The Pollercoaster Takes A Final Plunge
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election day superstitions a special pair of socks you know a meal like is there i mean i think i'm gonna get a massage i don't know try to relax a little i love that i got a massage this weekend yeah i'm excited

My kids are in D.C. I'm in New York. I'm going to live my life. For everyone else, this is like the most stressful week of the year. And Ruth is like, no kids. I'm in New York City. I'm going to get a massage. Anxiety for three months before, but actual day before the election. Totally fine. Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics podcast. I'm Galen Druke, and we are now just hours away from Election Day. Feels I can feel the energy. I feel it, guys. All right. And I

And I don't know if you've heard, but we got some polls over the weekend. In fact, this may be one of the rare instances in which the nerdy obsessions of the online election watcher community break through at least a little bit into the mainstream.

The Des Moines Register released its final pre-election Iowa poll conducted by none other than Ann Seltzer Saturday evening. And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you probably don't just know who Ann Seltzer is. In fact, you've heard directly from her in this feed over the years. She has a tendency of publishing outlier polls in the final days of elections that prove unethical.

In this case, her final poll showed Harris leading Trump by three points in Iowa. Iowa, folks, I know we've banned the expression shock poll at 538, but shock poll. Trump won Iowa by eight points in 2020.

But Seltzer wasn't the only high-quality pollster out with new data this weekend. The New York Times released its final slate of battleground polls, also showing a shift in the race, but one that was far from uniform. The Times has been one of the pollsters showing the starkest divides between a Sun Belt shifting towards Trump and a Rust Belt shifting towards Harris-Milne.

this cycle. But in this final slate, the trend was somewhat reversed. The polls showed a slight lead for Harris in Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, and Wisconsin, and tied or trailing in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona. And

And of course, there were a lot of other polls out this weekend. Our colleagues at ABC put out a final poll showing Harris up nationally by three percentage points and all told 600 survey questions from 164 surveys have been entered into our database just since Friday. So today.

You guessed it. We're going to talk about the final polls, the final shifts, and some final thoughts on the 2024 election. And here with me to do that is senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast, Mary.

Hey, Galen. How are you holding up? Oh, you know, I'm doing okay. I'm doing okay. Like I said, ask me on Wednesday after I haven't slept. But so far, so good for now. Also here with us is New York Times polling editor Ruth Egelnik. Welcome to the podcast, Ruth. Good to be here. It's good to be almost at election day. Well, for you, almost election day is over, right? Like your final poll is out the door. How are you feeling? I feel good. I feel good. I'm ready to know the results. Yeah.

Yeah, you and 350 million other people, if not six to eight billion other people. Before we dive in, just so people know the plan this week, this is our second to last episode before we get results. We'll have an episode in your feeds Tuesday morning with a guide for watching the results as they come in on election night. And also a couple more thoughts with my colleagues, Jeff and Nathaniel.

And then late on Tuesday, or more like early Wednesday, we'll be back to talk about what we know, whether it's that we don't know much or who won the election. So let's dive in. And I want to start by saying where the averages are, where we often start. Less than a point separates Harris and Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada on average. Trump leads by a point or two in North Carolina and Georgia, and closer to three points in Arizona.

That suggests a close race, but there's a good chance that that isn't what we get on election night. So how should people be thinking about the averages right now, Mary?

When we're telling people that we think this is a close race, it's not necessarily that we're saying we think the final margin is going to be close necessarily, just as you were saying. What these averages are telling us, if we look at the margins of error on either side of this, is that it could go really in either direction. You know, we have these close averages, but...

If we have a three-point polling error correlated across swing states, which is what we've seen in the past, ultimately, in either direction, I don't think that would be a close election. So when we say close, we mean in a probabilistic sense rather than like

We know it's going to go down to the wire in some of these swing states. Now, it might. It could. It's also a possible outcome. But I think, you know, really what we're reading from these polling averages and what our forecasts are saying is this race is still a toss-up. Yeah, that's right. We've used every cliche in the book, toss-up, jump ball, coin flip, like...

