On Election Eve

No one knows what’s going to happen tomorrow. Of all the pollsters, only Nate Silver has been honest in this. What we do know: The race is neck and neck. The candidates are virtually tied. It all comes down to a handful of states, chief among them Pennslyvania.

I’ve heard a lot about early voting in PA. The issue I have with some of the prognostication is that the comparisons are between now and 2020 when Republicans were told to not early vote and vote election day only due to concerns about COVID-introduced mail-in fraud. I’m not sure it’s entirely representative of the whole story to say that a restoration of normal early voting behavior is a gain. That said, Republicans are making gains. Looking back, Trump won the state by 44,292 votes in 2016. Biden won the state by 80,582 votes in 2020. There isn’t room for much by these margins. Pennslyvania, together with Wisconsin and Michigan, forms the “blue wall” which has protected countless Democrat nominees … except in 2016. It held in 2020.

Three days ago troubling signs from seniors emerged:

In Pennsylvania, where voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots, registered Democrats account for about 58 percent of votes cast by seniors, compared to 35 percent for Republicans. That’s despite both parties having roughly equal numbers of registered voters aged 65 and older.

More women than men have early-voted, with women tending to skew Democrat. Hopefully the campaign maneuvered to counter this on the ground — the trouble with trends like these is you can’t tell much about them or discern other patterns until the votes are counted. These could be troubling signs that are consumed by a deluge of Republican voters hitting the polls on election day.

But not all signs indicate trouble. There are some encouraging ones, too:

Republicans are leading early-voting for the first time ever in North Carolina likely due to the state’s disastrous response in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The GOP is reversing the party’s long-held position against early-voting.

Bernie Moreno just pulled 0.4 ahead of Sherrod Brown in Ohio. McCormick and Casey are tied in Pennslyvania, a better measure of Harris vs. Trump than most national polls. Republicans are expected to retake the Senate with 51 seats.

We have now endured three of the most insane, unpredictable general election cycles in American history. One of them occurred during a pandemic. Americans are constantly besieged on all fronts by politics and the creation of entertainment politics as a coping mechanism is both understandable and also the reason why everything is even more unpredictable.

I questioned the red wave narrative in 2020 because the polling data I saw disputed it. My gut instinct goes back and forth. I have resisted forecasting potential results because so much polling is unreliable with bad methodology. Democrats’s ability to roll over on principle and fete a candidate chosen for them by their ideological betters while bitching about losing democracy is a circus unlike anything the Romans could have imagined.

On tomorrow’s program we will deep dive on a handful of electoral pathways and I’ll offer my final projection for the Electoral College map, the future of the Senate, the House, what happens if the White House race doesn’t go our way, the to ten races to watch, the media narrative about “violence,” and much more.

Regardless, we’ve done our part, you’ve done your part, it’s out of our hands. Pray on it, remember God is on the throne, and no matter what happens, it’s not over yet — and even if it doesn’t go our way tomorrow night just know that it will never be over, not as long as there exist good people willing to preserve and maintain freedom in this republic. Onward.

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