With the hours ticking down to Election Day, nervous political obsessives are watching every single poll, attempting to glean some new information that goes beyond “The race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is very close.” But what if those polls are off again? This possibility concerns Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, who is one of the most astute observers of American elections. (Among other things, he was early to warn of Democrats’ big problems with white working-class voters and to observe that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock had a real chance to win their Senate races in Georgia.) I spoke with him about where he sees the race heading, the importance of abortion referendums to the outcome, and what makes him nervous about polling after two significant misses in a row.
On October 23, you wrote an article with the headline “It’s Close, But the Signs Aren’t Good for Harris.” I’m wondering if that’s still your basic view of the election a few days out.
I think the headline was a little bit overstated, in retrospect. I think, overall, the polls are close — all point to a very close race. But if you look at the bigger picture and everything else surrounding the race — I think to the extent we’re going to rely on vibes, they’re better for Trump. I think Trump’s had a couple rough news cycles since then, but I still think, on balance, once you get past the polls — which, again, point to a very close race — the way I might put it is I’d rather be playing his hand than hers.
And why is that?
Well, you look at what the campaigns are doing beyond what the polls say. Harris went to Texas, which I thought was perhaps an encouraging sign for her campaign, but he’s doing things like going to Coachella …
And you mentioned the Madison Square Garden rally in your piece. Of course, that didn’t end up going so well for Trump.
No. But these are the types of things you do when you think things are going well and you’re trying to maybe win the popular vote or save some House seats.
The counterpoint to that, though, is that Trump projects crazy confidence at all times, and his campaign does the same.
And that’s fair. I had the line, which with Trump is only a half-joke, that maybe he just always wanted to play the Garden.
The way it played out does give me some pause, or some additional pause, I guess. But I still think I’d rather have his hand than hers. You look at what’s going on with early voting in Nevada, which is hard to read stuff into. But Jon Ralston, who’s accidentally forgotten more about early voting in Nevada than I have ever known, is pretty bearish on Democrats. And he is not that bearish that often.
It’s a commonly held view among analysts that his analysis on this is the only one that matters.
Part of it is that Jon’s just really good at it and he’s done it a long time and he’s an honest broker, but part of it is........