We're running out of cliches. I like on a knife's edge. Knife's edge. Yeah, we use that to razor's edge. But yeah, I think that is exactly the way to be thinking about polling averages is that it doesn't mean that it will come down to the wire, though, obviously, in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Arizona, we've seen it come down to the wire in previous elections, mostly just that, you know,

based on what polling can tell us, it's hard for polling to tell us at this point who's going to win either any of those states because it's showing such a close race. So it might still be, you know, the wind blows and one candidate wins all of those. That would still be within the realm of possibility based on the polling we're seeing. But it's just too tough to tell. And that's to everybody who has texted me thinking I know the answer. We make all of our data public. I only know as much as all of you. It's too close to tell.

Yeah, actually, I'm going to take a moment for all of us. Friends, you know, relatives, practical strangers. If you text me asking me who is going to win the election in the final couple days of the campaign, I'm probably not going to respond.

My brother texted and asked me and I said, oh, I'm not sure. Ask me next weekend. There you go. Mary, you were kinder than I. I'm curious what you all make, given that we're talking about how close the averages are, about recent hurting concerns. Dear friend of the podcast, Nick.

Nate Silver recently calculated that the odds of the polls being this close within 2.5 points for the sake of this calculation in a theoretically tied race are one in 9.5 trillion.

And he looked at specific states, and it looks like the variability is more like what you would expect in states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada. But then when you look at Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the odds against this many polls being so close were 1 in 300,000 in Pennsylvania and 1 in 2.8 million in Wisconsin. And...

You know, just thinking about the what's happened over the past couple election cycles, the polls were off by a lot in Wisconsin. So I might understand on an emotional level why pollsters would be scared of publishing an outlier poll in a place like Wisconsin. Have you been convinced that there's hurting going on amongst the pollsters out there, Ruth?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of good reason to be concerned about herding. I mean, you put out this piece, but also a couple academics, NBC also put out a really good piece looking at herding. And I think, yeah, I think there's a lot of good reason to be worried about that. You know, herding is a concern that has come up in

previous cycles. In 2012, it was a big concern. And Wisconsin is a place where you could easily see that happening. Wisconsin is so idiosyncratic. They don't have party registration. They have same-day voter registration. So you end up with this kind of difficulty in predicting the electorate. And so less experienced pollsters, which there are more and more and more this cycle, might

be inclined to put their thumb on the scale and be too afraid to release an outlier. Now, regular listeners will know that we at The New York Times are never afraid to release an outlier. We very much do not herd. I think herding is bad for polling, bad for our understanding of the public. Like, this is not a good thing. If it is happening, this is hugely problematic for our understanding of the electorate and for how much people trust polls. But I think there's good reason to believe there is some herding, particularly among lower quality pollsters who might

be getting some strange outlier results and inclined to push them towards the middle so that they don't look like they're wrong. Yeah, we know historically speaking that averages are most robust when people publish their outliers. So we are looking for variability in the polls. We are not looking for a, you know...

Harris-Trump tie in Pennsylvania in every single poll that comes out in the state. I should say, Mary, you are one of our team of two. You and Cooper have been processing that just crazy number of survey questions that have come in over the past three days. And not only over the past three days, but this whole cycle. So if anybody can see hurting up close, it's you. How are you feeling about that question? So I...

I think that we have a question here before we can really address this, which is what do we actually mean when we say herding, right? Like there's a definitional issue here. Do we mean that pollsters are intentionally pushing their surveys to be in line with the existing averages? Or do we mean something different than that, which is that a set of methodological choices that have been made across the industry are having the effect of

of making the surveys all look really similar. This is where I'm not quite sure which side of this I come down on. So Nate Cohn in particular wrote a piece about this a few weeks ago, looking at weighting by recalled vote in the past election. My concern is that this is a set of methodological choices that's going to necessarily force a lot of the surveys to look really similar to each other. And it's not necessarily a pollster acting in bad faith.

or someone trying to avoid accountability for outliers. But I think it will end up ultimately having the impact of pushing all of the polls to look more like 2020, which, if we recall, was an extraordinarily close race in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. So if we have something like two-thirds of our pollsters are waiting to recall vote or pass vote in some shape or

that's going to necessarily force a tighter distribution in the survey results overall. So I'm a little torn here because it's a defensible methodological choice and it's, you know, pollsters have to respond to the failures of the past in some kind of a way. They're trying something. But on the other hand, does it obscure potential shifts in the electorate to assume the electorate looks a lot like 2020?

