House Rules

First some presidential housekeeping and then, let’s really put the House in order.

This week, for the first time since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris is on the wrong side of the swing state shift.

That’s the admittedly somewhat arbitrary 2-point margin by which a Democrat needs to win the national popular vote to carry the seven swing states, which are slightly less Democratic than the nation as a whole. 

But not entirely arbitrary. Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by about 2 points but missed in three of the four must-win swing states for Dems—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (Nevada is the fourth)—by a combined 77,744 votes despite getting 2.9 million more votes than her opponent nationally.

Harris leads former President Donald Trump by—gasp—1.8 points in this week’s average in the Statshot below, the closest the race has been so far. Maybe it’s noise, but it’s hard not to get the feeling Trump had the better first half of October. 

Or, maybe it isn’t noise, but maybe 1.8 points would still be enough. President Joe Biden did, on average, only 1.3 points worse in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin than he did in the nation as a whole. While that would be a very close call for Democrats, it might be enough.

That depends, of course, on which candidate has the better second half of October. 

In our first average after Labor Day, which was also our first average after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race and joined team MAGA, Harris led by 3.2 points with 5.6 points undecided or “other.” Now there’s only 3.4 points in that category. Trump has gained 2.6 points since September 7, while Harris has nudged up only .4 points.

One could argue that Trump’s post-Kennedy bump was illusory in the sense that most of those voters were going to end up back in the MAGA fold. Most of the Dem-leaning Kennedy supporters had already jumped ship when Biden dropped out or before.

But whether it was inevitable or not, Trump sure did get his people. The Republican nominee seems to have gotten something like 87 percent of the voters who made up their minds since Labor Day, and it’s hard not to see it as his Kennedy bump.  

Assuming there’s a fairly typical number of protest votes this year, there’s something just shy of 2 percent of the electorate still undecided. If Trump keeps up this pace, he will almost certainly win. If Harris even just splits those voters evenly with Trump, she will almost certainly win.

And if you wonder who those folks are, look at what the campaigns are up to. The Trump campaign is trying to get him to be nice to Nikki Haley to get her to campaign for him, with limited success.  Harris is out there looking for every Haley voter, including a sit-down with Fox News.

Wouldn’t it be a trip if the election came down to that last sliver of old-fashioned Republicans, mostly women, who just can’t quite get on the Trump train? The Liz Cheney Republicans versus the RFK Jr. Republicans.

Whoo boy…

Since nobody knows what’s going to happen in the next 17 days on the presidential side, why not expand the horizons of mystery and take a quick look at the race for the House of Representatives?

For openers, the current composition of the House is 220 Republicans and 212 Democrats with three vacancies. Fortunately for the sake of simple math, all three of the vacancies are in lopsided districts: two Democratic and one Republican. So we can call it 221 to 214 for the purposes of the election.

The line for a majority in the House is 218, so Democrats need only four seats to take back the chamber Republicans narrowly wrested from them two years ago.

And, no surprise, it’s very, very close. Out of the 60 or so seats that are even nominally up for grabs, there are 43 that the worthy gurus at the Cook Political Report With Amy Walter have deemed the most competitive. And among the hottest of the hot races, the 27 toss-ups, Republicans are defending 15 and Democrats are defending 12, a helpful edge in a closely balanced House for the party looking for a majority.

If you’d like to avoid delving too far into the particulars, the safe bet is that whichever party wins the presidency will also win the House. Republicans enjoy a similar structural advantage in the House as they do in the Electoral College. While the individual districts differ, the effect is much the same. And, no surprise, you’ll see below in the Statshot average for voter preferences for control of Congress that the Democrats lead by a breathtakingly close 1.6 points: a swing district shift to match the one for the states.

Democrats are betting that higher quadrennial turnout in blue New York and California alone will bring back enough seats to make the majority, and nab a few more here and there to give them some kind of cushion for Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic leadership team to actually try to pass legislation.

Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republicans, meanwhile, are looking for a newly redistricted North Carolina to offset their blue state blues. Then it’s all about trying to defend GOP seats in districts where Trump is likely to struggle. The battle for the ’burbs continues unabated.

We don’t know how individual races are likely to go given the dearth of high-quality polling at the district level. Even when we do have polls to help us, we remember that House-level polling may be the hardest of all. But we can safely assume that similar districts will break in similar ways across the country.

