What Democrats Should Pay Attention To While Watching The Election

The state of the 2024 election as best the professional polls and good-faith pundits see it.

There are some interesting developments of party realignment going on:

• This election may have high turnout. Purely anecdotal, but I live in Missouri and I tried to early vote at 2:39pm on Tuesday afternoon, and the line for early voting was like 150 people. I did not want to wait that long, so I left and came back Thursday and there was a line of about 100 people.

• I believe the underestimated, quiet constituency of voters that polls are undercounting this cycle is suburban women. My vibe check is that suburban women will beat voting expectations in defense of abortion rights in their states, and, while they’re at it, many moderate women, even those whose husbands are MAGA, will vote against Trump. Maybe this is a bubble thought, but it just doesn’t seem like women, conservative and liberal alike, are eager to vote themselves backwards in rights by electing an adjudicated rapist to be the one who appoints more Supreme Court justices who will find novel ways to make it more likely they die from pregnancy complications. Maybe I huffed too much hopium this morning, but it’s my hunch that that is an unpopular proposition Republicans have settled on.

• Bellwethers in Kansas and Nebraska? Recent polls in these two states have raised eyebrows showing Trump winning, but with a noticeable drop in support from 2020. Kansas currently has a Democratic governor in her second term, and in the Nebraska Senate race polls suggest independent Dan Osborn is in striking distance to defeat incumbent Republican Deb Fischer, which would make the calculus of Senate control much more interesting on election night. Watch the results of these states because if Trump has lost a lot of normie Republican and conservative support over January 6th, his criminality, and his blowhard chaos personality, these Great Plains states could show it well before Pennsylvania muddles through processing all of its early votes. Trump won Kansas by 15 points in 2020, but I’m interested if he grows or shrinks in 2024.

• Massive Phoenix is close to being nearly big enough and blue enough to keep Arizona a reliably Democratic Southwest state like Colorado and New Mexico. Democrats have obviously been boosted by the Arizona GOP nominating some of the craziest candidates in the nation over the last couple election cycles — Kari Lake and Blake Masters have stood out nationally for their extreme weirdness — so Republicans ought to be worried that their inability to conduct serious primaries in the state has given Arizona swing voters a liberal muscle memory of repeatedly voting Democratic.

• RFK Jr. has lost several court cases going all the way up to the Supreme Court now to get his name off the ballot in swing states because it’s not the law’s fault RFK Jr. decided to run and get his name on a bunch of ballots and then sell-out to Trump for a job and want to undo his presidential campaign. The Trump campaign will surely lament that in the vital swing states RFK Jr. will get more than zero votes of the low-information and protest voters who might otherwise vote for Trump. Unfortunately, Jill Stein is pulling away liberal votes from Harris, and far leftist voters who are protesting over Gaza and Hamas are committing political suicide. With polling so tight, either spoiler third-party candidate could affect the outcome. 

• This election is another experiment in North Carolina’s confounding state politics. Its demographics suggest it should be bluer than it is. Its northern neighbor Virginia has turned into a very dependable blue state, and its big cities are seeing much growth that usually attracts and cultivates college-educated voters who are dramatically swinging toward Democrats. But NC hasn’t voted for a Democratic candidate since Obama’s first term, despite electing a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, twice. This year Republican governor candidate Mark Robinson’s campaign exploded into a supernova of personal scandal, so Democrats are almost certainly going to keep the governor’s mansion for a third term. Will having this cycle’s worst gubernatorial candidate who Trump called “Martin Luther King on steroids” depress Republican turnout, encourage ticket-splitting, and help flip it blue?

• Texas is another state to watch. Obama lost it by 16 in 2012, Clinton lost it by 9 in 2016, and Biden lost it by 5.5 in 2020, so how close will Harris get this year? The trajectory of the previous three elections suggests she should be within a point or two of Trump, and Senator Ted Cruz, who was a J6 insurrectionist and has always been very unlikeable even among his fellow Republicans, might be a drag on the ticket as his campaign desperately clings to some of the most hateful transgender wedge issues in the nation. I wouldn’t bet money Harris has a chance of winning it this time around, but, if she gets within a point or two, the GOP should be getting pretty nervous for 2028. A Republican victory in the Electoral College is imaginably impossible without Texas and its 40 electoral votes. And, even if Republicans can keep it red in 2028, it’ll be a big deal that Republicans have to spend money campaigning in a giant state they’ve taken for granted for a generation.

