With less than a week to go, the 2024 elections are looking incredibly close.
Happy Halloween … and happy week before Election Day. There are just six days left before the 2024 polls officially close. (Millions of Americans already have voted by mail or early in person.) Today, we will offer our final look at where things stand. To bring a Halloween theme into the mix, we will also examine the concept of so-called “ghost voters” — voters who may not be showing up in pre-election surveys — and what they may mean for the election outcome.
There is a lot to cover, so let’s get to it.
It’s Hard To Find A Poll Outside The Margin Of Error
At least a dozen polls have been released in the last 10 days gauging who is ahead in the presidential race. Three of these surveys showed Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in an actual statistical tie. The rest were either within the margin of error or just skirting it. As a result, the RealClearPolitics (RCP) average of national polls has Trump ahead by a mere 0.4 percentage points nationally, well within the margin of error.
On Oct. 30, 2016 – this date in the 2016 election cycle – Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by 4.3 percentage points in the RCP average. She lost. On Oct. 30, 2020, President Joe Biden was 7.9 percentage points ahead of Trump. He won, but by a far smaller margin.
Battleground state polls also are remarkably close, even with a loose definition of “battleground.” For example, RCP lists Texas as a battleground. Trump leads by seven points in the RCP average in that state. (In 2020, he won Texas by 5.5 points.) RCP also considers Minnesota a battleground state. Harris is up by 4.7 percentage points there. The last time Minnesota voted for a Republican for president was 1972. In a newsletter this morning, the analysts at FiveThirtyEight said, “The election will likely come down to seven key swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.” Not one of these seven states has an RCP average that is well outside of the margin of error.
Like pollsters, economic analysts believe the presidential race is a toss-up. “Stock, bond and currency markets have priced in a Donald Trump victory over Kamala Harris,” Politico’s “Morning Money” reported today. “But as Hillary Clinton can attest, markets have been wrong before, and even trading savants like Citadel founder and GOP megadonor Ken Griffin are now saying the race is basically a coin flip.”
Moving to the Senate RCP averages, several toss-up races also are virtually tied:
- Michigan: in an open seat that is currently held by Democrats, the Democratic candidate, Elissa Slotkin, is leading by 2.5 percentage points;
- Nebraska: incumbent Sen. Deb Fischer (R) is leading by just 2.3 percentage points;
- Ohio: incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) is leading by just one percentage point;
- Pennsylvania: incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D) is leading by 1.6 percentage points; and
- Wisconsin: incumbent Tammy Baldwin (D) is leading by just 0.4 percentage points.
There are four toss-up Senate races where the polling average is outside of the margin of error:
- Arizona, where it looks like Ruben Gallego will hold an open seat for Democrats (he is four points ahead in the RCP average);
- Montana, where it appears Sen. John Tester (D) will lose his seat (he is down 6.5 percentage points in the RCP average); and.
- Nevada, where incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen (D) is running 4.7 percentage points ahead of her opponent; and
- Texas, where incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R) is 4.2 percentage points ahead of his Democratic opponent, Rep. Colin Allred. (Sen. Cruz narrowly edged out his 2018 opponent, Beto O’Rourke, by just 2.6 percentage points in 2018.)
West Virginia, where Sen. Joe Manchin is retiring, is not considered a toss-up race. Republicans are expected to easily take that seat from Democrats. If the GOP wrests those two seats from the Democrats, and does not lose Texas or Nebraska, they will take control of the Senate.
The race for control of the U.S. House of Representatives also is close. In fact, FiveThirtyEight gives Republicans a 52 percent chance of keeping control of the chamber. Democrats, meanwhile, have a 48 percent chance of becoming the party of leadership. The closest House races are: New York-19, California-45, Michigan-08, Washington-03, Alaska’s only congressional district, Oregon-05, and California-22. The leader in each of these races is up by 1.3 percentage points or less in their respective FiveThirtyEight averages.
The GOP Has The Edge On The Economy … But Will It Matter?
Throughout 2024, former President Trump has had the edge over his Democratic rival, whether it was President Biden or, now, Vice President Harris, on the question of who will better handle the economy. With voters saying the economy was their top issue of concern, that edge mattered quite a bit with rising inflation and high interest rates.
Not so anymore, at least for Democrats.
Earlier this month, Gallup reported that while 66 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters rate the economy as extremely important to their presidential votes, “far fewer Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters do.” In fact, only 36 percent of Democrats rate the economy as extremely important. The economy is not even in the top five issues for Democratic voters. They care more about the state of American democracy, the Supreme Court, abortion, health care, and education, in that order.
Still, the economy surely matters to some Democratic voters and for undecided independent voters. So, next, let’s look at how voters’ feelings about the economy portend actual election results.
In the years between 1968 and 2008, the outcome of the presidential election almost always reflected consumer confidence data. When the confidence rating was above 100 in these years, the incumbent party in the White House usually won. When it has been below 100, the party in power lost. Based on that history, Democrats were cheering this week when new consumer confidence numbers were revealed. Specifically, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index surged to 108.7 in October from 99.2 in September. That’s the biggest monthly gain since March 2021 and is above the all-important 100 mark.
While Democrats should cheer the improved consumer confidence reading, based on more recent election results, they might not want to put full stock in it as an indicator for 2024.
The 2020 and 2012 elections broke the prior 40 years’ mold. The final Conference Board consumer confidence rating in October 2020 was 101.7, but incumbent President Trump lost. President Barack Obama won reelection in 2012 even though the final Conference Board consumer confidence rating before the election was a mere 72.2. In October 2016, the final rating was 98.6 and the incumbent party (Democrats) lost. That election is the only one in the last 12 years where the consumer confidence rating portended the outcome.
What Are Ghost Voters And Who Will They Vote For?
In 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump outperformed the polls by earning a higher percentage of the popular vote than pollsters had predicted. This phenomenon gave rise to the concept of so-called invisible or “ghost voters” — people who either told pollsters they were voting for a candidate other than Trump or who were not captured by the surveys at all.
According to The New York Times, pollsters think they have worked out the problem this year and that national surveys will prove more accurate. “A major culprit was the failure to account for voters’ education levels, according to a report from a professional organization of public pollsters,” The Times said. “State level polls in particular that year overrepresented college-educated respondents and undercounted respondents without a college degree.”
Still, there is one problem for which pollsters cannot adjust: that their survey designs are based on past elections. Like generals in war, they are always using tools that were built for the last battle. This problem may be a significant one this year due to expected record voter turnout. No one knows who these new voters ultimately will prefer.
Democrats are hoping the ghost voter phenomenon benefits them this year, and analysts are giving them hope that it will. Pollster Celinda Lake told The Hill that Vice President Harris could benefit substantially from young women who have not voted before and are not being captured by many polls. Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, shares this sentiment. “I think we’re going to see a lot of women turn out to vote that have not been counted and may not actually even be registering in the polls,” he said last week. “We saw this in 2022.”
Still, pollster Lake conceded Trump also could continue to benefit from the ghost voter trend.
Could early voting trends indicate which party may benefit from the ghost voter phenomenon? Perhaps. According to AXIOS, more than 50 million Americans have already voted either in person or by mail. While it is impossible to know who these voters cast their ballots for, analysts are able to determine their partisan alliance. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 39 percent to 36 percent in early voting so far. The bad news for Democrats? According to The New York Times, even though they trail in early voting, Republicans are doing better than they were at this point in 2020 and, according to TIME, over the last few years, have registered more new voters than Democrats.
Still not sure which party will prevail next week?
Neither are we.