One thing worth noting about how much the devil is in the details.

Arizona and Nevada are still leaning pretty solidly R at the moment.(Trump’s hispanic margins have steadily gone up since 2016, dropping the wall focus helped a lot). Wisconsin and Michigan are the closest to going D albeit Trump still leans ahead. PA is in the middle and is the most important of the set. (North Carolina is the strongest R of all 7, and Georgia is the Libertarian Ex-Democrat Chase Olivers homestate which combined with Cornell West’s strong focus there and the election commission shenanigans means those two are out of play barring some good luck and Roy Cooper being picked. Trump would have won Georgia in 2020 with no third party vote and those have leaned left since. I don’t consider them swing states unless Andy or Roy are on board).

In the Rust Belt Focus scenario(They pick Shapiro or Walz and make Pennsylvania the biggest focus as it’s the most important state, and manage to finish ahead in all 3, at the cost of Arizona, Nevada, and the Southern States), the final score is 268-270. A win, but a damn tight one.

Except…Nebraska. Nebraska is putting a law up in September to change the way their state distributes to be Winner Take All. If it goes through it would be passed in October, taking away one D vote from Omaha and giving it to R. (Maine has threatened to do the same if Nebraska does, but they wouldn’t have it done til after the election if they did, not enough time). That would change the above scenario to a 269-269 decided by the current House…which is Trump run and even if it wasn’t it’s state by state and more than 26 states are safe red even in a blue wave scenario. Though it would leave the VP pick to the Senate, which is democrat right now, and while it couldn’t be Harris due to her current spot anyone else would be came. So there’d be a very real chance of a Trump/Shapiro ticket which would be a dysfunctional nightmare and would have a massive chance of one of the two getting murdered.(I can’t find a source if it’s the current senate or the newly elected one as they get inaugurated seperately from the president, but if the senate falls which looks likely the Republicans can pick the VP, and while the House is leaning democrat due to it being state by state it would be R regardless).

This ALSO happens in the reverse scenario, where the Dems focus on the Southwestern States with Mark Kelly(taking Arizona and Nevada) AND manage to put on enough pressure to take Wisconsin and Michigan(which are the closest and Kelly while he isn’t a winning deal there is still better than nothing), but are unable to win Pennsylvania(which is a lot more red leaning and without Shapiro or Walz is probably going red). 270 - 268 win for Democrats…unless Nebraska changes the law in which case it’s a tie, House picks, see above.

The specific configuration of which states go where makes a tie super likely this year especially if Nebraska switches their rules(which isn’t unconstitutional, they picked a weird unique system and they can unpick it, the other system is used by 48 states that’s all above board. The scummy part is the timing as it would leave Maine without time to change their own system before the election and thus secure an extra R vote without an extra D vote from changing Maine). There are also tie scenarios in the event Nebraska doesn’t change, namely the “Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia go blue, everything else goes Red” possibility if someone like Beshear or Cooper is picked ends in a 269-269 tie, as does a couple of scenarios where Maine-State swings Red(which it has come extremely close to more than once), turning narrow Blue wins into ties. And if those scenarios happened alongisde a Nebraska change they’d suddenly be 270-268 clean wins.

I will say I noticed a couple days ago on Reddit(zero clue the method used tho) that Iowa was the ONLY outlier among Early Voting/Mail In Voting results. All the blue states had blue leanings, all the red states had red leanings, swing states were split: Rust Belt Blue, Sun Belt Red, except for Georgia which was too close to call due to their lack of transparency and overall closeness. Iowa was more blue thanks to early voting. Only outlier.

On the one hand, this poll suggests that wasn’t an outlier. It FEELS weird because Iowa was considered the right most of the ‘weak red’ bloc, Florida and Ohio and Texas were discussed WAY more as potential pickups and got way more polling, Iowa got the least attention of them.

However I also note on the other hand the early voting data suggests Iowa is an outlier and this isn’t suggestive of a Kamala sweep. This could be because-

1. Iowa has some of the harshest Anti-Abortion laws in the country and isn’t deep deep red like the comparable ones. That’s on the ballot.
2. Iowa is right next to Minnesota and Tim Walz is jacking up the numbers, Iowa is old white country and Tim Walz is perfect for that.
3. RFK Jr couldn’t get off the ballot in Iowa and there isn’t a strong left wing 3rd Party outside the norm like Claudia or Cornel to counterbalance either. Ohio/Texas/Florida don’t have RFK on the ballot and neither do most of the swing states, and the Rust Belt has those other two to counterweight it.
4. Due to the lack of Democrat investment that Ohio and Texas and Florida saw there was also less Republican counter investment, so it trickled left and both sides missed it with so little polling there.

If you think Iowa indicates that nationwide trends are super wrong then you also have to ignore the early voting data that hinted at a bluer Iowa days ago because everything else on that chart is falling to expectation. That data still has Texas/Florida/Ohio Red and suggests the sun belt is going Red outside of maaaaaaybe Georgia which is tight. There are also a few other Iowa polls all showing it still safely red so it could just be super close/future swing state rather than blue this time.

