the predicted value (the mean) and the actual value are outside the margin of error in three states (Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina) and are positive in all states, meaning that Trump overperformed the polls. The average overperformance is 3.5%, just at the limit of the MoE.

Now back to English. The pollsters predicted Harris' score extremely accurately but greatly underestimated Trump's score. Why? This is not a math question. It has to do with who was polled and also who was a likely voter. Trump's campaign put a huge emphasis on getting (young) men who normally don't vote to show up for him. The campaign went to sports events and certain music festivals and bars, and places where low-propensity male voters tend to show up and pitched their candidate. These people probably didn't answer when asked to take part in a poll, so they were probably missed. And those that did would be asked screening questions like "Did you vote in 2020?" "Do you think voting is everyone's duty?" "Do you think your vote will count?" A "no" on everything will get you marked as an unlikely voter.

It is also possible that the "undecided voters" really were undecided and then broke for Trump nationally in the last couple of days. A huge question is whether this effect holds when Trump is not on the ballot. It is noteworthy that while Trump won North Carolina, by 3.3%, downballot Republicans didn't do so well. People in the Tar Heel State elected Democrats as governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and superintendent of public instruction. They also broke the Republicans' supermajority in the state legislature, so when they pass a bill and governor-elect Josh Stein vetoes it, they can't override his veto. That means that despite Trump's top-of-the-ticket win, downballot, the Democrats did well in some places.

Now let's look at the Siena polls for the Senate races:

Senate
 
Democrat
  
Republican
State Low Mean High Actual Diff Error?   Low Mean High Actual Diff Error?
Arizona 46.5% 50.0% 53.5% 50.1% 0.1% No   41.5% 45.0% 48.5% 47.9% 2.9% No
Michigan 44.5% 48.0% 51.5% 48.7% 0.7% No   42.5% 46.0% 49.5% 48.3% 2.3% No
Nevada 48.5% 52.0% 55.5% 47.6% -4.4% Error   39.5% 43.0% 46.5% 46.7% 3.7% Error
Pennsylvania   46.5% 50.0% 53.5% 48.5% -1.5% No   41.5% 45.0% 48.5% 48.9% 3.9% Error
Wisconsin 46.5% 50.0% 53.5% 49.4% -0.6% No   42.5% 46.0% 49.5% 48.5% 2.5% No
Average         1.1%             3.1%  

The effect is similar, but a bit smaller. The polls got the Democratic Senate candidates' vote share fairly well, but again underestimated the Republicans' vote share. The low-visibility, low-propensity voters were missed by the polls, but showed up and tended to vote for Donald Trump's party.

One pollster who has a whole chicken farm's worth of egg on her face is Ann Selzer. She released a poll just before Election Day showing Harris +3 in Iowa. The media went wild thinking this could presage a landslide. It sort of did—but the other way. Trump won Iowa by 13 points, meaning Selzer was off by 16 points. The reason is that unlike every other pollster, Selzer uses random digit dialing and does not apply any corrections to the raw data. Her sample this time had far too many college-educated voters and she didn't correct for that. (V)

James Carville Wants You to Get Off His Lawn

Like Karl Rove, James Carville has a reputation for being a political genius. So, like Rove (and Frank Luntz, and a couple of others), the media treats his words like manna from heaven. That same media does not seem to take note of several facts: (1) Carville's great success was getting Bill Clinton elected... 32 years ago; (2) It's a very different country and a very different Democratic Party today; and (3) He's often very wrong (for example, he predicted a comfortable Kamala Harris victory).

Yesterday, Carville was railing against the "problem" that cost the Democrats the election. He believes the party leadership is stuck in a bubble in Washington, that said leadership is pushing the wrong issues, and that "this identity sh** was a disaster."

We'll likely say more about this soon, but this is worthless analysis, in our view. Less than worthless, even, because it suggests to us that Carville can't separate Republican propaganda from actual Democratic messaging. How many times did Kamala Harris embrace identity-politics-type issues during the campaign? When did she talk about BLM, or defund the police, or women's sports, or any of that? She didn't do these things because she knows talking about these issues alienates centrist voters. The connection between Harris and trans rights was 99.9% a creation of Donald Trump's messaging, including $65 million in TV ads on the subject.

