With two weeks to go before Election Day, voters and commentators are alternately freaking out and projecting confidence about their preferred candidates. Dave Wasserman provides a coolheaded counterpoint to all the hubbub. Wasserman is a senior editor and elections analyst at the venerable Cook Political Report. His Twitter catchphrase, “I’ve seen enough,” signals a race’s conclusion for many political junkies, and perhaps no one knows more about the ins and outs of congressional districts. I spoke with him about why Kamala Harris still may prefer a lower-turnout election, why Democrats are gaining momentum for control of the House, and what he’s watching for on Election Night.
National and swing-state polls show Kamala Harris has lost a little momentum in the past couple of weeks, a point here and there. But it’s tough to sort out how much it means, and Democrats are prone to panicking over everything. I’m wondering whether you see this as a real shift or more like statistical noise.
There has been a very small shift toward Trump on average in these swing-state polls, and we’ve noticed a slight dip in Harris’s net favorability. That’s to be expected given that we’ve transitioned from Harris’s reintroduction into a more pitched-battle October race that is characterized by partisan trench warfare. I’ve been calling 2024 the Aladdin election because we’re in a whole new world from where we were three or six months ago. It was less than three months ago that Joe Biden was still the de facto Democratic nominee. Yet the notion that this was going to be a joy-filled magic-carpet ride for Harris was never realistic, and I think most Democrats understood that even as they were euphoric.
If anything, they were surprised the euphoria was happening at all. They didn’t expect it to last.
Look, Harris has achieved a remarkable brand turnaround. She went from a net favorability of negative 16 for the summer to dead even. And now we’ve seen her unfavorability tick up in these battleground states as Trump’s ad spending has taken its toll.
There are a few factors that explain why there’s not just a vibe shift but a transition from a very slight Harris lead to more like a tied race or perhaps even slight momentum for Trump. I think the first is Harris had a very favorable August with the Democratic convention and Trump flailing for a message to define her, whether it was questioning her ethnicity or her IQ. She had a very favorable September between her debate win and a Fed rate cut. But October was always bound to be harder because this is when the airwaves stop being polite and start getting real, to paraphrase MTV.
From Aladdin to The Real World.
Right. The ads Trump has run in October lean into the culture war. And what we have found in our polling is that the small slice of undecided voters have very negative views of both candidates, not unsurprisingly. They view Harris as too liberal and Trump as too erratic, but on average they trust Trump more than Harris to rein in inflation. And so the Trump anti-trans ad that highlights Harris’s support on the ACLU questionnaire for federal funds for gender reassignment plays into those undecided voters’ fear that Harris is too liberal, and it ends by talking about Trump cutting taxes and increasing workers’ paychecks. But I think the most potent element of that ad is its use of the logos of media outlets perceived to be left-leaning, whether it’s CNN or CNBC, to validate Trump’s claims and make a play for those undecided voters.
It’s commonly thought that Harris’s best path to victory is the “Blue Wall” Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, as opposed to the Sun Belt, where she’s doing slightly worse. If so, is that because there are fewer undecided voters in those places or because the demographics are more favorable to her there?
To be honest, I’m skeptical that we have a real handle on where these states stand in relation to one another because polls in Sun Belt states in the past ten years have underestimated Democrats slightly or been more on target, whereas polls in the northern battlegrounds have underestimated Trump by more. So for polling averages to have Harris up by one or a fraction of a point in the Great Lakes states and down by one or two in those Sun Belt states, I have very low confidence that Harris is meaningfully performing better in those Great Lakes states than in the Sun Belt states. It’s possible we’ll see a somewhat disjointed election result where there’s not a neat relationship between how these states vote.
I’ve talked to a bunch of pollsters and other analysts and have gotten their thoughts on how they’ve tried to fix the massive polling errors from 2016 and 2020 in these northern states. Do you have any confidence that they have done so effectively?
What pollsters are doing more this cycle is weighting, and I’m including our polls in this because we’ve used this methodology. More pollsters are weighting their samples to recall the vote in the 2020 election. Very few voters have actually changed their minds, so it’s no surprise that the results we’re seeing look a whole lot like the 2020 election.
