A little over two weeks left, and people are losing their freakin’ minds. And I get it: We have a lot more to lose than they do. If we win, their lives will improve (whether they want to admit it or not). If they win, we’ll lose our rights.
But seriously, relax. We’re doing what needs to be done, and we’re winning.
First, here are this week’s 538 polling averages for swing states, as of Friday at 1:30 PM ET.
All the moves were marginal, but almost all of them were toward Donald Trump. For those of you who want to pretend we’re losing, you’ve got something to freak you out. If you assign a state’s electoral votes to the person currently leading in its polls, neither candidate in this aggregate hits the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Five of the seven states are within a single digit.
And yet despite hundreds of million spent, the national race is steady as can be.
There is more movement in the battlegrounds, but so far, it’s marginal.
Of course, everyone is terrified of polling misses à la 2016 and 2020. We can’t know if pollsters have overcorrected in 2024 or whether there’s an inherent inability to reach Trump’s nihilistic supporters. But here’s what we do know:
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Democrats have far more money than Republicans, up and down the ballot. With battleground campaigns flush with cash, they can invest more heavily in get-out-the-vote operations that should pay dividends for the entire Democratic ticket. Take Arizona’s Senate race: Democrat Ruben Gallego raised over $20 million last quarter, compared with Republican Kari Lake, who raised only $7.6 million. Gallego is crushing Lake in the polls, and Lake may end up being a drag on all Arizona Republicans.
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Republicans have outsourced much of their get-out-the-vote operation to billionaire Elon Musk, who knows nothing about GOTV and is, by all appearances, screwing it up. Democratic GOTV efforts are apparent in the (very) early vote. (Since I wrote that story, the early vote has gotten even better for Democrats.)
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Gender gap. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which eliminated federal abortion rights, drove the election in 2022, and nothing suggests that has changed this time around. Note that women are more likely to vote than men. In 2020, 82.2 million women voted, compared to 72.5 million men. Don’t discount the power of state abortion initiatives in Arizona and Nevada, not to mention its relevance in the national debate.
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Republicans are depending heavily on young men. I have a story coming out on Sunday about this. In short—yes, young men are trending Republican, but they are also a low-turnout voting demographic.
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Trump, as a person, is fading in the stretch. He’s old, tired, cranky, and can’t handle the pressure. The media narrative is shifting as a result. Harris looks freakin’ great.
And we’re going to win because we’re going to out-hustle them. That’s on all of us.
What are you doing to win on Nov. 5?
