Today is Election Day. I’m not going to give you a long song-and-dance about why you should vote or whom you should vote for. If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably understand all of that already. You don’t need to vote because your vote will make a difference — in most places and most races, it won’t. You don’t need to vote because without doing so, you’re not allowed to complain — we have a First Amendment, you’re always allowed to complain. You should vote because this is our one form of leverage over those who govern us. This is our authority over their lives instead of the other way around; this is our chance to veto them, if we wish. And remember, all the worst people don’t want you to vote.
On the menu today: looking through Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien’s confident assessment, a couple of things that were supposed to have happened before Election Day that just . . . didn’t, and an event Thursday you won’t want to miss.
The Trump Campaign Lays Out Its Target Turnout Thresholds
Yesterday afternoon, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien laid out, in a series of tweets, what the campaign expects tonight, laying out how he expects Trump to win Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Florida. If Trump wins those states, he will be surpass 270 electoral votes.
Regarding Ohio, Stepien writes, “weeks ago, the partisan makeup of the electorate was [Democrats] +10, today it’s D +0.6. Going into [Election] Day in 2016, the gap was D +2.5. [President] Trump has a projected Election Day votes cast margin of over 400k net votes.”
Ohio doesn’t have formal registration by party; the state defines a voters’ party ID by which primary that voter voted in last. A few weeks ago, the Associated Press wrote something somewhat misleading about Ohio voters:
Democratic registrations have risen by over a quarter of a million since 2016, to nearly 1.6 million. The number of registered Republicans fell by 120,000 over the same period, with GOP President Donald Trump in the White House — but the party remains the larger of the two, at 1.9 million people.
Most voters in the state, more than 4.5 million people, remain unaffiliated.
This year we had a competitive Democratic presidential primary and an uncontested one on the GOP side; it’s not surprising there would be more interest in voting in the Democratic one, and less interest in voting the Republican one. Any way you slice it, if the Stepien figures are accurate, Ohio looks pretty good for Trump.
But there’s a factor at work in almost all of these states that I ought to address early on, which is whether a registered Republican vote is synonymous with a vote for Trump. Obviously, the vast majority of Republicans will vote for Trump, but some small fraction of registered Republicans will vote for other candidates. In the most recent Civiqs poll of Ohio, self-identified Republicans split 91 percent to 7 percent in favor of Trump . . . while self-identified Democrats split 96 percent to 3 percent in favor of Biden. If equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats vote, Biden would win by a narrow margin.
Regarding North Carolina, Stepien wrote: “Democrats jumped out to a D +32 advantage during absentee-only voting. Today it’s D +5.8.” The Tarheel State has a bunch of registered Democrats who usually vote Republican, so the party ID numbers can be a little misleading. The GOP is steadily gaining ground, but North Carolina still has a half-million more registered Democrats than Republicans. In the early vote, African Americans underperformed a little compared to their share of registered voters, but women, and in particular suburban women, overperformed. How confident Republicans should feel about the early vote in North Carolina should depend upon how confident they are that suburban women stuck with the GOP this year.
Stepien writes of Pennsylvania: “Dems have banked A TON of high propensity voters. We have millions of voters left.” Okay, but that means Republicans really need to get their voters out today. Pennsylvania has 2.4 million votes in already, and when Stepien writes, “Pres. Trump’s E Day margin needs to be significant and we project an Election Day vote-cast margin of over a million votes for President Trump,” this isn’t saying Trump needs a million votes total today. This is saying he thinks Trump’s vote total will be more than a million votes higher than Biden’s total today. That’s a bold prediction.
Keep in mind, Pennsylvania’s vote count is going to be slow, possibly messy, and probably contested in multiple ways. The state attorney general, Josh Shapiro, has already irresponsibly declared: “If all the votes are added up in PA, Trump is going to lose.” If you want to make sweeping declarations of victory before the polls open, go head up your state party, and get out of law enforcement. (By the way, did a single Democrat of any stature criticize Shapiro for saying this?)
In Arizona, registered Democrats are ahead of registered Republicans in the early vote by 43,055 votes. Stepien isn’t worried: “Weeks ago the makeup of the electorate was D +11.9, today it’s D +1.2. Reminder: going into [Election] Day in 2016, the gap was D +2.5. President Trump has a projected Election Day votes cast margin of over 150k net votes.”