Now, every pollster is making a somewhat different assumption about what the electorate is going to look like when all the votes are counted, and those assumptions may or may not be correct. It’s possible that Trump’s being underestimated yet again; after all, he’s polling much better this year than in 2016 or 2020. But it’s also possible that Democrats do have a superior ground game that will turn out more of their voters.
One metric I look to is the NBC polls that ask voters their interest in the election on a one-to-ten scale, and we’ve seen two NBC polls in a row now that show Republicans with a two-point enthusiasm advantage in the high 70s. That’s not all that meaningful — it’s well within the margin of error. But 79 percent of Republican voters rate their interest as at least a nine out of ten compared with 77 percent of Democrats. Harris has been able to close the gap since April, when the NBC poll found 70 percent of Republicans at nine out of ten compared with 65 percent of Democrats. Even a five-point gap could have led to a catastrophic result for Democrats up and down the ballot.
So now what we see is there’s interest in the election that’s on par with 2020 among partisans. I think it is a little bit lower among independents. Harris’s best-case scenario in my view is a slightly lower turnout where you have fewer white working-class voters show up, but that’s why Trump is dialing up the intensity level as he always does.
The whole Trump campaign seems predicated on this notion that it can turn out low-propensity voters through unorthodox means — outsourcing it to super-PACs. But we’ve seen that Trump is pretty good at getting people to vote who don’t vote regularly. So I guess the $64,000 question here is whether he can do it on an even grander scale than before.
Ultimately, Trump could get that high turnout he’s looking for even though the super-PACs he has enlisted don’t do an effective job of reaching them. Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk have next to no experience at persuading low-engagement universes and turning out low-engagement voters, yet Trump’s ads and his persona may be enough to turn out a very high rate of these voters without much direct contact.
I want to turn to the House. It feels like the race for control of it has been subsumed by the presidential and Senate elections, but there has been quite a bit of movement there lately. And you’ve highlighted the fact that GOP candidates are at a huge financial disadvantage to Democrats in a lot of places. So for people who haven’t been paying attention, where do things stand?
Democrats have a much better chance at flipping control of the House than they have of holding the Senate; that has been the case for a long time. This may be the first phase of the election where I think Democrats’ chances in the House may be on par or maybe a tiny bit better than their chances in the presidential race because of the money factor. Democrats have the ability in many of these races to dictate the narrative on the airwaves in the final three weeks of the race.
And that still matters? I always question the effectiveness of blanketing the airwaves with ads, but you draw a pretty direct correlation between House Democrats’ financial advantage and their odds. That doesn’t seem to always be the case in presidential and Senate races.
Right, because those are saturated. Now, there are Senate races where money has made a meaningful difference. Democrats have vastly outspent Sam Brown in Nevada, and that’s made a huge difference. Elissa Slotkin is being vastly outspent by Rogers in Michigan, and that may end up making the difference in that contest. But in the House, we’ve rarely seen this big a money differential between the parties. And Republicans, after 2022 and their underperformance relative to expectations, put a heavy emphasis on raising more hard dollars for their candidates. Because the dynamic then was that Republicans had a massive super-PAC advantage yet Democratic incumbents vastly outspent Republican challengers. And that’s why people like Slotkin and Abigail Spanberger held on to their seats.
So Republicans really wanted to shift more dollars to their candidates because candidates get better ad rates than super-PACs do. Dollars at the candidate level sometimes go three or four times further than a dollar spent by a super-PAC. So what happened? Well, that strategy has fallen flat. Republicans have not been able to get more money to their challengers, and part of that is their leadership turmoil. Mike Johnson is simply greener at the political aspect of the job, and Kevin McCarthy has spent much of the year on a vengeance tour against the Republicans who voted to get rid of him.
It’s generally not a good sign when that’s happening.