• Will there be a new blue wall in the sunbelt? Georgia was a very unexpected prize for Democrats in 2020 and 2022 thanks to Trump’s toxic meddling, and Democrats have also gotten lucky that Arizona Republicans have likely become the craziest state GOP party in the country. Is a blue sunbelt wall of Georgia (16), North Carolina (16), and Arizona (11) in the making? It could replace the blue rust belt wall of Pennsylvania (19), Michigan (15), and Wisconsin (10), whose whiter demographics might make them increasingly uphill battles for Democrats to keep. The much greater racial diversity and population growth in the blue sunbelt suggests these states, at least on paper, are trending blue. If Texas flips blue, it could almost replace the entire blue rust belt wall by itself.

• Republican social policies are feared like the plague by young women. The conventional wisdom is building that the political leanings of Gen Z women are diverging further left than Gen Z men, and the Trump campaign has bet big on Trump’s ability to grow his appeal amongst young men, particularly with young men of color, whose traditional support for Republicans has been all but politically negligible. Democrats have been extremely deaf and mute on young men’s issues, so Trump has made fast cultural inroads. However, Trump’s personality and his gutting of Roe V. Wade has almost certainly repelled many more young women toward Harris than attracted young men to him, and women are much more likely voters than young men to begin with. There are also just numerically more women than men in America. Republicans are doubling down on the smaller, less likely to vote gender of Gen Z when they could just try not being sexist, perverted creeps obsessed with women’s bodies and reproductive rights. But it remains to be seen if women will be as energized this election as Democrats are banking on.

• The last two elections have been decided on the extreme margins in a few states, so it’s quite possible relatively tiny developments could be consequential. Trump going on a bunch of podcasts to win over the kind of young men who idolize Joe Rogan and Elon Musk could make a positive difference for him, as could Tony Hinchcliffe’s hack joke about Puerto Rico being an island of trash piss off just enough Hispanic voters in Pennsylvania to lose the state. Harris’s campaign working with Republicans like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Joe Walsh could peel off just enough college-educated conservatives to keep the rust belt blue wall, or Trump’s attack ads against trans people could scare off just enough suburban conservatives from ticket-splitting at the top of the ballot. And, of course, there could be a surge in support for either candidate that polls are just not picking up, such as a whole bunch of first-time rural voters who love the MAGA call for patriarchy, or a blue wave of Gen Z young women who will be voting single-issue on abortion from now on until some form of Roe V. Wade is enshrined in the law.

• Miami is getting redder and redder. I predict that Democrats in the state will assist by recognizing their state is a contender for the most climatically fucked state in the Union, and moving out before all the homes are uninsurable and underwater with a couple category 5 direct hits on Miami and Tampa. Florida will get redder and redder as climate denialists and conspiracists refuse to leave and get more militant about resisting the government’s “hurricane machines,” but Florida’s population might peak. Maybe not dramatically by 2030, but I’m intrigued to speculate what Florida’s electoral power might look like after the 2040 census. The state has a lot of great places to live and has attracted millions of people for decades, but the oceans are just getting warmer and warmer while the hurricane season is getting longer and more intense. But watch this time around to see whether Florida has become a lost cause for Democrats, or if Harris’s big tent, anti-authoritarian coalition can bring back the Obama voters who carried Florida twice

Feel free to comment if you feel some of my analysis is off, or if I’ve been huffing a little too much hopium! Anything I’m missing that I should pay more attention to? At least as far as polling suggests, Kamala Harris seems to have many more credible paths to 270 Electoral College votes than Trump, and you’d want to be Harris in this race. 🥃

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