So I'm a little of two minds on this one. Yeah, and I think Wisconsin is a particularly good example of where that kind of recalled vote waiting has a big impact and could really push things towards the middle. So Wisconsin is a place in particular that is a real challenge for what you just described. Yeah, and I will say on the side of processing data, there was a day...

It must have been in the last week where we got seven Pennsylvania polls, and they're all within a point of each other. And then I see another pollster tweet that they've got more Pennsylvania data, and I'm like, oh, great. Guess what? Another tie. I mean...

It seems like there's something going on here. And I should say, the two high-quality polls that I mentioned at the top, Seltzer and The New York Times, do not wait by past vote. And they are two of the polls that we got over the weekend that showed some

real wild stuff going on. And so I'm curious if you separate out, you know, the high quality pollsters from maybe some of the lower quality pollsters. And I should say there are some high quality pollsters out there that have also been waiting by pass vote just because they're worried about some of the repeat mistakes from 2020. What do we see? What's the picture that we get if we really focus in on that high quality data over the past couple of days?

I mean, I think if you look at, generally speaking, the higher quality data we've gotten in recent days, I will be honest with you. There are so many polls that what days any particular thing comes out, it was very blurry in my mind. But I think if you look at maybe the past week or so of data from the higher quality polls, we're seeing perhaps a little bit more shift there.

toward Harris than in some of our lower quality polls. So just to put a finer point on that, to respond to some of these questions we had earlier in the cycle about lower quality pollsters sort of flooding the zone with lots and lots of data, our colleague Elliot Morris ran a parallel version of our polling averages that excluded those pollsters to just see how much impact they were having overall. And if you do that with the data we had, I believe Elliot ran these numbers yesterday, we see Harris doing over

about a point better in all of the swing states than in the version that includes all the data that you see on our site. Now, I want to be really careful with that, because if we had done just what I described in 2016 and 2020, our image of the election would have been worse, right? So we have to be really careful. We are not, we don't know which of these two visions is correct. But just to give a sense of how I'm thinking about this, if we

The higher quality polls, polls that we generally have higher trust in, are getting good samples like they did in 2022. I would expect that this is perhaps a little more tilted towards Harris than our current data shows on our website. If it's more like 2020, though, and these sort of lower quality pollsters are picking up on a trend that some more established pollsters are missing, then

It would be the other thing, right? So the opposite. Well, and we kind of split the difference in our polling average here at The New York Times, which is to say we include everything, but we give them different weights. It's sort of the same way we think about our probabilistic likely voter model. Everybody's included and then you get a different weight based on how likely you are to vote. And so for us in our polling average, we include all of these polls of various quality. Select pollster is our designation for higher quality. And we give select pollsters a higher weight in our model.

model, but everybody's included. And again, we saw exactly what you saw when we sort of like played with the weighting to see if we gave these other pollsters more or less weight. Did you know there's a nutrition plan that could not only help you lose weight, but also may lower your biological age score? It's called Prolon by El Nutra. And here's the craziest part. It's a fast that includes food.

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I am not going to be evil and ask you which candidate the polls are underestimating, because I know you're all very experienced with this. And you can tell me as well as I can tell you that we cannot predict polling error. But one reason people might be thinking that the error could be underestimating Harris right now is that Seltzer Iowa poll.

So there's a lot to unpack there, but I'm curious, first, Ruth, what was your takeaway from it?

So obviously, Ann Seltzer is a fantastic pollster and does an incredible job cycle after cycle. This is a poll that is definitely an outlier from the other Iowa polls that we've seen, including a Seltzer poll from just a month ago. They had a poll in September that had Trump up three or four. And now this poll has Harris up three. I think it's reasonable with outliers are sort of thinking always the New York Times is throwing the average poll.

