Oh, great. CNN reports that 30,000 absentee ballots in Milwaukee, Wisconsin will have to be retabulated as a precaution because a door was open on the panel of a tabulating machine.
I’m interested to see whether Columbia County, Wis., can return to form as the predictor of the presidential election. Columbia County has voted for the winner in every presidential election since 1980, except in 2000 (when Gore beat Bush there by 649 votes) and 2020 (when Trump beat Biden there by 517 votes).
Phil, it doesn’t matter how many times you warn us not to read too much into the first round of exit poll responses about the issues, we’re all going to grab them and gobble them up like pizza, beer and chocolate cake on “cheat day” for dieters.
Apply the usual caveats to any early exit polls you see and they certainly shouldn’t be used to project winners. With that said, if these numbers from CNN exits on the 2024 electorate are remotely accurate, it would be a major failure for Republicans to blow this election.
Feeling about way things are going
26% Enthusiastic/satisfied
72% dissatisfied/angry Biden approval/disapproval
41%/58%
Marc Short put it really well on TV on Sunday: This is a presidential election where the Democratic incumbent is unpopular and the top two issues voters care about are the economy and the border. This should be a layup for Republicans. Should. And yet it could end up being extremely close, or even a Democratic win, because the GOP ticket is also unpopular and has abandoned many traditional Republican policy positions. Remember 2022 should have been a red wave. It was the first midterm election under a Democratic president with a major blunder abroad (Afghanistan) and high inflation at home. And yet Republicans barely squeaked out a House majority and couldn’t take the Senate.
NBC New’s early exit polling indicating that the “state of democracy” represents the most important issue for Americans (35 percent) over the “economy” (31 percent) is precisely why you’re wise to ignore preliminary, unweighted exit surveys released prior to poll closing.
Yes, this cycle’s Republican Senate candidate class has a texting group chat! “I am the chattiest of the chat group!” Ohio Republican Senate nominee Bernie Moreno told me last month inside his campaign SUV. The idea is to “post good news” and “root for each other” on the campaign trail “so we’re not strangers when we land in Washington, DC.”
Pretty soon, we’ll find out how many of them make it there.
West Palm Beach — Special guests are already starting to trickle inside the Trump-Vance election night party here in the Palm Beach County Convention Center. Some of the GOP nominee’s beloved “Front Row Joes” are already standing near the front of the stage even as most of the convention room remains empty.
I have a chart up on the Corner right now listing the swing/battleground House districts by poll-closing time. Between 7 and 8 p.m. we should be getting swing-district results from Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Ohio.
By 4:45 p.m. on the East Coast, MSNBC’s coverage had already assumed what could only be described as a funerial tone. To emphasize the point, contributing editor Michele Norris mused about the prospect of “missed votes” who might boost Harris’s totals before retreating into a wistful retrospective on the vice president’s campaign. The confidence isn’t exactly overflowing.