Maybe it is a nationwide trend, maybe it is, but my gut says it’s a mix of lack of red investment and lack of blue polling interest as it wasn’t as seemingly close as places like Florida or Texas, and two huge Iowa specific factors being extreme anti-abortion laws nearly unrivaled nationally and Tim Walz being from right next door and appealing to the Iowa bloc massively.

What it would signal otherwise is that Tim Walz is doing a great job shoring up the white vote in the Rust Belt and that probably secures Wisconsin which ALSO borders Minnesota and has a lot of the same factors as Iowa. The early voting data says they’re losing the Sun Belt so they need to hold the Rust Belt. Iowa going blue and everything else going to plan would funnily enough make Nevada actually matter again. They’re both worth 6 points so Nevada going red(which otherwise was useless in basically any scenario, Republicans would either win without it or NV wouldn’t save them otherwise) would neutralize Iowa being lost and turn a couple scenarios from narrow losses to narrow wins.

I will say this debate is inherently riskier than the last one simply because JD Vance is already at his floor. He’s the most unpopular VP or VP candidate in history. Worse than Sarah Palin, worse than Spiro Agnew, worse than Aaron Burr.
He loses, nothing changes, he cannot go lower barring Mark Robinson tier revelations and even then I have doubts. He wins, Walz slips a point or two, Harris by extension maybe 1/4th of a point.

Really anything that can stop the bleed for the Republicans is a win for them, October is critical. Harris rode a 6 week high after getting in at the end of July, spent the first two weeks undoing the pit Biden had dug, then got boosts from the VP pick and convention that lasted until early September. Trump finally had trends on his side and the debate utterly wrecked that. That’s finally fading again so they really are seeking a win, a screw up here could be too late to wait out and Vance getting some good press could bury stuff like the Uncle Robinson(no relation) disaster.

The other problem is that he’s young, really young, Teddy young. JD Vance is young enough he can fake it for a little bit in a way Trump is just too old to do these days. He’s baitable, but not to the level of Trump or even Biden in this environment. Young Narcissists can put on a face for a while in a controlled space like this, 80s Trump did it all the time and I’d argue Vance might be sharper than him.

I don’t think it’s a bad matchup, Walz is very wholesome and more experienced(and the reverse would be very unideal for the Democrats. Vance would be better at avoiding the massive tangents Harris baited Trump into, meanwhile Walz isn’t as high energy or effective on the pursuit against Trump as Harris is) , but he definitely ‘looks’ and ‘sounds’ older than he is, especially compared to Harris. So Walz is walking in with that already there.

What do you predict Turnout being this year? 2020 was 65.9% of the VEP(Voting Eligable Population). The lowest in the internet era was 2012 at 58%. Average is 2004 and 2016 at 60.1 and 59.3 each, 2008 was the previous high at 61.1

538 has Trump’s support at his 2016 final levels. This is relevant to note because, in both prior elections, the polls were extremely good at predicting the baseline margins from diehards and registered, and the error came from badly guessing the undecideds wrong.

Unless this is the first election in a long long time to actually get the baseline wrong or literally 100% of the undecideds go to Harris, Trump’s got above 2016 in raw percentage totals basically locked in(in 2016 a ton of people went third party so neither he or Hillary actually crossed 50 percent, Hillary was 48.2 and Trump 46.1). In 2020 it was 46.8 for Trump and 51.3% for Biden. If things continue to trend that way Trump will be close to his 2020 total percentage locked in and thus will almost certainly be higher in the final count. The people genuinely leaving Trump will mostly be former undecideds, not the people locked in, so this number isn’t being shifted as much. That does suggest that, even with his general ceiling region not shifting a ton, he’s probably set to break 47% in the final number if not more (Trump was polling sub-45 in both 2016 and 2020 so 48 is also plausible).

This matters mostly because not every undecided is going to break for Harris or Trump, there will be people sticking third party who most polls lump in with them or at least contribute to the ‘Not Harris or Trump’ number, and this is one of the few areas where the general trend is not in Harris’s favor. Just broadly speaking this is the most left-wing Third Party batch we’ve had since 2000.

As much as people love to say voting third party helps Republicans, that hasn’t been the case in a while, the Libertarians have been the strongest for a long while and they usually siphon off more Republicans, especially Anti-Trump Ron Paul types. They probably cost Trump Georgia in 2020. But the Libertarian party has been in a state of collapse since 2022, there was an attempted takeover by a hard right clique, which lead to a nasty party schism that left the party not cooperating, then a ton of Hardliners defected to Trump when the Moderates got control of the primaries, and then to make matters worse RFK joined in around that time taking most of the right wing moderates and leaving the Left Libertarians to put Chase Oliver on the ticket. So a ton of Libertarian voters either left with the hardliners for Trump a year ago or left for RFK who in turn endorsed Trump likely redirecting some more of them to him, and what’s left is the most Left-Wing Libertarian the party has run since the 1970s.

