The 2024 election edition

Welcome, DC Diary readers, to the last edition of this newsletter before Tuesday night’s election. Most polls still have the presidential race at a dead heat between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Pennsylvania remains the lynchpin, as the paths for the respective candidates appears to be the Rust Belt and Pennsylvania for Harris, and the Sun Belt and Pennsylvania for Trump. Each campaign is pointing to data that they think gives them an advantage tomorrow.

Trump’s team published a memo Monday, for example, pointing out that early vote numbers suggest turnout among urban voters and women is down significantly in the seven swing states compared to 2020. They also take solace in the fact that their voter registration efforts have eaten into Democratic advantages in these same states. Republicans have performed exceptionally well in the early vote patterns in Arizona and Nevada — and the Trump campaign is hopeful that this is not merely a cannibalization of voters who would typically go to the polls on Election Day. Trump will spend the final day of his campaign rallying in Pennsylvania and then in Grand Rapids, Michigan — a tradition, as he held his final rallies in the same place in the previous two elections. I will be on the ground reporting from the Grand Rapids rally tonight, so keep an eye out for my dispatch in the early hours of Tuesday.

Harris’s campaign, meanwhile, thinks that they have enough of an early vote advantage in Pennsylvania to avoid the GOP making up enough ground on Election Day to win the state. Harris’s final few days have been a continuance of her mostly risk-averse campaign style, including a big ad push focusing on “unity” and a “brighter future” for Americans and avoiding revealing how she voted on California’s Proposition 36, which would increase penalties for shoplifters and drug traffickers. She will host her final rallies and campaign events across Pennsylvania before returning to Washington, DC for a victory party at her alma mater, Howard University.

The one poll that has everyone feeling a bit out of sorts came from respected Iowa pollster Ann Selzer. Selzer’s final poll has Harris winning Iowa by three points, though Trump won the state by eight points in 2020 and nearly ten points in 2016. Harris supporters believe this is proof that they have the election sewn up, while Trump’s activists argue Selzer has thrown away her reputation for a “suppression” poll and shared video of the pollster’s interview with Mark Halperin in which she appears confused by what the the “D” and “R” designations mean in her cross tabs. At this point, with the race so close, it’s a reminder to be careful putting too much stock in any one poll — and probably, any polls. Pollster Nate Silver has warned about the effect of “herding” polls: “You’re cheating … Your numbers aren’t all going to come out at exactly one-point leads when you’re sampling 800 people over dozens of surveys. You are lying.”

In a little over twenty-four hours, polls will start closing and we will be getting results. Stay tuned at The Spectator for our live election commentary and snap reactions from our top writers.

-Amber Duke

On our radar

NYT ON STRIKE The New York Times Tech Guild went on strike Monday amid a contract dispute with the paper, potentially jeopardizing the Times’s election coverage. The NYT Tech Guild consists of software engineers, product managers, data analysts and designers for the website. 

A CALL FOR PAUL Former Republican presidential candidate and congressman Ron Paul said he would be “happy to advise” billionaire Elon Musk on a potential government efficiency commission if former president Donald Trump wins the presidential election. 

NBC GETS NOTICE The Center for American Rights filed an FCC complaint against NBC for allowing Vice President Kamala Harris to appear on the final episode of Saturday Night Live before election night without granting equal time to Trump. The network responded by granting Trump the chance to address voters following its airing of a NASCAR race. 

Down the ballot…

The big-picture takeaway is that in most competitive races, both parties got the nominees they want — and both parties are sending out last-second messages via the mail, phones and texts to dissuade voters of the other party from backing certain candidates. Republican-aligned groups are driving wedges between Democratic candidates, and Democratic-aligned groups are trying to attack Republican candidates for being too unsupportive of Trump.

New Jersey Senate

Democrats avoided a potentially nasty general election when embattled Senator Bob Menendez announced that he would retire at the end of the term, rather than run as a third party, potentially helping Republican Curtis Bashaw defeat Representative Andy Kim with a plurality of the vote. While Bashaw is unlikely to win in a head-to-head versus Kim, Republicans note that their early voting numbers are off the charts in New Jersey, which would be a huge boost for Representative Tom Kean who has seen an influx in outside spending targeting him from Democrats.

Minnesota Senate

While the Trump campaign has tried to put Minnesota in play, this was a recruiting miss for the GOP, which nominated former NBA player Royce White, despite his well-publicized history of problematic tweets, including one where he discusses how his “penis also hits the water when I sit down to use the bathroom. I was born with it and yes… I’m certain that makes me a man.” Senator Amy Klobuchar won’t even need to throw a stapler at White in order to beat him tomorrow. 