To that end, my colleague, the great Nate Moore has hand-picked some very useful sample races that will help you understand the battle for control of the lower chamber now and to aid you on Election Day (Election Week?) as we wait for the results to come in:

California’s 47th District

Dave Min (D) vs. Scott Baugh (R); 2020 result: Biden +11.1; 2022 result: Katie Porter +3.4

Sunny Southern California may hold the key to a House majority this year. The region is home to a half-dozen competitive races, including this contest between state Sen. Dave Min and former Orange County GOP Chair Scott Baugh. After a closer-than-expected loss to Katie Porter two years ago, Baugh thinks he’s got a better shot against Min, who was arrested on a DUI charge shortly before the spring primary. Though Min has still proved a strong fundraiser, GOP PACs have come rushing to Baugh’s rescue in this affluent coastal area. Partisan lean keeps Democrats as slight favorites in this double-digit Biden district. But if Harris tanks in her home state, Baugh has a chance to score the upset. Fair warning: A tight race could mean weeks of counting mail-in ballots before a winner is declared. 

North Carolina’s 1st District

Don Davis (D, incumbent) vs. Laurie Buckhout (R); 2020 result: Biden +1.4; 2022 result: N/A (district redrawn in 2023)

For the first time in four decades, Republicans have a strong chance to win North Carolina’s 1st District. Rep. Don Davis hopes to survive a challenge from retired Army Col. Laurie Buckhout in a district that was redrawn last year to be more GOP friendly. While the new district still barely went for Biden, GOP Senate nominee Ted Budd would have won the district by 6 points in 2022. Davis—and Kamala Harris—will need strong turnout from the district’s 41 percent black population to prevail. A nonpartisan poll in late September found Davis up 6 points, but much of the electorate remained undecided. If Burkhout can win over a chunk of rural black voters, Davis’s tenure in the House may end at one term. This race is a toss-up. 

Arizona’s 6th District 

Juan Ciscomani (R, incumbent) vs. Kirsten Engel (D); 2020 result: Biden +0.1; 2022 result: Ciscomani: +1.4

A Democratic state senator and environmental law professor, Kirsten Engel is taking a second crack at this southeastern Arizona seat. Republican incumbent Juan Ciscomani, a former aide to Gov. Doug Ducey, was a prized recruit two years ago but only narrowly survived the drag of Blake Masters and Kari Lake. Each candidate’s campaign reflects the national environment: Ciscomani has zeroed in on immigration and Engel is doubling down on abortion. While Ciscomani has eschewed electorally toxic MAGA rhetoric, his fate may well be tied to Trump this time around. Biden carried the district by just a tenth of a point in 2020—Engel will hope Harris can improve on that margin and carry her across the finish line. This race is a toss-up. 

Pennsylvania’s 10th District 

Scott Perry (R, incumbent) vs. Janelle Stelson (D); 2020 result: Trump +4.1; 2022 result: Perry +7.6

Republicans are sounding the alarm that this Harrisburg-based district, which voted for Trump by 4.1 points in 2020, might flip blue. Speaker Johnson’s PAC joined the race this week with a sizable last-minute ad buy—a sure sign that GOP insiders think Rep. Scott Perry might lose to Democrat Janelle Stelson. A longtime local TV anchor, Stelson has great name recognition and is hammering Perry over his role in trying to overturn the election. An early October poll found Stelson leading by a whopping 9 points and Stelson also lapped the incumbent in third-quarter fundraising, bringing in $2.8 million to Perry’s $850,000. Despite sunny polling and a strong fundraising for Democrats, this is still a tough race in a district Trump probably carries. If Stelson wins, expect that Democrats are having a strong night across the board. 

Holy croakano! We welcome your feedback, so please email us with your tips, corrections, reactions, amplifications, etc. at STIREWALTISMS@THEDISPATCH.COM. If you’d like to be considered for publication, please include your real name and hometown. If you don’t want your comments to be made public, please specify.

STATSHOT

General Election

Kamala Harris: 49.2%  (↑ 0.8 points from last week)
Donald Trump: 47.4% (↑ 1.2)

[Average includes: TIPP: Trump 47% – Harris 49%; Emerson: Trump 49% – Harris 50%; Fox News: Trump 50% – Harris 48%; Ipsos/Reuters: Trump 44% – Harris 47%; Marist: Trump 47% – Harris 52%]

Generic Ballot

Democrats: 48.4% (↑ 0.4 points from last week)
Republicans: 46.8% (↑ 0.6)

[Average includes: Emerson: 47% Democrats – 46% Republicans; Marquette Law: 51% Democrats – 49% Republicans; NBC News: 47% Democrats – 47% Republicans; Marist/NPR/PBS: 47% Democrats – 47% Republicans; Echelon: 50% Democrats – 45% Republicans] 

