T-4 Days: Election history lessons learned, or not?

I heard two interesting things in Dublin last night. One, nonsense. The other, a prescient history lesson. First, let's get the nonsense out of the way. An experienced financial markets professional emphatically stated that Donald Trump is winning and will win the US presidential election because early Republican voting is higher than the last election in 2020. Keeping it Dublin, that's like saying city centre pubs are doing much better business than in 2020. Cough...cough...pandemic. For regular readers of this 8-article election countdown series, you already know that in 2020 way more Democrats voted by mail (early) for health risk reasons, and way more Republicans voted on the actual election day as encouraged by their dear leaders. So, yes more Republicans should be voting early in 2024 than in 2020.

The second observation came from someone with serious historian qualifications and who was involved in Ireland's 2018 abortion (8th Amendment Repeal) referendum. She quite correctly asked the question whether a male-centric media in the US was making the same mistake as the male-centric Irish media in 2018. As a refresher, the expected super-tight 2018 referendum ended up in reality as a 66% landslide driven by huge female and youth turnout. Lesson learned, not really.

If you were doing a decent analytical job on the US election, you'd be looking very closely at the 2022 mid-term elections in the US where every House of Representative seat(435) in the nation and 35 Senate seats were up for grabs. The accepted pre-election wisdom from professional pollsters and the media was that a Republican 'red wave' would punish an unpopular(39% approval rating) Biden Democrat government as interest rates, inflation, the economy and stock markets (down 18% in 2022) inflicted pain on prospective voters. The actual vote was a stunning 'red fizzle' as the Democrats produced the best result by an incumbent governing party in 20 years. Instead of losing Senate seats they gained one. And, the House election meltdown of up to 35 lost seats ended up as a 7 seat haircut. Lesson learned? Here's one of the better US commentators, Simon Rosenberg, who actually correctly called the 2022 errors before election day:

“There was a massive media failure this cycle. The failure that just took place is more grave than the polling error [in 2020] because there were a lot of really smart people who basically misled tens of millions of people through their political commentary in the final few weeks.”

Rosenberg's more reliable methodology was not rocket science - "Real voting is more important than polling. The way you interpret an election is looking at how people vote.”

And in 2022, before the November elections there had been some very interesting voting action in the earlier summer months and post the historic reversal of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court. Nicole Narea of Vox summarised the under-appreciated "Roe wave" of real voting as follows:

Republicans had doubled down on a brand of politics that had just been twice rejected by the American people in 2020 and 2018. And a series of special elections that occurred over the summer showed a similar pattern, with Democrats significantly overperforming across House races in Nebraska, Alaska, Minnesota and New York. In Nebraska’s First District, for instance, the Democrat lost by less than 6 percentage points, compared to more than 20 percentage points in 2020. And Democrats won a House seat in Alaska for the first time in 50 years, defeating former Gov. Sarah Palin. In August, voters in deep-red Kansas also showed up in supercharged numbers to vote against a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed state lawmakers to further restrict abortion access following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe.

So, any real voting clues this time around? Well, regular readers will already know the gender gap is, if anything, expanding which hints at strong female voter engagement. The quantum of votes is less helpful as a guide vs 2020 for well-worn pandemic reasons. However, there have been a number of interesting votes in more recent times which look like the "real voting" Simon Rosenberg is analysing. Here are a few which caught the eye:

*June 2024 - In Ohio 6th District House elections the Trump-endorsed candidate in a deep red seat was expected to win by 29 points. The actual win margin was just 9 points.

*April 2024 - Special elections for two vacant seats in the Michigan House of Representatives flipped control back to Democrats

*April 2023 - Democrat-backed candidate Janet Protaswiecz wins Wisconsin Supreme Court election by a whopping 11 points over her conservative opponent.

In fact 2023 was an instructive post-Roe v Wade voting year. Democrat candidates over-performed in 24 of 30 special elections that year (Source: Five Thirty Eight). The founder of the high profile NYT/Five Thirty Eight polling firm, Nate Silver, blurted at the time. "It's not polling, it's real".

Of course, we know the female vote is bigger relative to the male vote but we still don't know how they will vote. The reality is pollsters might not know either. Because... if you're looking for the surreal, I did enjoy this update from the brilliant Heather Cox Richardson in her Letters From An American newsletter:

On the Fox News Channel’s?The Five?this morning, host Jesse Watters said that if he found out his wife “was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair…. That violates the sanctity of our marriage.” Christian pastor Dale Partridge posted: “In a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction. He is the head and they are one. Unity extends to politics. This is not controversial.” But, he added, “submission does have limits. A wife doesn’t need to submit to her husband in sin (in this case voting democrat).”

Well, folks, things are about to get real in 4 days.