When you throw that seltzer poll in the average, the average in Iowa ends up at plus two. Plus two for Trump. Plus two for Trump. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. If we throw it into the average, it's plus two for Trump.

And one thing we struggle with with outliers is outliers could be a real indication of something that other polls aren't picking up. And they could just be a real statistical reality that every pollster deals with. So, you know, just taking Seltzer, for example, sort of within pollster change, the fact that they had a poll a month ago that had Trump in it.

doing decently well in Iowa. And now they have this poll that suggests maybe a seven or eight point swing in the state. Reasonable to think that that's not really possible. The state of Iowa swung seven or eight percentage points in the direction of Harris over a month.

one of those polls could be an outlier. It's also possible the truth is somewhere between those things, right? Margin of sampling error and all the other errors that go into polling suggest that the truth could be between those two things. So I think my first blush look at this is this is an outlier compared to all the other Iowa polls we've seen, including another poll from a high-quality pollster that same day that had Trump plus nine in Iowa. But

There are also things in the Seltzer data that are really interesting and potentially believable. So I think, you know, we sort of throw it in the averages and see. Yeah, I mean, that's our same basic philosophy with an outlier poll. Let's toss it in the pile and see what happens. I think the thing that sticks with me looking at this particular Seltzer poll is something that we've been sort of

kicking around all cycle, looking at polling data sort of across the landscape is whether we see some shift, particularly among white voters toward Harris compared to 2020. I was an extraordinarily white state. So while I'm not necessarily saying this poll is accurate, I don't know yet. I will tell you. Listen, ask me that on Wednesday.

I think there's maybe some directional information there that could be useful for sort of contextualizing it. So if Iowa is closer than we saw in 2020, which in Seltzer's polling taken as a whole, including that September poll you were talking about, Ruth, that that's what is being suggested here. This is going to be a much closer race in Iowa than we saw in 2020. And I think that directional information can give us some useful insight into this.

Yeah, Mary, that was my takeaway as well. You know, Iowa is an 85% white state and the electorate itself will even be a little bit whiter than that. And we have been talking for months, maybe even years.

years, over a year, about how white voters have either held up particularly well for Biden or then shifted towards Harris. We've also been talking about how Democrats seem to be overperforming with seniors compared to their performance with young voters. We saw that in this poll. I mean, a significant overperformance amongst the 65 plus crew, while only winning young voters in this poll by about five percentage points. Of course, those are smaller samples and all of the caveats around a larger margin of error.

accompany that. And then we also saw a massive gender gap, right? In this poll in particular, well, we saw late deciders breaking towards Harris in this poll. We also saw independent women going for Harris in this poll by almost 30 percentage points compared with just five

percentage points in that September poll, whether you want to call them like the Liz Cheney voters or just, you know, even less politically engaged than Liz Cheney. There is this maybe older, more apolitical type of voter, a woman who doesn't like Trump, who maybe has increasingly been reminded of the reasons they don't like Trump in the past couple of weeks.

who seems to be moving towards Harris. So yes, like shock pole, but also, you know, the trend lines are not shocking, even if the absolute number is. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. This is exactly what I think is sort of directionally correct, whether or not the magnitude is correct. There's one more thing I want to say here, because it is truly an outlier, which is that Seltzer's methodology, as she's talked about on this podcast, is,

is relatively simple. She doesn't do a lot of waiting. She oftentimes doesn't even wait by education. And her likely voter model is also very simple. She just asks people, are you going to vote? And bases the likely voter model off of what they tell her, how certain they are to vote. So I feel like one of two things are going on here, which is that one,

Either some of the challenges in underestimating Trump voters, particularly along lines of education and institutional trust, have finally caught up to Ann Seltzer. Or that some of the methodological adjustments or modifications that pollsters have made to try to deal with that exact underestimation of Trump voters...

since 2016 have brought them further away from the truth in this case.