TIME OUT: OUT ON A LIMB

GQ: “Scaffolding covered the cathedral, but Frédérique Meyer expressed confidence that Notre-Dame would open on schedule on December 8—less than six months away. A rickety elevator took us up 120 feet to the roof. We stepped onto a platform where a few workers were taking a break under a blazing sun. … Paris spread before us. The Seine and its riverside promenades presented a scene not too different, I thought, from that which must have confronted the 12th-century carpenters on their scaffolding of branches. … We were joined by Hank Silver, the Massachusetts carpenter, who had spent about eight months in Normandy building the charpente alongside the other artisans. … Like many others at Notre-Dame, Hank Silver felt that he had given the project his soul. Now he was determined to see it through to the end. … The roof was nearly finished; the grand opening, in December, was approaching. Then, like the work of their medieval predecessors, their achievement would be sealed back into the darkness—perhaps to remain for another 850 years.”

DEMS DISTRESSED OVER HARRIS’ PENNSYLVANIA OPERATION

Politico: “Top Democrats in Pennsylvania are worried Vice President Kamala Harris’ operation is being poorly run. … They say some Harris aides lack relationships with key party figures, particularly in Philadelphia and its suburbs. They complain they have been left out of events and surrogates haven’t been deployed effectively. And they’ve urged Harris’ staff in private meetings to do more to turn out voters of color. … Some are even pointing fingers at Harris’ Pennsylvania campaign manager, Nikki Lu, who they say lacks deep knowledge of Philadelphia, where the vice president must drive up voter turnout in order to win. … Some of Democrats’ frustrations could be exacerbated by Pennsylvania’s size and long-standing regional differences: Lu hails from Pittsburgh, which is located on the other side of the state from Philadelphia and the major Black and Latino communities in southeastern Pennsylvania.”

Harris courts black men in closing days: New York Times: “Vice President Kamala Harris made a sweeping push on Monday to energize Black voters, among whom she faces slipping support, unveiling a plan to bolster the finances of Black men, appearing in interviews with two Black media outlets and releasing a pair of ads in battleground states targeted to that crucial voting group. … Polls show that Ms. Harris is receiving significantly lower support from Black men than President Biden did in 2020. The slip from Mr. Biden’s 2020 numbers among that voting bloc is striking: 70 percent said they would vote for Ms. Harris in November, down from Mr. Biden’s 85 percent in 2020. … The most substantive piece of the Monday rollout was the economic plan targeted to those male voters. The plan, called the ‘Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,’ expands upon Ms. Harris’s ‘opportunity economy’ pitch.”

Gender gap continues to define dead-heat election: Wall Street Journal: “While a divide between the sexes has become a fixture of modern elections, it appears to have broadened since 2020, cutting across many racial, educational and economic groups. Trump’s 5-point advantage among men in the 2020 election has widened to 10 points in The Wall Street Journal’s most recent national poll, in late August. President Biden’s 12-point edge among women in 2020 has become a 13-point lead for Harris. … In a recent Wall Street Journal poll of the seven battleground states, 27% of women—but 8% of men—listed abortion as the top issue motivating their vote for president. … Harris’s recent efforts to connect with men have included talking about owning a Glock and locking people up when she was district attorney of San Francisco, and she drank a beer on late-night television with Stephen Colbert.”

GOP races to bolster Trump’s outsourced ground game: Wall Street Journal: “The Trump campaign has gambled that it can have outside groups including Turning Point Action pay people to knock on voters’ doors instead of doing much of this work in-house. … Some Republicans in such places as Wisconsin and Arizona have said they aren’t seeing Turning Point Action make much progress. … A GOP operative in Michigan said the Trump campaign is knocking on one-tenth of the doors it did in 2016, though a Republican National Committee official said the campaign’s efforts have yielded five times as many Michiganders committed to voting for Trump. … The alleged overall disorganization risks imperiling the GOP’s ability to connect with voters regarding Trump’s economic message. … [RNC Chairman Michael Whatley] said the party was ready to focus on two big goals: turning out voters and election integrity. … Trump responded by telling him to focus primarily on election integrity, the person added, because the former president’s supporters would show up to the polls regardless.”

AS CASH POURS IN, DEMS SEARCH FOR PATH TO 50 SEATS

Semafor: “Democrats are anxiously eyeing Nebraska, but they can’t help [Dan Osborn] without muddying his identity as an independent, and they’ve seen similar independent candidacies fall short in recent cycles after initially polling well. Texas looks more and more competitive for Democrats, as Florida appears to drift further away. That makes [Colin Allred], who out-raised [Ted Cruz] by nearly $10 million in the last three months, look compelling to donors after ex-Rep. Beto O’Rourke came less than 3 points from unseating the senator in 2018. … Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell calls the Democrats’ offensive forays a ‘waste of money.’ ‘We don’t think we’re going to lose incumbents,’ he said. … There are also some candidate-specific factors. Cruz and Scott are far more polarizing than Sen. John Cornyn, who is up for re-election in 2026, and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who won by 16 points in 2022. So Democrats are taking their shots while they still can.”