And that is the real problem here: The Republican propaganda apparatus is devastatingly effective. John Kerry was ruined by the swift boaters. Barack Obama's birth certificate did not stop him from being elected, but it did become deeply embedded in the right-wing psyche. Hillary Clinton's e-mails most certainly did stop HER from being elected. Joe Biden's age/infirmity did not derail him in 2020, but did do him in this year. And Harris' allegedly radical-pro-trans agenda hurt her badly this year.

As readers probably know by now, the House will have its first transgender member in Representative-elect Sarah McBride (D-DE). The Republican propaganda mill will do everything possible to make her the face of the Democratic Party, just as it has done with The Squad, and with Nancy Pelosi before that. This has nothing to do with party-wide Democratic wokeness, it's how the modern-day GOP works. And, as a sidebar, we really hope the Capitol Police agree to assign McBride a security detail, because she is likely to become an object of obsession for some people who are not mentally well.

We do not deny, incidentally, that Democrats need to be thinking about their messaging, and how well it connects with various constituencies. But that means something like "figure out how to better communicate the Party's ideas on kitchen table issues" and not "stop talking so much about the woke stuff," because the latter isn't actually happening, except with a few officeholders on the fringes, and a couple of Squad members who won't be back in January. The blue team also needs to be thinking about solutions for countering the GOP propaganda flamethrower (which is no small task). Carville's carping is, dare we say, out of touch, reactionary, and not terribly insightful.

However, it is surely true that Beshear/Cooper 2028 would be stronger than Pelosi/Ocasio-Cortez 2028. Until the Democrats figure out how to win back FDR's base, they probably should not run women or minorities or especially minority women for president (no matter how well they do and have done in the Senate and House or as governors). (Z)

Trump/Vance 2028?

Before sending us an e-mail telling us about the Twenty-Second Amendment, think out of the box. Donald Trump loves running for president, what with all the adoring crowds (even if they were much smaller than Kamala Harris' crowds). He didn't actually like being president the first time around, but he is warming to it. Besides, implementing the entire 900-page Project 2025 will take more than 4 years, so he will need another term, assuming he hasn't gone to the big White House in the sky by then. With his stock in DJT now worth billions of dollars, he can afford to hire a good constitutional lawyer, even if the lawyer requires a nonrefundable payment of $5 million in advance before starting to work on it.

Let's start with the basics. Here is Section 1 of the Twenty-Second Amendment:

Section 1

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Section 2 describes the ratification procedure, which was fulfilled on Feb. 27, 1951. For the textualists among our readers, please note that the Amendment is about being elected to the presidency, not about serving as president.

We are not lawyers, but here are a couple of things we have thought of in 5 minutes (imagine what one of J.D. Vance's brilliant Yale Law School buddies could think of given 4 years and $5 million):

We're not trying to be predictors of doom here. We just wanted to point out that, fundamentally, there is a bug in the Twenty-Second Amendment. It should not have mentioned elections at all. It should have said: "No person may serve more than 10 years as president." This bug opens the possibility of succeeding to the presidency in some way other than being elected.

We think it is unlikely that Trump will find a way to remain president beyond January 20, 2029, especially given his physical and mental health. But if he tries it, it will almost certainly involve working within the system, and trying to find a loophole, as opposed to merely declaring himself president-for-life. This being the case, it's useful to keep in mind what to look out for. (V)

In Conversation: The Banhammer

Yesterday, we announced that we were going to have far less tolerance for, and to give far less oxygen to, trolls. We continue to welcome disagreement, including strong disagreement, as long as it takes the form of respectful discussion. But we've had enough of personal attacks, rants and raves, etc.

There was quite a lot of response to that announcement, and we thought we would share a few of those:

K.H. in Maryville, TN, writes: First, I have to say I'm as shocked as everyone else that E.G. in The Villages is a woman. They are absolutely an angry, old white guy in my mind's eye. Someone Trump-like, in fact, even down to the golf cart.

Second, thanks so much for your decision on being more aggressive with the banhammer, and for exactly why you described. Respectful criticism is fine and should be welcomed. Much as it might be nice to live in a like-minded bubble, it's not a healthy diet for us. Thinking of your analogies to palate cleansers, we must have some vegetables, and not only desserts. But the pointless, angry vitriol is a waste of your time and effort, and ours as well.

