Americana

1. Introducing Semafor Bellwethers
2. Senators turn on their colleagues
3. Criminal justice reform backlash contests
4. Someone has to win the House
5. The latest on key ballot measures

Also: Yes, we’ll talk about that Iowa poll. Plus, the closing campaign ads.

If you work in any political or politics-adjacent job, a great thing happens on Election Day. You stop getting the “who’s gonna win?” question. It’s one of the least interesting topics in the business, with a binary this-or-that answer that rewards confidence over nuance. Answer it correctly, and you’ve got pundit immortality; answer it incorrectly, and you might still get that, depending on how good you are at spinning.

The best answer to the question this year has been an annoying one: It depends on how wrong the polls are. A voter who cast his first ballot in 2000 — that would include me — lived through multiple presidential elections where the final polling slightly underestimated the Democratic nominee. A voter who showed up in 2016, and has only lived through elections with Donald Trump on the ballot or as the hand behind the GOP, has gotten used to a Republican coalition that does better with hard-to-find voters and worse with the ones who show up even in non-presidential years.

So, the results today range from a conservative triumph, and the making of a new anti-expert coalition, to a center-left triumph made possible by the post-Roe electorate. If Republicans run 1-3 points ahead of their final polling, Donald Trump would win all seven targeted swing states, his party would hold 53 or 54 Senate seats, and Democrats would dig in for four years of irrelevance. If Democrats run 1-3 points ahead, they could potentially hold the White House, House, and (pushing their luck) the Senate next year. Republicans would perform their autopsy on a campaign that aggressively targeted male non-voters of all races, and couldn’t put a national coalition together.

Neither campaign knows which world it’ll wake up in, or if the race will be settled tomorrow. Talking with strategists I was struck by how many scenarios involved a days-long wait for mail ballots, the curing of provisional ballots, or lawsuits that would complicate either. Americana, which has been biweekly since its launch two years ago, will be back on Friday, then become a weekly newsletter covering the post-election world. See you on the other side.

Semafor Bellwethers: How we’ll be tracking election night

The 2024 election is underway, and the first clues into how it’s going will turn up in representative areas of key states — suburbs, rural counties, and big cities. I’ll be tracking our Semafor Bellwethers live tonight, a list of 20 counties that we’ve picked as early indicators of national trends.

When should we start seeing the first results that matter? Polls close at 6 p.m. eastern in Indiana, which hasn’t been a swing state for 16 years, and in most of Kentucky, which hasn’t been competitive since the 1990s. That could make their key counties more interesting: Neither presidential campaign has spent a dime to win them. If Democrats are getting the suburban shift that they need to win the presidency, it could show up first in Hamilton County, north of Indianapolis, or Kenton County, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.

What about rural voters, and voters in big cities — both targeted all year by the Trump campaign, which believed that there were more potential votes out there from working-class Americans of all races? That will be trackable a little later in the night, as more polls close in states that have been bombarded with ads and canvassers. What happens in Roanoke County, Virginia, where the Trump campaign sent both sides of the ticket, even though the state had fallen off the electoral map? What do Democrats do in Gwinnett County, a diverse section of the Atlanta megalopolis that they have started to win big in close races?

For our full hour-by-hour guide on what bellwethers to watch tonight, read on…

When senators stop being polite and start getting real

Republicans are confident that they’ll win control of the Senate today, after a campaign that drew many of them into swing states to beat their Democratic colleagues. It’s part of a gradual breakdown of an old Senate tradition that once discouraged members from actively participating in efforts to oust their colleagues.

Montana Sen. Steve Daines, the chair of the NRSC, helped personally recruit veteran Tim Sheehy into the race against Sen. Jon Tester, and has campaigned in their state for him. Senators with leadership ambitions, like Texas’s John Cornyn and Wyoming’s John Barrasso, fanned out across the country to stump with GOP challengers in key states.

“The map makes it easy for Republicans to be more aggressive this year,” Semafor’s Burgess Everett reports. “The remarkably open race for several leadership positions is also turning campaign appearances into goodwill operations for ambitious senators.”

The retirement of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin took a Democratic seat off the board; Manchin endorsed Glenn Elliott, the Democrat running to replace him, as well as former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is waging a longshot bid as a “maverick” Republican.

No Democratic senator campaigned in person against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz or Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the only Republicans facing serious re-election challenges; Dan Osborn, the independent challenger to Nebraska GOP Sen. Deb Fischer, has declined any Democratic support, even as he benefits from a PAC funded by party donors.

For the full story, keep reading …

Kamala’s not the only prosecutor on the ballot

Down the ballot, voters will render their judgments on criminal justice reformers today, deciding whether to keep progressive prosecutors in office and whether to roll back sentencing reform.

