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In many ways, the final week of a presidential campaign — for those of us who cover presidential politics — is akin to being in the eye of a hurricane. There’s an eerie calm that you know is about to disappear, but the anticipation is agonizing. There’s not a lot more to report or unearth. All you can do is wait (and continue to prepare).
That preparation includes running through every potential outcome and thinking about how the campaign might get there. For the purposes of this exercise, I want to essentially brain-dump everything I’m thinking about how this campaign could end and let that serve as a guide for how I’m watching the final days — and what I’ll be looking for on election night (or week).
For me, this endgame feels more like 2000 and 2004 than like any of former President Donald Trump’s previous elections (2016 and 2020). Why do I say that? For one thing, the polls are indicating a much closer race this time than in 2016 or 2020. The last time the polls were collectively this close in the final month of a campaign was during George W. Bush’s two successful presidential elections.
And I’d argue that in both of Bush’s elections, but 2000 especially, the campaigns ended in a sort of draw, in that both parties split the battleground states, rather than their being swept by one candidate. From 2008 through 2020, the winning candidate either swept or nearly swept the final six to eight battleground states.
This year, one could easily see the seven core battlegrounds splitting fairly evenly.
If the polling is accurate for both candidates, then Vice President Kamala Harris’ ability to overperform with older white women should help her overperform in the Northern states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Conversely, if Trump does end up overperforming with male voters of color, as polling has indicated, that should give him a particular boost to win the Sun Belt battlegrounds of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
Toss in the lone electoral vote in the Omaha, Nebraska, congressional district for Harris, and that geographic split of the battlegrounds would give Harris a narrow 270-268 victory.
By the way, if Harris won under this scenario, she’d be the first president since the U.S. has had 50 states to win while carrying just one state in the South (New Mexico). Had John Kerry carried Ohio in 2004, he’d have won the presidency without a single state in the South. Talk about regional polarization!
Again, that scenario assumes that the public polling is accurate for both candidates. If either Harris underwhelms with white women or Trump underwhelms with men of color, it could hand the other one a clean sweep of the battlegrounds. And we’re talking only a small polling error, just in connection with those two demographic groups, which could dictate whether we witness a split decision or a clean sweep.
Another endgame scenario that seems quite plausible to me: Harris wins North Carolina but Trump wins Pennsylvania.
Assuming both Michigan and Wisconsin stay blue (again, quite plausible), this would put Harris three electoral votes short of the 270 she’d need. The Sun Belt state after North Carolina where I think Harris has the best shot at winning is out in the desert, and this would make Nevada the center of the presidential universe.
The battle over which damaged mail ballots should count and which provisional ballots deserve to be “cured” under this scenario could become quite fierce. The 2000 Florida recount took a lot out of us as a country and, in many ways, helped accelerate us to this era of polarization. Just imagine what a Nevada recount in this supercharged political climate could look like.
That having been said, this isn’t some “1%” scenario. I have always believed North Carolina was this year’s Georgia for the Democrats. The internal mess that is the state Republican Party led it to nominate a disastrous candidate for governor. It has energized the entire Democratic ticket in that state. Couple that with the potential of Harris’ campaign to re-energize the state’s rural Black vote (the secret to how Barack Obama carried the state in 2008) and you have a realistic formula for her to carry the Tar Heel State.
Incidentally, Nevada could very well be the state with the closest raw vote result of any of the battlegrounds. The image of half of America’s political class living in Las Vegas for the month of November sounds like the start of a bad reality show idea. But I digress.
While it’s true that we won’t have the final results out of battleground states like Arizona and Nevada for days (or even weeks), we will “know” who won the presidency on election night if the same candidate ends up winning both North Carolina and Pennsylvania. And it’s likely we will have the results of both states before the sun rises Wednesday morning after Election Day. It’s something to file away as you contemplate whether to pull an all-nighter with us on election night. (My advice: Pull the all-nighter with us! Nobody does election night like we do at NBC News!)
In short, the simplest way I’m gaming out Election Day is as follows:
So what could give us a decisive result that the deadlocked polls are not showing?
For one thing, polling error. In the previous two elections, Trump outperformed his polling numbers, leading many of us to believe we simply weren’t polling the electorate correctly. Are we still under-sampling Trump voters? If so, Trump may win fairly comfortably.
Then again, is Trump’s improvement in the polls this cycle an indication the polling community finally got it right on the Trump vote? Or is it possible there’s been an overcorrection? Obviously, if we have it more right this time, then prepare for the knife fight scenarios I outlined at the start of this column. But if the polls have overcorrected on Trump, Harris may win a victory that looks a lot more like Obama 2012 than anything else we’ve seen this century.
Of course, there are some things polls simply can’t measure. For instance, there’s been this assumption that the polls were off in 2016 and 2020 because Trump ended up overperforming. But what if the polls were accurate at the time? It would mean a lot of voters waited until the very last minute to decide to vote and to cast their votes for Trump. I think it’s quite logical in 2016 that a number of voters who didn’t like either choice for president waited until the last possible minute to finally decide whom to “vote against.” Given the result in 2016, it appears many may have even waited until they got into that voting booth before deciding: “OK, I just don’t want her. I’ll try him.”
Ask yourself, when you are unenthusiastic about something you know you have to do, do you do that task early, or do you wait until the very last minute?
