State of the Election Notes: Close States, House and Senate Polls, and More

Close states over the years

As the time to decide the presidential election draws ever closer, the seven states we classify as toss-ups have dominated political discourse – and our own internal thinking – to perhaps an unhealthy degree.

On Wednesday evening, David Plouffe, a veteran Obama strategist who is now advising the Harris campaign, said all seven toss-up states were on track to be decided by one percentage point or less. At this point, we really wouldn’t be surprised if Plouffe’s prediction came true. However, we wanted to take a look back at history to see how common it was for decisions to be made with such narrow margins in so many states.

Table 1 considers presidential elections since 1976. We were a little more liberal with our criteria, looking at the number of states that were decided by 2 percentage points or less each year. This is partly due to the small sample size of states decided by less than one point: these elections had the most states in 2000, 5.

Table 1: States decided by 2 percentage points or less, 1976-2020

Compared to Barack Obama’s election, there were more marginal states in the Trump era: In 2012, Florida was the only state to land in Table 1, with 29 electoral votes. One advantage Democrats had during the Obama years was that the tipping point state (TPS in Table 1, rightmost column) voted to the left of the national popular vote in both elections: in both 2008 and 2012 it was Colorado, which Obama won by 9 and 5 points respectively. In 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin, the tipping point state, was decided by less than a point — and could well be again. Ron Brownstein, writes for Atlanticnoted our research on presidential “turning points” and raised the possibility that Trump may not have as large an advantage in the Electoral College this year as he has in the past.

As obvious as it may sound, Joe Biden was able to win in 2020 by reversing Trump’s advantage in nearby states. In 2016, Trump won four of the nearest states, equal to 75 electoral votes, while Hillary Clinton won just two, equal to 14 electoral votes. We’d also like to note that Clinton’s states, Minnesota and New Hampshire, saw notable swings to the Democrats in 2020, and Harris would be in for a potentially disastrous night if either came very close.

While the presidential winners have claimed the majority of states close to them since 2008, this was generally not the case before. For example, in 1984 and 1988, when Republicans won handily, Republicans built such a lead across the board that they could easily afford to lose the only states they were close to (Minnesota in 1984 and Washington State in 1988). . Conversely, competitive races have led to situations in which presidential losers claim narrower states. Despite his narrow loss to Jimmy Carter, we were struck by Gerald Ford’s relative strength in Table 1: In 1976, 11 states were decided by 2 points or fewer, the most of any year we looked at, and he won 8 of them. Four years later, the peripheral states once again prevailed decisively against Carter – he won one of the seven states – although the list of states was important: most of the states that Ronald Reagan narrowly won that year were in the South and were heavily favored in 1976 Carter.

If we were to redo this table after next week’s election, we would be surprised if the tipping point, whatever it ends up being, isn’t decided by less than 2 points. It would certainly be a historical anomaly, at least in modern times, to have three consecutive elections in which the tipping point was so close, but it is another measure that points to the competitive nature of national elections today.

Quick hits that last for days

– Michigan was Joe Biden’s best state of the seven key swing states and North Carolina was Donald Trump’s best state. Another sign of the overall competitiveness of this race is that neither Harris nor Trump, as far as we can tell, appear to have or should have thrown away their lowest-hanging fruit in key states. In North Carolina, we were curious to see if there would be any obvious signs of early turnout issues in Western North Carolina due to Hurricane Helene. Take a look at this turnout map from Prof. Michael Bitzer of Catawba College if you’re curious – turnout in the area didn’t look significantly different than other parts of the state.

– A possible positive sign for Republicans is that the general votes in the House of Representatives have moved a bit in their direction amid the close and hard-fought presidential election. These are polls that typically ask voters whether they support a Democrat or a Republican in their race for the House of Representatives. Different averages show different results: RealClearPolitics now has Republicans about a point ahead, while FiveThirtyEight is about even, but both have shown slight movement among Republicans recently. We’re not sure what to make of this, if anything, but if Republicans end up outperforming expectations in the House and Senate races, that might be an indication. From the House’s perspective, it is also possible for one side to win a majority in the House without winning a majority of votes cast: Democrats did so in 1942 and Republicans did so in 1996 and 2012. The popular vote in the House , once fully calculated, should also be adjusted to account for uncontested races or districts where two members of the same party are running against each other in the general election, as is sometimes the case in states with the first two area codes such as California and Washington. This will be something to consider once all results are certified.

– Speaking of the House of Representatives: There were a few impartial polls in certain districts. Perhaps the best result for Democrats was Rep. Matt Cartwright (D, PA-8) leading businessman Rob Bresnahan (R) 50-43% in his Trump-won northeastern Pennsylvania district in an Inside Elections/Noble Predictive Insights poll ) was survey. Trump trailed Harris there by 49-46%, matching Trump’s margin in 2020 – that would be a good result for Harris if it held, as this covers Biden’s home territory of Scranton, so some decline would be expected there with Biden to Harris’ shift. Emerson College saw close races in a few other places: Tom Barrett (R) led by 2 points in MI-7, an open seat that Republicans see as one of their best chances to win, while Rep. Yadira Caraveo (D, CO-8) led by 2 points in another toss-up race. Another poll that contradicts a recent rating change we made was Rudy Salas (D) leading Rep. David Valadao (R, CA-22) by 2 points; We’d still be slightly surprised if Valadao lost. Overall, we would say these polls are better for Democrats than the general voting trend mentioned above suggests. Adam Carlson, a former Democratic pollster who has done a solid job aggregating polls this cycle, recently looked at presidential numbers in House districts using publicly released nonpartisan polls and found an average presidential vote drop of just under 1.5 Points to the right from the actual district level numbers for 2020 to the results of the surveys. That suggests a political environment that’s slightly less blue than 2020, but quite similar – in other words, probably better for Democrats than what the generic vote movement showed, although the comparison isn’t quite the same (the generic vote measures the voting intention of the House of Representatives). Carlson’s comparison focused on the president’s performance at the House floor.

— There were some poll results that stood out to us in the presidential/Senate elections in the industrial north. The general trend throughout the cycle was that Democratic Senate candidates were ahead of Democratic presidential candidates in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, if not necessarily in vote share, then at least in margin over their Republican rivals. But some surveys came to a different result at the end of the election campaign. A Susquehanna poll in Michigan showed Harris up 52-47% – a great poll for Harris there compared to some others – but Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D, MI-7) was only ahead 48-47% former Rep. Mike Rogers, her Republican rival. Meanwhile, a CNN/SSRS poll showed another strong showing for Harris in Wisconsin, up 51-45% over Trump, but Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) was ahead of businessman Eric Hovde by just 49-47% ( R). . To be clear, these are outliers, but they remind us of something from 2016. The last Marquette University Law School poll in Wisconsin that year showed Hillary Clinton ahead of Trump 46% to 40%, but former Sen Russ Feingold (D) Only 45-44% ahead of Senator Ron Johnson (R) as his race became increasingly close down the stretch. The poll did not show that either Trump or Johnson won, which was ultimately the case, but the poll suggested that Johnson did better in the Senate race than Trump did in the presidential race, which was also the case. That being said, Harris was up 50-49% and Baldwin was up 51-49% in this year’s final Marquette poll, which better reflects other polls this year. The lion’s share of the data suggests that Democrats are doing slightly better at the Senate level than at the presidential level to the extent that there is a difference between the presidential and Senate races in these three battlegrounds, although Baldwin’s performance is similar over time most likely the presidential election. Could any of these Republican Senate candidates do better than Trump in the industrial northern states? That would be a surprise, but we wanted to at least acknowledge the possibility, as these surveys show.