The most high-profile contests are in Kamala Harris’s California, though the vice president did not tell reporters how she voted on her Los Angeles County ballot. That non-answer covered Proposition 36, which would undo some of the state’s 10-year old changes to the criminal code. Higher crime, and a frequent media and conservative focus on shoplifting and smash-and-grab robberies, has weakened support for the 2014 proposition; Gov. Gavin Newsom has led a campaign against Prop 36, attempting to sap its momentum with new laws in Sacramento.

Two prosecutors elected to end “mass incarceration” are also underdogs today: LA County DA George Gascon and Alameda County DA Pamela Price. Gascon faces former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman, and Price faces a recall attempt less than two years into her term. They’re not the only tests for the reform movement, but losses for Price and Gascon would mean that 11 million Americans no longer live under progressive prosecutors, four short years after the “racial reckoning.”

In North Carolina, where Republicans haven’t elected an attorney general since the 19th century, Republican Rep. Dan Bishop faces Democratic Rep. Jeff Jackson. Republicans nearly won the office in 2016 and 2020, and Bishop struggled after gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson’s campaign was staggered by reporting on his social media habits. But Bishop tried to shift momentum by attacking Jackson over accepting an award from an LGBTQ group that was physically handed over by a reformed sex offender.

The incredible shrinking House map

Control of the House of Representatives could once again come down to a half-dozen seats, after hundreds of millions of dollars in spending over a fairly small map. Both parties were predicting a victory on Tuesday, a change from 2020 when neither party, relying on flawed internal polling, saw the Democratic House majority at risk.

“We’re only four seats short of taking back the majority, and this could be the seat that could make the difference,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said at a weekend rally for Josh Riley, a Democrat trying to unseat Rep. Marc Molinaro in upstate New York. House Speaker Mike Johnson had just left the region, after fumbling a question from Syracuse University student journalist Luke Radel: Johnson said that Republicans would look at repealing the CHIPS Act, which freshman Rep. Brandon Williams doesn’t want to do.

The decades-long decline in split-ticket voting left very few incumbents stranded in seats that the other party’s presidential nominee carried in 2020. Just five Democratic House members were running in Trump seats, all still contested into Tuesday; Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola now represents the most conservative district of any Democrat. Nineteen Republicans are defending seats carried by Biden four years ago, two of them (Alabama’s 2nd District, Louisiana’s 6th District) newly created after courts struck down previous maps over racial gerrymandering. That’s basically a wash for Republicans: Their new gerrymander of North Carolina deprived Democrats of three seats, and the race in the Montgomery-based Alabama seat is competitive.

In 2020, most news outlets declared the House for Democrats on Election Night, not taking into account western seats that would break for the GOP and make things closer by the end. In 2022, Republicans didn’t secure the House majority until two weeks after the election, a combination of gun-shy network forecasts and slow counts in California.

For more about the close races to watch, keep reading …

Abortion, ranked choice, and gerrymandering are also on the ballot

Voters in nine states will decide whether to add abortion rights to their constitutions today, the most hard-fought of the year’s many ballot measures.

Democrats support each abortion measure, but Republicans have approached them very differently from state to state. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has led a campaign against Amendment 4, trying to keep it and Amendment 3 (marijuana decriminalization) below the 60% threshold needed for passage. In Arizona, Republicans are more hopeful that voters separate down-ballot races from Proposition 139; Senate nominee Kari Lake voted no, telling reporters of her choice after casting an early ballot, but she didn’t emphasize it in her own campaign.

In New York, Republicans have rallied against Proposition 1, which Democrats call the Equal Rights Amendment, by warning that it would obliterate legal distinctions on gender. In Nebraska, there are two competing abortion measures — one that would put the current 12-week ban in the state constitution, and one that would create an abortion right through fetal viability. That’s not the only place where voter confusion could be decisive. In Ohio, Republicans wrote the official language for an anti-gerrymandering ballot measure to say that it would enforce “gerrymandering,” re-defining the term (which means legislators drawing their own seats) to warn that an independent commission would be taking power from voters.

Voters’ powers could change in seven other states, where they will decide whether or not to allow some form of ranked-choice voting; in Arizona, Republicans are pushing a measure to ban it and require partisan primaries. Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, and Oregon are all considering whether to adopt a version of what Alaska has used since 2022 — itself on the ballot again this year, as Republicans try to get rid of the “top four” system that helped Democrats win back the state’s House seat

For more on the ballot measure campaigning, keep reading …

Polls

The final polling in the race for president shows the closest contest between the major parties since 2012, a year when Democrats out-ran the data. But that was a far more predictable election, with Mitt Romney facing few serious paths to 270 electoral votes, and an electorate of fewer than 130 million people. This year, the possibilities are much wider and forecasters are struggling to make confident pronouncements about even individual states.