And it feels like to me, it's got to be one or the other at this point. Is there something I'm not seeing? No, I think those are the two likeliest choices, right? I mean, it is a little bit of a natural experiment where we see a methodological difference and we see if that's corrected or if that's made things worse. And that's kind of how we feel also at the Time Sienna poll, because we don't wait based on past vote. And a lot of people do now. And we're finding these kind of different results. It's a little bit of a natural experiment. The battle of the pollsters. Yeah.

If I can give one contrarian take to the Seltzer poll, I think it's really interesting to watch kind of the fervor around it in the last 24 hours. Has it been 24 hours? I don't even know. What? Have people been making hay up the polls? Yes. And sometimes it feels like a little bit of liberal wish casting, which is to say, if this poll had showed Trump plus five, then

Would we be having this kind of excavation into the poll to try to understand if we like it and trust it? I think people are hungry, especially sort of Harris supporters are hungry for good data and are just kind of grabbing at what they can get. And I'm always conscious that if I see a lot of attention around a poll, is it because you trust polling in general or is it because you like what this poll said?

And I think that's a challenge. I love that you chose Trump plus five, Ruth, because the producers asked me to predict what the final Iowa poll would show. And I said Trump plus five because that would be a three point shift amongst a mostly white electorate towards Harris in comparison with the 2020 vote. And that kind of made sense to me. So I don't know what the public would be saying about a Trump plus five poll in Iowa, but

But to me, that would both be a decent poll for Harris and in line with expectations. When I saw plus three for Harris, then I was like, OK, I guess scrap everything I've said. To your point about methodological updates, I will say, you know, friend of the show, Kristen Soldis Anderson, posted on social media that if this poll in Iowa is correct, it's

It's basically like how in Battlestar Galactica, the one ship that hadn't upgraded to the latest technology was the only one that survived the initial Cylon attack. I mean, that's why everyone's freaking out, because that would be crazy. Ruth, let's talk a little bit more about the New York Times Siena College polling out over the weekend.

I mentioned that it showed better numbers for Harris in the Sun Belt than we've seen, particularly in the Times polling this cycle and slightly better numbers for Trump in places in particular like Pennsylvania, because the last time we saw a poll from Pennsylvania from you guys, it was Harris plus four. And, you know, this weekend you showed that it was tied. The last three polls in Pennsylvania were Harris plus four. Three polls. Last three polls were all plus four Harris. And then this one tied. OK, so what's going on underneath it all?

Yeah, I mean, listen, I think, you know,

The shifts are small. These are all small shifts. So I'm hesitant to make a lot of, oh, well, Black voters moved three points or whatever it is. I think too much under the hood comparison between our poll to poll isn't that helpful. Because I think, you know, I mean, we are all aware that Harris plus four to even isn't a huge shift. But we have had three Pennsylvania polls in a row since Harris joined the race that were plus four for her. And this one was even. And I think we're

When we do look under the hood, there are these kind of small shifts. The one thing we saw is sort of Trump consolidation of Republicans, right? Some of these Republicans who are kind of coming home, deciding to land on Trump. Maybe they were on the fence. And Harris also kind of consolidating some of the key groups a little bit better with black voters, a little bit better with women. Trump's doing a little bit better with men. These shifts are pretty small.

One thing that we saw that was interesting that kind of helped explain some of this difference is that Trump did well with the late deciders in the Rust Belt, while Harris did well with some of the late deciders in the Sun Belt. Now, Harris did well with late deciders overall across the seven swing states. But when you isolate places like Pennsylvania, there Trump was doing a little bit better with those late deciders. Now, that's also a smaller pool of late deciders in Pennsylvania than in places like Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina. Those are bigger pools of late deciders.