Once again, the party affiliation may not be telling the whole story, because apparently Trump has been weak among suburban women in Maricopa County. And a few percentage points of support could make a difference. If 90 percent of registered Republicans who voted support Trump instead of 95 percent, that’s 45,000 votes that aren’t going into Trump’s column.
For most of this cycle, Florida has looked like the swing state that is strongest for Trump — and memories of Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott narrowly winning the 2018 races fuel GOP confidence that the Sunshine State will continue to lean their way. Stepien writes: “Democrats jumped out to a D +18.8 advantage during AB-only voting. Today it’s D +1. Going into Election Day in 2016, the gap was D +1.4. President Trump has a projected Election Day votes cast margin of over 500k net votes.” Four years ago, Trump won by about 1 percent with 9.4 million votes cast, 112,911 votes. Florida has 8.9 million early votes cast, and so turnout will probably at least equal that of four years ago.
Some may wonder whether Stepien didn’t think he needed to offer any statistics about a couple usually red states such as Georgia or Texas, or whether he deliberately omitted them because the outlook is grim.
The fact that Trump held a rally in Georgia Sunday night indicates that the campaign thinks it doesn’t have the Peach State locked up. Like Pennsylvania, this is a state where Trump needs a big turnout of his supporters today:
“Democrats built a lead in early vote and absentee ballots, but they do that every year,” [Jay Walker, a Republican consultant who works on state legislative races in the state] said. That’s been borne out again in early vote analysis this year, with Democrats leading Republicans heading into Election Day.
“We are catching up to them this third week [of early voting] and we [typically] beat them on Election Day, and that’s what we’re seeing.” he said.
But that puts a lot of pressure on Trump to win the Election Day vote handily, carrying “about 58 percent of Election Day voters in order for him to win the state,” said Mark Rountree, a Republican pollster in the state. “From early voting, Biden will have a 6- to 8-point overall lead.”
Texas will almost certainly be much closer than it usually is in presidential elections . . . but maybe that huge surge in early voting isn’t quite as Democratic-leaning as the conventional wisdom would suggest:
Derek Ryan, a Republican consultant and data analyst in Texas, said he models voter data by matching every person who has voted so far this year against a list he maintains of all registered voters, which includes such details as age, gender, location, and in which previous elections each person cast a ballot.
Ryan’s latest report, published Thursday, shows that nearly 30% of people voting early this year have a history of voting in Republican primary elections and about 23% previously voted in Democratic primaries.
In an update from his research firm, Ryan said the numbers show “voters who most recently voted in a Republican primary have about a 350,000 vote advantage over voters who most recently voted in a Democratic Primary.”
Ryan’s latest figures show that 16 percent of people who have voted so far have no general or primary election history, and nearly 29 percent have no primary election history, meaning that they have voted in past general elections but not in primaries. Voters who have never voted in a primary election are poised to be the largest group of voters, Ryan found.
The early vote in Texas was 9.7 million people; if 16 percent have no general or primary election history, that is 1.55 million people who have never voted before, at least in Texas. Do you think those people are more likely to be for Trump, or for Biden?
Department of Behind-Schedule October Surprises
Say, it’s getting a little late for that big police roundup of all of those celebrities and politicians that QAnon kept talking about, isn’t it? You don’t think all those rumors turned out to be false, do you?
Another big announcement that was supposed to arrive by Election Day . . . Paul Waldman, September 3: “We now take it as a given that, just before the election, Trump will announce some kind of major development on the pandemic, probably related to a vaccine . . . We also take it as a given that the announcement will be fraudulent, like so many other supposedly dramatic announcements Trump has made on pandemic developments.”
ADDENDA: A few days ago, I participated in the New Hampshire Journal podcast rundown with Andrew Cline and the Boston Globe‘s James Pindell, taking about the national and New Hampshire political landscape; you can check it out here.
On Thursday at noon, I’m scheduled to join a Heritage Foundation virtual event: “Post-Election Analysis: What Lies Ahead for America?” along with Kay C. James, Heritage Foundation president; William Bennett, former Education Secretary and Drug Czar; John Yoo, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley and fellow, American Enterprise Institute; and Byron York, chief political correspondent, Washington Examiner.