By tomorrow morning, this poll result will live in eternity or infamy. Pollster Ann Selzer built a strong national reputation for nailing the last-minute movement in Iowa in its caucuses and its general elections. She put Donald Trump at 48% in the GOP race this year, and he won with 51% of the vote; she gave Trump a 7-point lead in the 2020 race with Joe Biden, and he won by 8 points. Here, she sees a massive gender gap in Harris’s favor, including a 28-point lead with female independents, up from the 8-point Hillary Clinton win with those Iowa voters in 2016. If Harris wins with that factor, Selzer called it. And if it doesn’t materialize, everyone else was right not to see it.

Four years ago, according to national exit polling, Joe Biden won Pennsylvania’s Latino voters by 42 points. That represented a 10-point decline from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance with Latinos in the state, and a 20-point decline from Barack Obama in 2012. This polling finds Harris doing worse with Pennsylvania Latinos than any modern presidential candidate, as the demographic makes up a bigger share of the state’s voters than ever. But Democrats would take that given the extensive Republican efforts to win their votes this year. It makes the campaign’s new suburban math a little easier, and it got better after Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. Nearly three-quarters of Pennsylvania Latinos, including some who will vote for Trump, now say there’s anti-Latino racism in the Republican campaign.

Coverage of the race for Michigan has asked and re-asked one big question: Can Harris put together a winning coalition while underperforming with the Arab-American vote? The final MIRS poll, one of a few state surveys that found incremental movement toward Harris in the final week, shows how it could happen. Harris has fixed most of her problems with Black voters, losing just 9% of them to Trump, similar to Joe Biden’s performance in 2020, and she runs 2 points better with white voters than Biden. Trump leads with the rest of the electorate — a likely quirk of the small sample, but a decent study in what would happen if the Arab-American vote surged toward Trump. (Independent polling, conducted for Muslim and Arab-American groups, finds Trump winning at most half of that vote.)

Ads

• Harris for President, “Brighter Future.” The Democrats’ closing TV ad makes no mention of Donald Trump whatsoever. Harris, narrating the spot, promises to move on from “politics that have driven fear and division” — that’s Trump — but focuses more on bipartisan outreach and a pledge to bring down costs for “groceries and housing and prescriptions.” It’s the Harris campaign in miniature, sticking to the topics that play best with voters and leaving the viewer able to name at least one or two of her policies.
• Donald J. Trump for President 2024, “We Fight.” If Trump wins the election on a surge of new male voters, it will be the payoff after months of messaging and organizing aimed directly at them. In Joe Biden’s America, this ad warns, there is “no prize for the guy who works up every day to do his job.” The crises of the early 2020s are recapped as uncontrolled borders, crime, and censorship: “If we dared to speak the truth, it was called hate speech.” Images of Trump raising his fist after being shot in the air, and shouting “fight, fight, fight,” close the ad, picking up a theme that the Republicans built their convention on, and kept pushing even as Biden quit the race and Harris rebooted it.
• DSCC and Bob Casey for Senate, “Four Candidates.” The final ad for Democrats in Pennsylvania’s Senate race does many things, all of them encouraging to Republicans. It mentions the two conservative third party candidates on the ballot, informing voters that they have more options who have not, like Republican Dave McCormick, “sold us out to China.” It mentions that Casey “stood with Donald Trump” to put tariffs on China. Casey and his late father have won Pennsylvania elections since the 1960s, but the implication here is that the senator needs to do slightly more to grow beyond the Democratic base.

Scooped!

The best new outlet of the cycle was 404 Media, the pirate ship run by Vice’s old tech reporters after that company’s bad management sunk it. Jason Koebler’s reporting on tech-based election based chicanery gave us scoops about misleading PAC messaging to Michigan’s Muslim and Jewish voters, AI slop images that misled people about the Hurricane Helene response, and finally a look at how election officials who want to push names off the rolls are now asking if error-prone AI can help. Seeing into the dark future — the best way to get scoops.

Next

• 42 days until the Electoral College votes
• 62 days until Congress certifies the presidential election
• 76 days until Inauguration Day
• 728 days until the 2022 midterm elections

David Recommends

Don’t think of all the how-to-watch-results guides as competition. Think of them as complements, with different rundowns and theories about what matters. The Dispatch’s pregame look at the entire ballot in every state, and what technology people will be using to fill them out, pairs nicely with Politico’s hour-by-hour guide, Ettingermentum’s list of key counties, and the New York Times’s omni-guide to polling. All helpful for making your own election night Google Sheet of benchmark results. (If you don’t have one you can cheat with FiveThirtyEight.)

“To restore trust in news we need radical innovation and visionary leaders — particularly at the handful of great, legacy outlets positioned to survive,” Justin Smith, Semafor’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in an open letter to Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. The letter was published shortly after the Post refused to endorse a candidate in the presidential election, a decision that Bezos said came in response to falling trust in news media.