With Harris putting such a focus on Nikki Haley voters from the GOP primaries — i.e., Republicans who don’t like Trump — it’s clear her campaign sees these GOP voters as key to her winning the presidency. If you’re a Republican who doesn’t like Trump but is also skeptical of Harris’ more progressive tendencies, I’m guessing you’re waiting and waiting and waiting until the very last minute to decide how to vote. If she does end up overperforming with this specific GOP-leaning group, I think it won’t really show itself until Election Day.
One theory about this election I’ve been pondering is whether it is a reverse 2016 — with Trump as Hillary Clinton in this scenario.
He’s the known quantity who just doesn’t feel like the best answer to get us out of this polarized ditch. This makes Harris the Trump of 2016 in this scenario, in which the voter may decide, “We’ve tried him, I know what that presidency will look like, I’d like something new, let’s try her, she’s at least different.”
Again, I think this voter is very hard to poll, which is why we should give pollsters some grace here. It’s possible to have an accurate poll that ends up looking like a miss because one segment of undecided voters didn’t end up splitting evenly but went more decisively (and unexpectedly) in one direction. The unpredictability undecided voters can have is one of the reasons we always make sure to show the undecided/other vote when we visualize the results of our own polling.
Of course, there’s another way polling can both be accurate but miss something at the end. What if one party is spending a lot of money on a get-out-the-vote operation while the other is focused on something else? In 2020, the Trump campaign was the only one knocking on doors during Covid, as the Biden campaign feared scaring its supporters at the doors. It’s possible that if Biden had matched Trump’s efforts on the ground, he would have performed slightly better in the actual results, making the polling numbers just before the election look more accurate.
This election, we appear to have another lopsided ground game situation. The Harris campaign appears invested in doing traditional get-out-the-vote programs in all sorts of places. The Trump team is focused more on building teams to “watch” the counting of the ballots while outsourcing its get-out-the-vote operations to two untested entities: Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point organization. Toss in the massive financial advantage Democrats have down the ballot over their Republican counterparts (especially in the House), and this organization edge could be worth a point or two, enough to turn a tied race into a close but decisive victory for Harris.
Right now, neither party looks like it’s on sure footing going into Election Day. Both parties feel optimistic, but neither feels overly confident (despite the public bravado from some in Trump world).
And that leads me to what I think is the most likely result next week — a parity election for the House and the White House, taking days or weeks to figure out who narrowly eked out enough electoral votes or House seats to claim a majority.
There are so many cross-currents in this election that a tie (of sorts) feels like the likeliest outcome. Democrats are dominating on the money end of things and seem to have a lot more resources to tap across the board to help operationally. Republicans have the mood music on their side, meaning the sourness about the economy and the current Democratic president gives them the natural “time for a change” messaging that can be persuasive.
The wild card issue for me on the presidential level is abortion. It has been fascinating watching Trump overperform all of the Republican Senate candidates. And one explanation that rings potentially true to me is that he’s performing better with abortion-rights-focused Republicans than any other Republican on the ballot.
Why would that be? Because voters don’t believe Trump is as strident on abortion as the rest of the party. And why is that? Old video! Senate Democrats have been pummeling their GOP counterparts on the issue, usually using old video of them calling for overturning Roe v. Wade as their proof this is a long-held position.
The irony is that for Trump, the oldest video of him discussing abortion has him sounding like a longtime supporter of abortion rights, though there is also plenty of video of him celebrating the end of Roe v. Wade.
Toss in his various efforts to push back against six-week bans at the state level (at least rhetorically) and it has given Trump some ability to keep abortion-rights-concerned Republicans with him, even if they decide they will vote for Senate Democrats as a bulwark against a total ban.
Of course, how a campaign ends can have an outsized impact, as well, and there’s no question that Trump is the one who appears to be closing poorly. If Trump ends up losing a close election, there will be outsized attention on his decision to massage his own ego by holding a raucous rally at Madison Square Garden.
I know of many Republican strategists who are making themselves feel better about Trump’s disastrous Garden party by clinging to the belief that voters have already priced in his behavior to their calculus. Who is getting offended now who hasn’t been offended before? That’s how goes the thinking of those “see no evil, hear no evil” GOP operatives. And, certainly, there’s plenty of evidence in Trump’s past that indicates voters are more willing to give him leeway on character than they have been for any other politician in the modern era.
But while voters have clearly become desensitized to Trump’s antics over time, how good is it for Republicans to have voters reminded, just nine days before the election, of all the character things they don’t like about him, including his associations with unsavory people? Do I believe voters have been less tuned in to this election than the last two? I do. But do I think these same “tuned out” voters have been tuning in a lot more over the last few weeks? I do. Do we think these exhausted voters liked what they saw (and what they continued to see on social media) from Trump’s Garden party?
I don’t know whether this ends up being Trump’s “Comey moment” — an end-of-campaign event that reinforces a negative and reminds skeptical voters of something that was already in the backs of their minds. But in an election this close, everything can matter.
Above all else, the fact that Trump ended up doing this rally indicates that the people around him on the campaign don’t know how to tell him no. There was only downside that could come from this event, and they held it anyway. Why? Because Trump wanted to do it.
This didn’t help him win battleground states. This didn’t help GOP House candidates in New York. If anything, it may have created more headaches for these blue-state GOP members. Many an election has been lost by candidate hubris. Could this be one of them?
Chuck Todd is NBC News’ chief political analyst and the former moderator of “Meet The Press.”
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