Thank you both SO MUCH for the hours and hours you devote to this site. We appreciate you!


J.H. in El Segundo, CA, writes: Great idea on stopping negative comments the rest of the year and banning certain obnoxious commenters. You guys do a great job and are very fair and respectful to respectful views of all types. You don't need to hear that swill. It will be better for all of our mental health to not have to view that.

Thanks for all that you both do. I am very thankful to have your site to follow. I will be cutting out completely almost all of my news sources, even NPR, and your site might be my only source of news for a while.


A.N. in St. Joseph, MI, writes: I, for one, will not be saddened by the elimination of the complaints department section. I understand that constructive, substantive criticism or debate is always welcome and enjoy reading well-written arguments, even if I fundamentally disagree. Rants, however, can be left to the cesspool that is Twitter...

On a related note, I'm sure E.G. in the Villages will be SHOCKED (much like Inspector Renault in Casablanca) when TFG's goon squads round her up in one of their forthcoming raids and send her "somewhere" just because she "fits the profile"... her red hat is unlikely to save her.


G.K. in Blue Island, IL, writes: I imagine you will get some blowback about your decision regarding E.G. from The Villages, and that most of the rationale will be spurious arguments having to do with balance, free speech, discrimination, etc.

You may or may not remember, but in 1988 Oprah Winfrey invited a group of Nazi skinheads on her show, the rationale being she would expose their hate-mongering for what it was. Instead, things got out of hand and, in the end, she only succeeded in amplifying their message and arguably aided their recruitment. It was a pivotal moment for Winfrey, and she decided thenceforward that "ignorance should not be given a platform." She also let her producers and network types know that any attempt to attract more eyeballs by emulating, for instance, Jerry Springer, would not be welcome.

Donald Trump's ignorance—about economic issues, how government works, complex societal problems, etc.—was given a platform by the Republican Party and here we are now (heaven help us all). I can't help but applaud your decision regarding E.G.in The Villages, and hope for some future world where the Flat Earth Society is not given control of NASA just because someone wants to "hear them out" on their show.


G.L. in Chicago, IL, writes: I'd like to express my... well, not gratitude exactly, but certainly approval, of your decision not to publish rants from E.G. and their ilk anymore.

The tragic lesson that we as a society have failed to learn over the past few decades is: The only prize for indulging dipsh**tery is more dipsh**tery.

I don't know precisely how to have a society where it's possible to have constructive discussions but some basic ground rules of decency are a good start.

Despite the prediction from G.K. in Blue Island, we didn't get any negative feedback about this (unless we missed a message). It was overwhelmingly positive. After all, we're not shutting down letters that express disagreement. We're only shutting down letters that express disagreement in a highly disagreeable fashion.

And we do think there was merit in showing readers what a truly out-of-bounds message looks like, but we also agree with the semi-implication that we made the same error as Oprah did. Feeding the trolls just encourages them.

On a somewhat related note, we are vaguely toying with a notion, though it's just concepts of a plan right now. We are nothing but disdainful of performative bothsidesism. We don't believe that, for example, when CNN hires a Scott Jennings, or The Washington Post hires a Marc Thiessen, they are really trying to enlighten their audience.

That said, we think there would be merit in finding someone who has a right-leaning perspective, and could contribute something to the site once a week (or maybe every other week). To be more precise, we're thinking someone who could pick one (or two) items that we wrote that week, and could say "Here's how this particular story/issue/etc. looks through my eyes." Sort of a conservative ombudsperson. But the candidate needs to have some kind of track record of being intellectually honest and capable of reasoned debate. Someone who pines for how The National Review was when William F. Buckley Jr. was in charge would be nice. Being one of J.D. Vance's Yale Law School classmates would be a plus, but is not a requirement. The person should also expect some of what electrical engineers call "negative feedback" from us and others.

Anyhow, if readers have thoughts on this—good idea, bad idea, the best way to execute the idea, etc.—then we would be glad to hear them at comments@electoral-vote.com. As K.H. in Maryville points out, a bubble is something to be watched for, and actively resisted, and this might be a good step in that direction. (Z)


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