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When we had our most valuable data point episode, Patrick Ruffini from Echelon Insights came on and said, you know, the most valuable data point for me is information flows in the final weeks of the campaign. They measure them at Echelon in some sense. And we do know that over the past couple cycles, it seems like things have mattered in the final weeks. And one of the places that puts pollsters in is,

there's possible that there's systematic error, but there's also, it's also possible that things just really do shift down the final stretch based on everything that happens. And then people say, oh, well, screw you pollsters. And it's like, well, we said it was a snapshot in time and we will never actually know what that snapshot was.

was if people voted on that day. But just to give you a taste of the final week or so information flows, everyone knows at this point about Trump's Madison Square Garden rally. But following that up, you know, on Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson promised, quote, massive reform to the Affordable Care Act if Trump wins. Johnson later walked back those comments and the Trump campaign clarified that Trump does not want to repeal the ACA again, sort of

how the roles have reversed here. But of course, Democrats jumped on that. On Tuesday, Harris made her closing argument in a speech at the site of Trump's January 6th speech. Her speech was overshadowed by Joe Biden's appearance on a campaign Zoom call where he used the term garbage to refer to somebody, whether it was referring to Trump supporters as

as a whole, or the MSG comedian, depends on how you interpret his apostrophe usage. Republicans, of course, seized on that, and Trump later did a photo op with a garbage truck. Throughout the week, the endorsements came hot and heavy, particularly amongst celebrities. So LeBron James, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, all endorsed Kamala Harris.

Then at an event on Thursday, Trump said, quote, about Liz Cheney, she's a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.

Later on Sunday, Trump said he wouldn't mind reporters being shot. Quote, I have this piece of glass here, he said, but all we have really over here is the fake news. And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don't mind that so much. End quote.

Also, last week, on Friday, Trump said that if he wins, RFK Jr. will have a, quote, big role in health care, and people started talking about fluoride in water. Then, on Saturday, of course, the Seltzer poll, and Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live. And then, on Sunday, the New York Times' Siena College poll. So...

You know, that was that was a mouthful. But just looking at that, quote unquote, information flow over the past week, I mean, does that suggest to you that things really could be shifting underneath the hood?

We can sort of feel two things about this. One, I am skeptical that a lot of this information did flow to a lot of voters, especially if you look at the people who are still making up their minds or people who are undecided or persuadable. We have data that shows that they overwhelmingly get their news from social media, which means they're not looking at traditional news sources. So they may not be getting a lot of the news themselves.

that regular news consumers are seeing. And so I am skeptical that a lot of this kind of like nuanced difference really flowed through to a lot of people who are deciding about who to vote. The other thing that's different this year and in 2020, and will probably be different for most of our lifetimes, is that election day isn't an election day anymore. In our poll across the seven swing states, 40% of people had already voted by the time we finished the poll.

Which means that a lot of people voted before any of that happened. They made up their minds. They voted before any of that happened. I mean, we talk about these late deciders and it's something like 8% of voters in those states. And then most people voted

60, 70, 80% of people decided long before that. So these little shifts weren't really impacting their decision-making. So obviously we always have October surprises. Obviously it only takes a few voters to see it and be influenced and change their mind to matter. But I'm somewhat skeptical that some of these late shifts make a big difference.

Yeah. The one data point I think that we have a little bit of evidence for actually breaking through to voters is the comments about Puerto Rico at the Madison Square Garden rally. So Univision and YouGov did a poll of Latino voters in Pennsylvania.

And they found that 88% of Latino voters in Pennsylvania said they had at least heard something about this, which is enormous. So whether or not that has an impact on the ultimate vote, this survey did show a wider margin for Harris among Latinos in Pennsylvania than in previous surveys. Whether that translates into actual votes or whether a lot of these people have already voted, as Ruth was mentioning, I'm not sure. But there is some evidence that those comments were heard at

at least, by a significant portion of the population, especially folks that might be directly affected by them. Ruth, you mentioned early vote. So I have to ask, roughly 75 million Americans have already cast their ballot, and that well could be the majority of the elector, or at least by tomorrow, the majority of the electorate will have voted. I know we really caution folks about

early vote data because there's not a clear benchmark to work off of because 2020 was such a peculiar pandemic era election. And it also reversed trends from before that when Republicans historically voted more early and by mail than Democrats. But what we see right now amongst states where we know the registration is a slim lead amongst Democratic registrants by about two percentage points and then, you know, a

a large chunk, 25% are unaffiliated. So something of a black box there. But one thing that stuck out to me is the gender balance. So there is a cluster of states that does have data on the gender of people who have voted early. And according to this data, 54% of people who have returned an early ballot are women. And it's more like

44% are men, and then there's some unknown. And we have seen a significant gender gap. We've also seen in the final weeks of this election, the issue of abortion gain in salience amongst voters. So in the New York Times Siena College poll, abortion gained three percentage points more Americans said that that was their most important issue. Now it's 18% of Americans saying it's their most important issue.