Sam Brown struggles to break through in Nevada: Washington Post: “Brown, a military veteran and Purple Heart recipient, is the latest Republican trying to break the party’s dozen-year drought on winning a U.S. Senate race here. … But Brown has been unable to close the polling gap with [Sen. Jacky Rosen], an incumbent with a well-funded campaign that Brown, who is neither independently wealthy nor a prolific fundraiser, has not matched. … He has also failed to generate excitement among conservative voters, even in the more rural parts of the state. … [Rosen] is leading in public polling averages by 8.5 percentage points. Republican internal polling … shows Brown down by about 7 percentage points — a difficult gap to close with less than three weeks before Election Day. … The Brown campaign said he can make up the difference by getting all of former president Donald Trump’s supporters to vote for him.”

BRIEFLY

Abortion ballot measure could scramble Arizona elections—Politico

GOP supermajority in North Carolina legislature hinges on key tossups—The Carolina Journal

Nebraska Supreme Court says felons can register to vote—Omaha World-Herald

WITHIN EARSHOT: NO DOUBT 

“So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use. Okay?”—Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance weighs in on whether he thinks Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election after avoiding a direct answer in past interviews.

MAILBAG

“Something that struck me was the split where candidates from different parties are leading in the presidential and senatorial elections. Is this a likely outcome, or is it more probable that these senatorial contests end up going for the party that wins the presidential contest in that state? I’d imagine that with the same electorate, they’re likely to vote a straight ticket except for some special cases where the candidate has got special qualities (e.g. Joe Manchin) or less than special qualities (e.g. Kari Lake.)”—George Skinner, New Westminster, British Columbia

Mr. Skinner,

That’s the $64,000 question (or, I guess, $88,183 in Canadian) this year. The quadrennial electorate is typically about a third larger than the midterm electorate, and, as you rightly observe, that majority of the extra third is highly likely to vote for the party rather than the person when it comes to downballot races.

In the past two presidential cycles there was exactly one Senate candidate who won despite their party’s presidential candidate losing the state: Sen. Susan Collins in Maine. And she was helped by the fact that Maine distributes its Electoral College votes by congressional district. Republican voters in the Trump-friendly 2nd Congressional District had more incentive to turn out to vote than they would have in a state where they knew their candidate was going to get routed. That no doubt helped Collins, something struggling Sen. Deb Fischer ought to remember this year in similarly situated Nebraska. 

But that’s the exception. Consider the results in Texas and Colorado four years ago. Neither state was competitive at the presidential level, but both featured contested Senate races. 

In Colorado, then-Sen. Cory Gardner had won as a Republican in a blue state in the 2014 midterms and remained popular in Colorado. He even outperformed Donald Trump by nearly 65,000 votes while challenger John Hickenlooper lagged Joe Biden by a massive 73,238 votes. But with Trump getting skunked by 439,745 votes in the Centennial State, Gardner got caught in the avalanche.

In Texas, it wasn’t presidential coattails, but rather a multiplier effect, where Sen. John Cornyn ran well ahead of Trump in a state that Trump was going to win already. Polls had shown challenger M.J. Hegar might be within striking distance, but when that quadrennial surge came into the electorate, it pushed Cornyn to a 10-point victory in a state Trump won by only 6 points.  

As Democratic incumbents Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana think about the quadrennial surge in their states, they should think about Gardner and Hegar and the way the tide runs.

But what about swing states? There are hot Senate races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin this year. While you are right that Arizona this year may be something of a special case because of the notoriety of the Republican nominee, Lake, the state has good lessons for us about the quadrennial shift.

Polls showed incumbent Republican Sen. Martha McSally getting clobbered by Democratic challenger Mark Kelly by 10 points, but she lost by less than a quarter of that margin. It wasn’t close, but it was a heckuva lot closer than it looked at this point in 2020. Kelly outperformed Biden by a pretty stout 44,324 votes, while McSally lagged Trump by more than 24,000 votes. Kelly didn’t need to run ahead of Biden to win, but it would have been a squeaker if he hadn’t.

Arizona and Wisconsin might have very similar stories to tell this year: Lopsided races that get too close for comfort for Democrats when the tide comes in.

