Washington’s political class is grappling with an uncomfortable, and unprecedented, reality: This is the most unpredictable election of their careers.
The presidential race is statistically tied in all seven battleground states, making a clean Donald Trump or Kamala Harris sweep — or something in between — about equally likely. Republicans face good odds of flipping the Senate but can’t rule out the possibility that Democrats pick up less-than-ironclad GOP seats in Texas or Florida. And while control of the House often reflects the top-of-the-ticket outcome, strategists on both sides of the aisle are girding for a surprise.
Never in modern political history has there been so much uncertainty heading into Election Day — with such a wide array of possible outcomes.
“The only intellectually honest answer is to say: I don’t know,” said Douglas Heye, a veteran GOP strategist and former communications director for the Republican National Committee. “Everything I see contradicts itself.”
Patti Solis Doyle, a Democratic strategist and a former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton in 2008, said it’s the most unpredictable election of her more than three decades of working on presidential campaigns.
“Normally I would say that the House goes where the presidential goes. That’s sort of the standard,” Solis Doyle said. “But I don’t think that’s the case here. In some of these battleground states where it’s tied, you see some of the Senate races going either D or R, full on, and it’s befuddling.”
“I don’t think anybody knows how this will turn out, and people who tell you they do know, I think, are lying to you or are drinking the Kool-Aid,” she added.
Strategists on both sides of the aisle attribute the uncertainty around what will happen come Tuesday in large part to an intractably divided electorate — with uncharacteristically little obvious movement in the polls. Among the unknowns: Will Trump peel away a couple percentage points of young Black men? Will Harris make inroads with a small number of Republican women? How big will the gender gap be between young men and young women? And, importantly, how does it all add up?
“Do I think a lot of Republicans are going to vote for Kamala Harris? No way,” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign in Wisconsin. But if Harris can get 2 or 3 percent of Republicans to vote for her “that’s going to make a difference” in a state like Wisconsin, which will likely be won by just 10,000 or 20,000 votes, he said.
“Because of how close it is, everything matters. Every demographic matters,” he added.
While certain states at this point seem to strategists more likely to go to one candidate over another, the polls in the seven states are a complete tossup, with neither candidate leading by more than 3 points in The New York Times’ polling average. Because of that, strategists on both sides of the aisle say at this point they wouldn’t be surprised if either candidate won any given state — or ran the table to an Electoral College rout.
Though the conventional wisdom tends to say Trump’s support is undercounted in the polls, many experts are warning that may not be the case. If, as the Times’ Nate Cohen notes, the state-level polling error this year is the same as it was in 2022, Harris would win every swing state save for Georgia, swapping out the Peach State from Joe Biden’s electoral coalition for a win in North Carolina. But if polling error this year replicates 2020, it means a clean sweep for Trump. That’s a 77-vote Electoral College vote swing.
And on Saturday, strategists were thrown another curve ball. A gold-standard poll out of The Des Moines Register in Iowa — which isn’t a swing state — found Harris up 3 points in the state, suggesting an unusual amount of strength for the vice president among women, and particularly those who are older or identify as independent.
“Let’s be clear that in a very divided country, a small little break of one to two points in either candidate’s wave could equate to a massive Electoral College political tsunami,” said Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and former Trump administration appointee.
That uncertainty exists down ballot as well. Republicans seemingly had the inside track to taking the upper chamber, starting the cycle with the luxury of being almost entirely on offense. And with Democrat-turned-independent Joe Manchin retiring in West Virginia, a guaranteed one-seat pickup for Republicans, the GOP needed to only win the presidency — or, failing that, flip one additional seat — to control the chamber.
But Republicans have struggled to be able to put away that final state. Their best bet is — finally — taking down Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), where Republicans have been so confident of their victory in a little over a week that they’ve canceled some major ad buys. But the FiveThirtyEight polling average in Montana has the race still competitive — a five point lead for Republican Tim Sheehy — that chamber control is no sure thing.
At one extreme, Republicans could take down Tester, and then run a sweep — or something close to it — in the other core battleground Senate races they’re trying to flip in Ohio, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Arizona, putting them at a majority in the mid-50s. At the other, Tester could pull off a surprise win — a not-impossible feat in a small state — and Democrats could defend their other, non-West Virginia battlegrounds, and maybe even pick up a seat in Texas or Florida, two seats where the Republican incumbent is favored but not a sure bet.
That scenario would, in essence, be a supersized version of Democrats’ overperformance in 2022. Two years ago, they were favored to lose the chamber, especially with an unpopular President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. But after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats actually netted a seat in the Senate, flipping Pennsylvania and defending their challenging map — something those on the left are hoping will happen again.
“I think that the 2024 polls are suffering from 2022-itis, meaning they’re yet again not measuring the energy, the undercurrent, of how women feel around reproductive rights,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. “We have seen that post-Dobbs, the party that has been overperforming has been Democrats, time and again in every single election, special and otherwise, Democrats have overperformed.”
And then there’s the House. The number of competitive House seats has generally decreased since the 1990s — from 173 districts within five percentage points of the national presidential vote, as measured by the Partisan Voting Index, down to 86 this year, according to a Brennan Center analysis. But of those, only about two dozen seats are true tossups.
Those House seats could all break one way and give either party a solid majority — or either party could eke out a majority of just a couple seats, like Republicans have had this chamber.
And strategists are fully prepared to see an array of mixed results down the ballot.
In Arizona, for instance, Democrats appear poised for victory in the Senate race with Rep. Ruben Gallego polling well ahead of Republican Kari Lake, could flip or tie control of the state legislature and could take over the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors for the first time in recent memory — even as those on both sides of the aisle feel like a Trump win in the state is slightly more likely than a Harris one.
“I think you’ll get a lot of conflicting signals,” said Chuck Coughlin, a longtime Republican political consultant in the state who left the party in the Trump era. “Maybe the Democrats take control of the chamber out here too, maybe take over the county board of supervisors, but Trump still wins the state. That’s crazy.”
There’s only one thing political operatives feel certain about: that the presidency, and control of Congress, won’t be decided Tuesday night.
“This election is like freshman year of high school, full of anxiety, dreading each and every morning you wake up wondering what indignity and ugliness you were going to face today, and it seemed like it would never end,” said Barrett Marson, a GOP strategist in Arizona. “But eventually, as we all know, you come out on the other side. Scarred for life, but you survive.”
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