The Home Stretch: Here’s the election news for Nov. 3
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We’re on the 48-hour countdown to Election Day. While everyone’s day may be jam-packed with errands, football and family dinners, the candidates are still criss-crossing the battleground states in a last-ditch effort to reach every swing voter. Here’s what’s going on today.
Where is everyone?
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump will leapfrog through three states today, with rallies in Lititz, Pa., Kinston, N.C. and Macon, Ga. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance, will campaign in Raleigh, N.C., Aston, Pa. and Derry, N.H.
On the Democrat side, Vice President Kamala Harris will take her bid for the presidency to Michigan, where she will make appearances in Detroit — then locally in Livernois and Pontiac — and East Lansing today. Her VP pick, Gov. Tim Walz, will be in Atlanta, as well as Gwinnett County, Ga., and then head to North Carolina for an event in Charlotte.
Crunching the numbers
A lot of pollsters’ final polls of the cycle are popping up now, and most of them surveyed Pennsylvania — the likely tipping-point state of the Tuesday election.
Atlas Intel published their third swing state poll of the week yesterday, putting Trump up two points in Pennsylvania, 50-48, among likely voters. The NY Times/Siena final poll has the two candidates tied with 48% of the vote apiece, the same result as Morning Consult’s survey. And Muhlenberg College puts Harris ahead, 49-47.
As for Pennsylvania’s U.S. senate race between incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and Republican Dave McCormick, more than half a dozen polls give Casey the lead, falling somewhere between two and five points ahead of his opponent.
Nationally, several pollsters, including NBC News and Emerson College, have the race all tied up. Atlas Intel has a nationwide result of Trump +2, with a 50-48 split, while Morning Consult has Harris up two (49-47) and ABC News/Ipsos has Harris ahead three points (49-46).
And we can’t discuss polling without the biggest shock poll of the cycle, which came out of Iowa last night. J. Ann Selzer, considered by many to be the “gold standard” of Iowa polling, released their final survey of the season with Harris winning the state, 47-44. Iowa has gone red by eight or more points in both of Trump’s previous elections.
It looks like Tuesday will be a wild ride.
What’s going on?
About 72 million Americans have already voted in the 2024 general election. Here in Pennslyvania, almost 1,743,000 ballots have been cast.
In addition to determining the next resident of the White House, Tuesday’s election will reshape the U.S. House of Representatives. The Wall Street Journal has a look at a number of nail-biting races that could determine the look of our legislature for the next two years.
Harris made an appearance in the cold open of comedy program “Saturday Night Live” last night.
Live from New York, it's Saturday night.pic.twitter.com/qQ2IJdqqFA
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 3, 2024
Republican Federal Communications Commission commissioner Brendan Carr called Harris’s appearance “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.”
What’s everyone thinking?
Enjoy your Sunday afternoon with some opinion pieces from across the media landscape.
• In the New York Times, Ross DouthatDavid French and Bret Stephens collaborated for “A Second Trump Term? Three Conservative Columnists Unpack What Could Happen.” “The 2024 Republican nominee, is even in the national polls, is favored to win in betting markets and is poised to win a bigger share of the African American, the Latino and possibly the youth vote than the G.O.P. has at any point in our lifetimes. He’s assembled a team of future leaders that includes the author of a 2016 best-selling memoir about working-class dysfunction, the electric-car hero Elon Musk, a former rising-star Democratic congresswoman who switched parties to the G.O.P., a scion of the Kennedy family and more. He’s moved the Republican Party to the center on entitlements, same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization — and he is trusted more than his Democratic rival on the economy, immigration and foreign policy,” Douthat writes.
• Ellen Emerson White contributed to the Los Angeles Times with “I’ve written novels about a female president since the 1980s. I’m ready for fiction to become reality.” “So, as I slouched in front of an old Smith-Corona typewriter in my college dorm room, there were really no viable images of what it would look like to have a woman in the Oval Office. I was an enthusiastic politico who had been stuffing envelopes at the local Democratic Party headquarters since I was a child, so I figured that I Knew Things, and I could just make up what a candidate would need to be like, and how she could win. And when the book was published in the spring of 1984, I figured that sooner rather than later, a woman would win the presidency in the real world. I was wrong, of course. Years passed, then decades.”
•Columnist Megan McArdle responds to the week’s events with “Garbage scandal shows what happens when we hate half the country.” “This scandal matters little enough in itself; Biden will leave office in a few months, and Vice President Kamala Harris has said she “strongly” disagrees with criticizing people based on their votes. Yet it’s important because L’Affaire Garbage reflects something that’s poisoning our politics: an increasing tendency to demonize the other side’s voters along with their politicians. Post readers know how this plays out among Republicans, so I won’t belabor the litany of offensive MAGA comments. They might be less attentive to how it manifests among Democrats, some of whom seem to think they can make lasting political change by anathematizing Trump’s voters along with the man himself.”
• And the Des Moines Register’s editorial board has a pre-election plea, “Someone will win the election. It’s our job to accept when it’s over.” “But casting a ballot is not the end of a citizen’s responsibility. Orderly democracy demands that supporters of the losing candidate face facts and vocally or silently acknowledge that the other person will be sworn in in January. Put another way, it is appropriate to vigorously advocate for accurate counting of ballots and judicial review of potential irregularities. But when those processes are exhausted, the time to accept the result and stop sniping arrives. This isn’t the other usual editorial-board bromide to put aside our differences and come together after a bruising election. It’s an expression of severe alarm about already proclaimed insinuations — and in some cases loud declarations — that a certain outcome in the presidential race is presumptively illegitimate.”