Nebraska Senate

In one of the stranger races of the cycle, Republican senator Deb Fischer found herself struggling against a man with no party. Dan Osborn, a self-proclaimed Independent, has spent much of the campaign being dogged by reports, first published in The Spectator, about his Twitter account liking graphic porn tweets and his email address appearing in the Ashley Madison hack database. Osborn has cratered amid a series of reports about his ties to national Democrats at just the right time for Fischer to potentially win a closer-than-expected race tomorrow night.

Alaska’s at-large House district

Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat, represents Alaska following a disastrous midterm where two Republicans cannibalized each other’s votes, allowing her to take full advantage of the state’s ranked-choice voting system. This time around, Republicans have more or less neutralized that, convincing the party’s runner-up to drop out. Peltola, however, has cultivated a strong bipartisan brand, and even boasts a rare cross-party endorsement from one of the state’s longtime senators, Lisa Murkowski. 

Colorado’s 8th district

Look no further than this district to see the impact of immigration and fentanyl on the campaign trail. Both parties are messaging heavily on it, arguing that their candidates, Democratic representative Yadira Caravaeo and former combat veteran and police officer Gabe Evans, respectively, are the best positioned to handle the crisis. Illegal immigration has thrust Colorado onto the political scene, with Trump and others capitalizing on an influx of Venezuelan gangs into Aurora, in particular. 

Iowa’s 2nd district

Iowa surged onto the map this week, following a shock poll from the state’s legendary pollster, Ann Selzer, which showed Kamala Harris leading Trump in the solidly red state. This poll trickled down to the 2nd district, where Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks is facing a rematch against failed Democratic candidate Christina Bohannan. This is one of the districts where the Democrats’ dirty tricks are being deployed in full. One group, called Save Western Culture, bizarrely accuses Miller-Meeks of wanting to send “our tax dollars… to arm an Islamic state.”

Maryland’s 6th district

This late-breaking race has seen an influx of attention from House GOP leadership, who all endorsed 2022 nominee Neil Parrott, who is again attempting to flip this seat in the DC suburbs (which, full disclosure, I . The seat is now open due to Representative David Trone failing in his self-funded bid to win the state’s Senate primary. Parrott’s opponent, April McClain Delaney, is the wife of the previous representative of this district, John Delaney. 

Pennsylvania’s 1st District:

Harris is going to easily carry this suburban House district, but Democrats are once again not even trying to seriously oust Republican congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, an incumbent whose brand is so strong that he has withstood blue wave after blue wave that crested in Bucks County.

Pennsylvania’s 10th District:

Representative Scott Perry, a former Freedom Caucus chair, is in a potentially competitive district that says almost as much about the shift in local news as it does about him. His opponent, Janelle Stelson, was a former local news reporter who moderated one of Perry’s previous congressional debates. Perry had a close-ish call in 2020, and while he’s expected to prevail, the fact that a well-known journalist ended up running for Congress as a Democrat should make everyone think twice about what they watch on the local news. After all, we also saw a former longtime Politico reporter decamp to Michigan to literally knock on doors for Kamala Harris this weekend…

That’s a sampling of the good, the bad and the ugly — and the open seats, the tossup seats and beyond. We’ll be back Wednesday to work through these results, and what they all mean.

In the meantime, drink up tomorrow night! It could be a long one…

–Matthew Foldi

RNC notches wins on election integrity

The Republican National Committee is celebrating the efforts of the resources it has poured in to election integrity measures after Trump’s claims of voter fraud in 2020. Earlier this cycle, the GOP told The Spectator it planned to deploy an army of 100,000 volunteers and attorneys, mostly in battleground states, to watch out for potential chicanery. Since then, they’ve claimed multiple victories: 

• Courts ruled in Trump’s favor that election workers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania had illegally turned away early voters who were waiting in line. The early vote period was extended accordingly. 
• The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that returned ballots that did not have dates on them could not be counted. 
• The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that mail ballots arriving after Election Day cannot be counted, striking down a Missippi law that violated this federal rule. 
• The RNC stopped a Democrat-led lawsuit to extend the voter registration period in Georgia. 
• Detroit agreed to take steps ensure election worker parity, ensuring that at least one Republican poll worker will be present at each voting location. 
• Courts affirmed that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson must reject ballots with a missing stub and offer voters an opportunity to cure their ballots. 
• An RNC lawsuit led Secretary Benson to update guidance indicating that election workers must verify signatures on absentee and mail ballots. 
• In North Carolina, courts ruled that North Carolina may not accept digital student IDs as proof of identity to vote. 
• The Supreme Court issued a stay that allowed Virginia to proceed with removing self-identified non-citizens from the voter rolls. 

“The RNC’s election integrity program has been able to secure unprecedented legal wins because we invested the time and money on the front end to build a robust, nationwide network of litigation,” RNC chairman Michael Whatley told The Spectator. “Our goals are to set legal rules of the road that protect every legal vote and make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.” 

–Cockburn