Then there’s the fact the Constitution Party has been steadily weakening for years, they lost their status as the Number 3 Third Party in 2020 to the PSL, and this year they had a schism between the Mormon and Protestant factions. They also mostly take Republican Votes. Or the fact the usual coalition of small right wing parties all working together to back one candidate(Rocky De Le Fuente last time) are all gone. Why? They all hitched to RFK Jr, and he dropped out too late for any of them to pick new guys. (That I honestly suspect was the real goal of his candiacy. Wipe out the small right wing third parties and weaken the Libertarians).

On the other foot, the Greens are proportionally stronger as Jill Stein has better name recognition than Howie, the Party for Socialism and Liberation is surging with youth support and is set to break their all time record again, and Cornel West…exists.

It could be far worse, lawsuits kept most of them off of most Swing States, Nevada kept the Green Party off and has the Constitution Party, and Pennsylvania and Arizona only have the Greens and Libertarians. Wisconsin and Michigan also still have RFK Jr on them despite Cornel West and Claudia being there. But it’s still way more left leaning than normal just from the Libertarian crisis and lack of small right parties even without those new guys.

Let’s say around 1.5% of the undecideds go Third Party. Lower than 2020, way way lower than 2016, about on parr with previous years. It’s going to be mostly people who would otherwise vote democrat. The Popular Vote to Electoral College margin is supposed to be quite a bit less this year, but sub-Hillary margins nationally are probably a loss. So Harris wants a 2 point lead and there’s around 98.5% available. It’s gonna be tight.

Just with a bit of estimation of the remaining 12% of votes uncounted, Trump is going to beat his 2020 vote record by a couple million, 81 million on the high end and maybe closer to 77 million on the low end. Unlikely, but possible he beats the 2020 all time record set by Biden. Definitely beats his 2020 numbers.

Kamala recently pulled ahead of Hillary’s 65 million and Obama’s 66 million, she’s gonna end up around 71-74 million.

Kamala lost the Popular Vote. In fact she won some blue states by smaller margins then she lost some ‘swing’ states. Nevada might not even be tight enough to qualify as a swing state this election(needs to be 5% or less, Trump’s currently winning by 5.2% meaning it wasn’t a swing state), meanwhile Minnesota was won by 3, New Jersey by 4, New Hampshire by 4 and a half, and Maine might be lost we’ll see, but those 4 were all swing states as the margin was less than 5%. New Mexico and Virginia came very close(and New Mexico would have been under 5 without RFK Jr dragging Trump down a point).

This also suggests the Electoral College no longer favors Republicans, and is somewhere between neutral and actually favoring Democrats again. 2028 a tight election with a Democrat win could see them lose the PV and win the EC.

I had a ton of 2004 vibes from the start and it looks like that was correct. He is coming back to serve a second term, and YES, this time he won the national electiiion

(Also you can’t blame third parties this time, they did horribly nationwide. At worst maybe they tightened up Virginia a bit just through how uniquely bad for Democrats it was there, but on the other hand RFK Jr is the only reason New Mexico didn’t crack a sub 5 margin and go into Swing State territory again(Harris won by 5.2 there and RFK got 1 point. No third party means that crosses the 5 point threshold)

Before anyone starts getting a bit too high off their own supply Harris’s polling averages peaked on August 12th. They were stagnant or declining on the 13th and 14th, briefly spiked on the 15th, and that spike was completely undone on the 16th. Today is dropping again. Not big drops, like 1/10th of a point every other day(which day depends on which conglomerates you use), but the growth trend is over.

It’s probably a trap…but beating him there would be a huge huge fucking deal. Trump took the last debate on Biden teams terms and despite that Biden still cocked it up and that made the burn worse(had that debate been on Fox the age issues would have been blamed on their audio mixing and editing and the room being too hot and crap). If Trump loses on his own turf on his rules with his followers watching?

Had Trump won in 2020, he’d have taken the fall for the Recession and Hyperinflation and it would have caused a 2008 effect. Populist Wave haulted, strangled in it’s crib by Coronachan.

Had Trump won in 2020, he’d be done now and his VP would still be the democracy respecting Pence.

Trump when elected in 2016 had no major plan and mostly left the employees of the state intact, and in 2020 the change was minimal. Now there’s a full blown scheme to control the government

In 2020 they didn’t know how much they could get away with. They’ve seen the limits now.

Winning in 2020 means no January 6th shattering the overton window and leading SCOTUS to some interesting choices about power.

2020-2024 had one Supreme Court Justice to appoint. Now there’s another 2 if not 3

In 2020 it would have been close. Now Democrats will have to regain ground, New Jersey New Hampshire and Minnesota are now Swing States.

2016 Trump had his populist wave weakened by Gary Johnson and Evan McMulin who blocked the popular vote and kept states like Colorado and New Mexico out of his hands. 2016 Trump sucked with Hispanics. That initial wave would have burnt out with the COVID fuckery. Instead Democrats slotted in, took the 4 worst possible years, and are handing it back having effectively both given them another shot in the arm and crippled themselves. There goes the court. This isn’t John Kerry, it’s Carter.

I’ve heard of 2020 hindsight, but this is ridiculous

I just heard her speak for the first time today.

Better than Joe, but I don’t think she’s Obama tier. That man was king of the mic.