The Kevin McCarthy Schadenfreude is real here. McCarthy is confident that Republicans would not be in this predicament right now financially if he were still there. That said, the House is still very close, and when you add up all of our toss-ups, if the toss-ups broke evenly, Republicans would still have a very slight majority, an even slighter majority than the one they have today. The reason Republicans might keep the House is that their incumbents are still polling okay in New York — Mike Lawler, Marc Molinaro. In part, that’s impacted by Kathy Hochul and her unpopularity there. The House could take a while to know because of all these races in California in our toss-up column that will take weeks to count.
When we spoke before the midterms two years ago, I asked which race encapsulates the headwinds that Democrats were facing at the time; you said Oregon’s Sixth Congressional District. Democrats ended up doing quite a bit better than people were expecting, and Andrea Salinas, the incumbent in that district, won that race.
By about two and a half points, yeah.
So what would you say to the same question now: Which race encapsulates the entire thing?
Perhaps Pennsylvania’s Seventh District, Susan Wild versus Ryan Mackenzie. This seat ought to be very winnable for Republicans. Biden won by a fraction of a point in 2020, and it may very well go for Trump narrowly this year. Yet Mackenzie, the Republican nominee, has raised just a tiny fraction of what the Democratic incumbent has raised. And Democrats have aired an ad that mocks him for lying about his age on a dating profile. Incidentally, there’s a Democrat in California who has come under fire from Republicans for lying about his age by ten years on a dating app.
I guess that’s the age we live in.
Right.
Are you going to be active on Twitter after the polls close?
No, I never am on the big Election Nights.
Because people look to you in these moments, and we’ll have to do without, what will you be watching for? What are the early indicators that things may be going one way or the other?
North Carolina’s First District, Don Davis versus Laurie Buckhout, will be a key one to watch. This is a more rural seat in our toss-up column. So that’s the first true toss-up where we’ll perhaps have a decent handle on things. And then we’ve got Virginia Second and Virginia Seventh. If Democrats are winning Virginia-2, which is currently in our lean-R column, that’s a good sign that Democrats are headed for the House majority. But that would be an upset.
The Seventh District we just recently moved to toss-up. This is Eugene Vindman versus Derrick Anderson, and Vindman is not as natural a fit for this seat as Spanberger is. He does have the money, but he doesn’t have the rural appeal or the ties Spanberger worked hard to build. And Anderson is a stronger Republican candidate than Yesli Vega, whom Republicans nominated two years ago and who crashed and burned. But this is a seat Democrats need to hold, and if Republicans win it, that would be a good sign that they’re headed for the majority and perhaps even expanding it to a few seats.
Any other thoughts on the state of the races?
I just want to be totally clear on how I view the presidential race overall. I don’t think there’s a clear favorite, but the way I’d characterize it is that I see a few more warning signs for Harris at this point than for Trump.
That’s not going to please our audience.
I think the question in the final weeks is what kind of closing argument we hear from the prosecutor in this race. I actually think a big question is the extent to which January 6 becomes part of her closing argument. But I do think that Democrats right now may be misframing January 6 because when they cast it as a future-of-democracy issue, it resonates with Democrats but falls flat with independents, who don’t believe Trump represents this threat of backsliding into authoritarianism.
What independents do believe is that Trump generally sows chaos and could sow instability, and I think the issue has much more potency for Harris as a law-and-order issue — specifically, Trump’s pledge to pardon rioters who attacked police officers. Yet that was absent from Walz’s line of questioning in the VP debate, and it hasn’t been prominent in Harris’s messaging. So I’ll be watching to see whether that becomes more of an element in the final weeks.
Just to be clear on what you meant when you said “warning signs,” is that a mix of your looking at the data and your gut feeling about what’s resonating and what’s not?
Well, the warning signs are, No. 1, that undecided voters care even more about pocketbook issues than the rest of the electorate and they trust Trump more to rein in inflation. No. 2 is we’re still seeing Harris underperforming with Black voters and Hispanic voters. And then the third is that Trump is introducing new information about Harris in his late attack ads that cast her as a radical, whereas Democrats’ messaging against Trump, whether it’s Mark Milley, Mike Pence, or Liz Cheney, doesn’t really tell voters things they don’t already know about Trump. And we’re seeing Harris’s negatives tick up a little bit.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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