With less than three weeks to go before Election Day, and early voting already underway in dozens of states, a lot of Democrats — maybe you’re one of them — are in full freak-out mode, rattled by every dip in the polls and panicked over the possibility of Kamala Harris losing the election and Donald Trump returning to the White House.
Calm down already. There are plenty of good reasons to believe that Harris will be elected president and that Dems will end up with control of one or both houses of Congress. Here is, in my view, the best and most productive way to view the election as it now stands.
A close race really shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s striking how many political professionals knew that the race would get tight in the closing weeks — literally every keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, including Harris herself, warned that would happen — but are still losing their minds. Politico called some of the party’s movers and shakers and found that “nearly two dozen Democrats described Harris as running a do-no-harm, risk-averse approach to the race they fear could hamper her as the campaign enters its final 30-day stretch.”
“Everything is deadlocked and the composition of the electorate is unknowable, and there are so many things that are unprecedented,” my friend Jamal Simmons, a former communications director for Kamala Harris, told the Hill. “If you’re not nervous, you’re not paying attention.”
One guy who pays attention and is not terribly nervous is Cornell Belcher, a former DNC pollster who was part of both of Barack Obama’s winning campaigns. “Don’t ride the #Pollercoaster people, stop focusing on the polls, they are all over the place, just have a voting plan and get your family & friends to the voting booth,” he recently said on social media.
That’s good advice. One sure way to drive yourself crazy is to obsess over every little shift, like the recent surveys showing Trump ahead by, collectively, less than half a percent in seven key swing states. The latest NBC poll shows the candidates with 48 percent each, a change from a September sampling showing Harris with a 4-point lead. And there are more shifts to come: 10 percent of voters currently say they might change their minds, which is enough to cause sleepless nights among strategists of both parties.
Another smart, anti-panic perspective comes from political historian Alan Lichtman, who has accurately predicted the winner of nine out of the last ten presidential elections and insists the polls add little beyond confusion. “Polls mean nothing. They’re just numbers. They don’t tell you anything about how candidates or presidents should behave,” Lichtman told me. “It’s governing, not campaigning, that counts. The pundits don’t have the message.”
Lichtman, who has been in a long-running war of words with number crunchers like Nate Silver, argues that every presidential election since 1860 has boiled down to an up-or-down vote on how the party in power has performed. Lichtman focuses on 13 key areas — including economic growth, major domestic policy achievements, and the presence or absence of a big intraparty fight for the nomination — which he claims can accurately predict whether voters are ready to kick the ruling party out of the White House.
Democrats under the Biden-Harris administration, he says, have met the test by avoiding scandal, fending off a serious third-party challenge, and scoring big domestic policy victories like the national COVID vaccination program, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the infrastructure bill. Even the performance of the long- and short-term economy, two key Lichtman measures, has been a success. “A recession during the election year is very much a negative factor for the incumbent party. But despite some predictions, the economy has hit a soft landing,” he told me. “In fact, it’s booming. 254,000 new jobs created [in September] beats the average of the Trump job creation even before the pandemic, and inflation is now down to 2.4 percent, down from 9 percent. The stock market has hit records.”
That runs counter to the idea that Americans are ready to storm Washington with pitchforks because the price of groceries is too high.
Another number that nervous Dems should remember is $1 billion. That is the staggering, record-breaking total that Harris raised in the first 90 days after replacing Joe Biden at the top of the ticket in late July. The haul extends what was already a formidable financial lead: According to Forbes, from January through the end of August, Biden and Harris raised more than $678 million, which is more than double the $309 million collected by the Trump campaign.
The Democratic money advantage translates into significantly more campaign ads, reports Digiday: “So far, the Harris campaign has outspent the Trump campaign 2:1, having spent $456.3 million between July 22 and Oct. 9, compared to $204.3 million spent by the Trump campaign.” There’s significant money being spent by GOP outside groups, but Democrats should feel confident that Harris is getting her message out. And a recent week saw the Harris-Walz campaign spend more than $5 million on digital advertising, far more than the $517,000 the Trump-Vance team spent during the same week.
And remember that burst of enthusiasm when Harris jumped into the race? Many of those extraordinary, hourslong Zoom calls where tens of thousands of voters got online have translated into a vast field operation. “Democrats, in many places, are outpacing Republicans in terms of paid staff and doors knocked, and are counting on that local presence to break through a fractured media environment and to reach voters who want to tune out politics altogether,” reports the New York Times.
The Trump campaign, by contrast, appears to be pursuing a riskier strategy of relying on outside political groups to target and motivate persuadable conservative voters who are turned off by politics.
A final batch of numbers that should make Dems smile is the early voting data. In Michigan, 2.1 million voters requested mail-in ballots, and about 31 percent have sent them in — including a surge of activity in overwhelmingly Democratic Detroit, where voters requested more than 102,000 absentee ballots, and returned 41,000 in the first week. In Georgia, more than 300,000 people showed up on the first day of early voting, better than doubling the previous record of 136,000 first-day votes cast in 2020.
As more states start early voting, anybody worried about how the election is going should channel that nervous energy into reminders to friends, family, classmates and co-workers in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, or Florida. As former First Lady Michelle Obama hollered from the podium at the DNC this summer, “Don’t just sit around and complain. Do something!”