In Georgia, there were two races in 2020, but in the special election, Republicans split their votes between two candidates, part of a series of brutal self-defeats the Georgia GOP executed that year. But in the head-to-head matchup between then-Sen. David Perdue and Democratic challenger Jon Osoff, Perdue also ran ahead of Trump, if only by 763 votes, while Osoff ran substantially behind Biden. 

In Michigan, it was a textbook Senate race in a quadrennial: incumbent Democratic Sen. Gary Peters and challenger John James both ran behind their presidential nominees, but Peters clocked in almost 70,000 votes behind Biden while James was only 7,631 behind Trump. 

Were there Trump-Peters voters and Biden-James voters? Sure, and probably more of the latter than the former. But there were also lots of folks who voted for president and didn’t vote for Senate at all: 67,466 more people voted for a presidential candidate than picked a Senate candidate. We can’t be sure, but one would suspect that Peters’ deficit to Biden came mostly from those undervotes.

That’s the cautionary tale for Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania this year. Casey is a much better-known and better-liked candidate than Peters was in his first reelection bid four years ago. But he can also expect that challenger Dave McCormick may end up doing better than Trump. There will be plenty of Harris-McCormick voters, meaning any substantial dropoff between Harris and Casey this year could flip that seat.

That’s all a very long way of saying that in the crash of competing forces—incumbency, partisanship, campaign spending, etc.—we can mostly count on the surge of quadrennial voters to align with their preferred party on the Senate level. But those other factors don’t disappear. 

If the presidential race ends up looking pretty much like it does now, even a narrow Trump defeat could end up putting Republicans at 52 seats. 

All best,

c

You should email us! Write to STIREWALTISMS@THEDISPATCH.COM with your tips, kudos, criticisms, insights, rediscovered words, wonderful names, recipes, and, always, good jokes. Please include your real name—at least first and last—and hometown. Make sure to let us know in the email if you want to keep your submission private. My colleague, the un-gerrymandered Nate Moore, and I will look for your emails and then share the most interesting ones and my responses here. Clickety clack!

CUTLINE CONTEST: ALWAYS PULLING US BACK IN 

Maybe I’m just feeling nostalgic for great Francis Ford Coppola movies, given his most recent one that is, well, the opposite of that. Or maybe this week’s winner absolutely nailed it with a reference to the final scene of The Godfather for our picture of Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno::

“Kay, never ask me about my business.”—Tim Maloney, St. Louis, Missouri

Winner, And Cleveland Will Pay For It Division:

“As he laid the final brick, Moreno realized he was on the wrong side of The Wall.”—Tripp Whitbeck, Arlington, Virginia

Winner, Cask of Amontillado Division:

“I thought the walls were closing in on Trump. What the hell?”—Michael Smith, Georgetown, Kentucky

Winner, Metaphor Masters Division:

“Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno ponders how to maintain his floor yet raise his ceiling.”—Linda McKee, DuBois, Pennsylvania

Winner, Final Cloture Division:

“Bernie Moreno contemplates writing a locked room mystery about the U.S. Senate”—Mary Stine, Prairie Village, Kansas

Winner, Death With a Salesman Division:

“Bernie Moreno demonstrates that, if this political stuff doesn’t work out, he certainly could begin a new career as a mortician.”—Steve Wilson, Batavia, Ohio

Winner, Halloween H24 Division: 

“If Michael Myers looks in this closet, he’ll get an eyeful of coat hanger.”—Michael Smith, Georgetown, Kentucky

Winner, Ride Along Division:

“It’s not a golden staircase, but it’ll do.”—Richard Kennedy, Ferndale, Michigan

Winner, Missed It By That Much Division:

“Bernie (don’t call me Maxwell) Moreno previews the opening credits from his new TV spoof, ‘Get Moreno.’”—Richard Basuk, New York, New York

BUCKEYE BALLYHOO 

London Telegraph: “The World Conkers Championships has been embroiled in a cheating row after the men’s winner was found with a steel chestnut. David Jakins, 82, clinched the title at Sunday’s event in Southwick, Northamptonshire on his 46th attempt after competing in it since 1977. But when he was searched after his victory, where he knocked a number of opponents out with just one hit, the retired engineer was found to have a metal replica concealed in his pocket. He has denied using it in the tournament, saying he only had it with him ‘for humour value’. Kelci Banschbach, 34, from Indianapolis in Indiana, defeated him in the final and became the first American to win the competition. … No fewer than 2,000 conkers enthusiasts were in attendance to watch the tournament, which saw 256 people take part. Mr Jakins raced through the quarter and semi-finals by defeating his opponents in one strike, a rare occurrence in the sport.”

Nate Moore contributed to this report.