Am I making too much out of this if I take from this information that there is a part of the electorate that is largely women that's more motivated to vote in this election? No, I mean, I don't think you're taking the wrong thing, but I think you're also right to urge caution, which is to say, like, just looking at what you said, right, more people who are motivated to vote who are women. That can be true and it can be not enough to make up for the more people who are motivated to vote situation.

who are voting for Trump for different reasons. So I think there are more people in this circumstance. Do we know roughly how it breaks down in terms of sort of if you're a Democrat and you're hoping that's enough to overcome the increased early vote among Republicans and people who are motivated based on the economy or immigration? That I don't think we can say, but I do think

The data really supports the fact that there are more people who are motivated to vote on abortion, which is a good issue for Kamala Harris. We saw in these polls that it was the first time that abortion was the number one issue for women. Period. The number one issue for women. Period. Number one issue for women. And that's new. And that's really interesting. I thought that was really fascinating. But it's hard to know how it will impact the early vote and how it will impact the vote overall, if it's enough to sort of have those people be motivated or if it's just more than before.

All right. Final question here as we head into election day. This is a choose your own adventure. Do you have any closing thoughts on this portion of the 2024 election pre-results? Or do you have any questions that you are particularly anxious to have answered by tomorrow's data? Ooh, questions I'm anxious to have answered. I mean...

There are a lot of questions about the electorate that I'm anxious to learn, right? Like some of the things that we've seen, the trends we've seen in pre-election polling, as what we were just talking about, about this sort of surge in women and enthusiasm around abortion, movement among Black and Latino and younger voters towards Trump. I think I'm very...

interested to see if some of that bears out in the data. But if I'm being perfectly honest, the single thing that I'm most anxious about to see after Election Day is just how well the polls perform. If there is systemic polling error, if there are concerns that we need to address, I'm

really interested to see how that shakes out. Said like a member of the team at the American Association of Public Opinion Research that is with doing an excavation of how the polls did in 2024. So not only are you very curious, you are literally the person who is going to be answering that question for all of us. That's right.

Mary, final thoughts. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with all these demographic shifts. We've been talking a lot about that over the past months, and I'm very interested to see how the electorate is shifting over time. And as part of that, I'm actually...

particularly interested in some states that have been reliable for one party or the other, but we were starting to see a little movement in, in 2022. I'm thinking of states like New York and California. I'm really interested to see if the demographic trends that we saw beginning to emerge in 2022 continue in those states and what that means sort of moving forward for like the shape of the electoral college as we sort of continue, uh,

we have more elections after this where we get to keep voting. I'm sort of interested. I'm very interested to see if the trends that we started to see emerging in 2022 will continue into 2024 and beyond.

Yeah, I have repeated in many editorial meetings that you've been in, Mary, expect crazy stuff. You know, I have been through this rodeo enough times now. I think this is my fourth general election. I'm that old. And yes, it is literally my birthday tomorrow on Election Day. I just realized, Galen, your birthday is Guy Fawkes Day. My birthday is Guy Fawkes Day. Remember, remember the 5th of November, the gum powder treason and plot. And

And also, literally, Election Day. But, you know, expect the unexpected on Election Day. The only election I have covered where that wasn't the case was 2012. And so we've been on quite the polar coaster, roller coaster political...

ride of our lives for the past decade. And whether it's states that you didn't expect to be in play suddenly being in play, like Alaska or, I don't know, Minnesota or whatever it is,

Expect the unexpected. And like I said, we will have one more podcast for you in your feeds on how to watch the results as they come in on Tuesday. But for now, we're going to leave it there. Thank you, Mary and Ruth. Thank you. Thanks, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian. And our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us

Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.