Hopium Election Night Notes #1 - It's A Close Election, and It Is Still Early
Happy Election Night all.
As I wrote to you today, we are likely to have significant results from only three battleground states tonight by midnight ET - GA, MI and NC.
I can understand if folks are frustrated and anxious. So much data, partial results, things moving around. Things look good, then not so good. It’s also very hard to know what is happening in any county until 100% of the votes are in. Small rural Trump counties get counted quickly. Many of our big urban counties will end up reporting late tonight which means Trump may lead most of the night in some of these states and then things will tighten up. Yes, ugh.
Folks I spoke to in the campaign and in the states today were very optimistic. Vibes were good. I remain very optimistic.
A few notes:
It is going to be a close election, and we may not know the outcome until Thursday or Friday.
Trump did not enter today either ahead in polling or the battleground early vote. Due to a strong week of polling all the major forecasters tipped back to Harris in recent days. Using TargetEarly we won the battleground early vote by 1.4 points, and did especially well in AZ, GA, MI, NE-2 and WI. The Trump campaign’s big drive to win the battleground early vote this time failed.
Remember while we have multiple paths to 270 our core path is MI, PA, WI and NE-2.
Senate races have been called for Alsobrooks in Maryland, Baldwin in Wisconsin and Josh Stein has won in North Carolina. One forecaster just called Virginia for us based on the outstanding vote.
The chat is not open on this post, and for those paid subscribers wanting to chat and compare notes keep working off the chat we started earlier this evening.
Keep calm, carry on, and more soon - Simon