Trump’s team is cautiously optimistic, while some supporters are already predicting a landslide.
Allentown, Pa. — On the stump, Donald Trump likes to tell his supporters he needs a “landslide” win in 2024 so that his victory will be “too big” for Democrats “to rig.”
But off the campaign stage, the former president’s team is striking a more measured tone.
The GOP nominee’s stronger performance this cycle in RealClearPolitics’ battleground-state and national polling averages compared with 2016 and 2020 indeed has Republicans feeling confident in their chances — albeit less bullish on a landslide win than they were a few months ago when Trump was running against Joe Biden.
With less than a week to go before Election Day, Trump is better positioned in the polls than he has been at any other time throughout his three presidential campaigns. He currently leads Harris by 0.4 percentage point in a RealClearPolitics average. By contrast, with six days until Election Day, Biden led Trump by 7.5 percentage points in the 2020 RCP polling average. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton led Trump by 1.7 percentage points.
The public polling data may suggest an extraordinarily close race against Harris in the seven battlegrounds. But “if you look at the mail-in ballot requests and returns, we’re far outpacing where we were in 2020 and the voter registration gap has also closed,” a Trump campaign adviser told National Review in an interview. “So just looking at the metrics, things are way more favorable for us than they were in 2020.”
“I don’t know if I would predict a landslide,” this Trump adviser added. “But I think we’re all cautiously optimistic that we’re going to win.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are doing their best to put on a brave face. As one Democratic member of Congress put it in an interview with NR on the ground in Pennsylvania this week: The Harris campaign “had a very short on-ramp, and I had my share of frustrations in the beginning, but I think they’re getting it right, and I think they’re doing a lot of really good things. I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about our state.”
While Democrats are understandably trying to project optimism, the early voting numbers for Republicans undoubtedly have them concerned. After disparaging non–Election Day voting last cycle, this time around Trump and his party have embraced voting by mail and early voting to better compete with Democrats, who have long held an advantage in non–Election Day turnout. Data suggest the strategy is paying off, with Republicans narrowly casting more early votes than Democrats in the key battleground state of North Carolina — a massive shift from the political environment in 2020, when early voting heavily favored Democrats.
Swing states have seen huge early-voting turnout. More than 40 percent of all registered voters in Georgia have cast their ballots. Meanwhile, Wisconsin recorded a 45 percent increase in in-person absentee ballots in the first seven days of early voting compared with the same time period in 2020. Still, election experts, pollsters, and veteran Keystone State political observers have warned against interpreting this early voter swing toward Republicans as a sure sign that Trump will win the election.
Trump recently campaigned in deep-blue New York and California, and he’ll head to Virginia and New Mexico in the final days of the race. Democrats have interpreted those campaign decisions as a sign that the GOP ticket is trying to make Trump’s base believe they are heading toward a landslide win.
Trump’s team has made a point of pushing back against the overconfidence narrative in recent days. “We’re not cocky,” Trump campaign political director James Blair said in an interview with Semafor, “but we’re confident in our trajectory and general positioning right now.”
“You always worry, and the minute you’re overconfident, you’re missing something,” says businessman Jeff Bartos, who has run for office three times statewide here in Pennsylvania and has been active in politics for over 20 years as a donor and volunteer. Speaking with NR inside Trump’s Allentown, Pa., rally venue Tuesday evening, he said he’s hoping for good weather on November 5 and is optimistic Trump will outperform his 2016 and 2020 performances in the Philadelphia-area suburbs.
There are also signs that Democrats are divided over the Harris campaign’s closing pitch to on-the-fence voters.
In recent weeks, the vice president and her 2024 campaign surrogates have leaned into the argument that Trump is a “fascist” and “petty tyrant” who will destroy his enemies if elected to a second term. That tactic has apparently frustrated Future Forward, the main super political action committee supporting her campaign. According to the New York Times, the spending group’s staffers believe that going all negative on Trump all the time is less effective than leaning into her own biography and governing agenda.
Harris struck a conciliatory tone in her closing argument delivered from the Ellipse in downtown Washington, D.C., on Tuesday evening, pitching herself as a unity candidate as compared with her competitor, who has an “enemies list of people he intends to prosecute.”
But the eleventh-hour pivot to a unity message is unlikely to change the underlying dynamics of the race.
“Based on the body language of the campaigns and polling comparisons of between now and the past two presidential elections, it feels like the Trump team is going to win this one,” says GOP strategist Ron Bonjean.
On the ground in swing states, many of the former president’s strongest supporters are feeling extremely confident that it won’t be close. As Bethlehem, Pa., resident Tom Barker put it in an interview with NR on Tuesday night at Trump’s rally in Allentown: “I really, honestly, truly believe it’s going to be a landslide.”
Around NR
• Democracy is alive and well in Brian Kemp’s Georgia, the editors write, despite all of the fearmongering over the state’s new voting law back in 2021. At the time, Biden described the law as “Jim Crow on steroids.”
In spite of extensive damage from Hurricane Helene to some parts of the state, early voting is booming. As of Tuesday, with a week to go before Election Day, more than 3 million Georgians have voted already, over 2.8 million of them in person. At least 130,000 mail ballots have been requested, beyond the number already returned. As Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office reported on Monday, when the tally stood at 2.74 million, these have been record-breaking numbers compared with 1.98 million votes at the same point in 2020, 1.64 million in 2022, and 1.2 million in 2018.
• Audrey Fahlberg reports on Trump’s closing argument to Pennsylvania voters last night:
Speaking about himself in the third person and interspersing his remarks with characteristically winding anecdotes, an upbeat GOP nominee made the case to Tuesday’s crowd in the majority-Hispanic city of Allentown that a second Trump administration would usher in a “golden age” in America that would make the country stronger, safer, bolder, and greater “than ever before.” His opponent, “communist” vice president Kamala Harris, “has embarrassed us” while in office and “doesn’t have what it takes” to call the shots inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
• Jeffrey Blehar, responding to the president’s calling Trump supporters “garbage” on Tuesday, says that Biden and the Democrats will never stop condescending to you:
I know what Joe Biden said, and I have every reason to believe that it is what he thinks, given that he shares a party and a legacy with Hillary “Basket of Deplorables” Clinton. You, with your partisan beliefs as they are, can choose to accept his “clarification.” Instead, I believe that a nasty, angry old man slipped his leash — as he has countless times in the past few months — and said what he and everyone else around him really believes.
• Short-form video platform TikTok has become the newest battleground for younger, apolitical voters, and right-wing influencers are hoping to belatedly capitalize on its growing popularity, James Lynch reports:
Right-wing influencers are reaching millions of potential voters leading up to the 2024 election and driving engagement among TikTok’s younger user base. TikTok has an estimated 150 million U.S. users, many of whom are Millennials or Gen-Z Americans. The average TikTok user spends around an hour per day on the platform, and an increasing number of people are regularly getting their news from it.
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