And Down the Stretch They Come!
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Welcome back to The Horse Race. We're finally in the final stretch, and it looks like Tuesday will be a good night for Team Blue. Is that right? Here to talk it all through with us is Real Clear Politics' Sean Trendy and the American Enterprise Institute's Carlin Bowman, both of whom will go deep into the polling weeds to give us their best assessment of how this exciting race will finally end. The horses are at the starting gate. They're off. ♪

Well, it's the last horse race before the election, and there's nobody I would rather have on my podcast to talk about the overall trends than the man who I've got, Sean Trendy, Senior Elections Analyst at RealClearPolitics and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most acute and mathematically accurate of the elections analysts out there. Sean, welcome back to the horse race. Thanks for having me.

So, Sean, tell us, where do you see the race right now? There's polling averages. There's the people in Team Trump who are pointing to outlier polls and saying they're telling the truth. What do you think the truth is? You know, I think...

There's two things. The first is, you know, you have this body of polls coming from, I mean, Rasmussen, but Trafalgar and Susquehanna inside advantage. You know, and those last three, they're respected polling companies. It's not like they're showing five points in favor of Republicans every election. Yeah.

But it's very obvious that they're doing something different than the rest of the pollsters are doing, you know, trying to figure out account for shy Trumpism and whatnot. So you almost have to take those separately. So there's this bucket of pollsters doing one thing that says, you know, Trump's ahead. There's this bucket of pollsters doing another thing that says, no, Biden's on route to a comfortable win. And I almost feel like it's going to be one or the other, you know, not somewhere in between.

So where do you come down? Are you on Team Trafalgar? I feel like this is, you know, another one of those old. Gosh, what was the vampire thing from a few years ago? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it'll come to me. You know, Team Edward versus Team Jacob. Where are you for that? Do you think Bella Swan will fall for the werewolf or do you think she'll fall for the vampire? Are you on Team Trafalgar or are you on Team Consensus? I'm pretty much on Team Consensus. You know, I think it's not an either or. You kind of have to say, yeah, when you're building your overall probability, you have to say, yeah, there's a chance that these other people are right and incorporate that.

But I'm kind of on team consensus. I think Trump's probably behind by a healthy margin. There are some positive signs for him, you know, floating around out there outside of what Trafalgar says. But, you know, overall, I kind of go with the majority view here. So what does that mean for election? Biden wins by...

You know, we've got the majority view kind of ranges between Biden plus five, which is, I think, where Emerson had it and Biden plus 11 or so, which is where some of the larger national polls have. Where do you stand within that consensus?

I'm kind of, I've said all along Biden plus six to eight. I kind of feel like I'm on the lower end of that. Maybe Biden six or seven points, which is still a healthy win. It's closer in the Electoral College than that win would be.

suggest, but it still says, you know, Trump probably loses Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan since he barely won those last time. Probably loses Arizona because of the Sun Belt swing, the swing in the suburbs. And then we can debate what we think is going to happen in Florida, North Carolina, you know, maybe Iowa and Ohio. And Georgia, or do you think that's pretty safe for the president? No, I guess I should have added Georgia to that. I mean, Georgia...

Georgia is just one of those states – I mean, it's kind of like Pennsylvania was for the Republicans. It's one of those states that it's always –

kind of on the cusp of becoming a Democratic pickup, and then it doesn't follow through until it does, like it did for Republicans. But the difference between Georgia and a state like, say, Arizona is that Georgia still has a lot of rural white voters who are swinging Republicans still and going to come out hard for Donald Trump. Arizona, the vote is almost entirely cast

Phoenix, Tucson, you know, maybe Flagstaff. There just aren't a lot of small towns and rural voters to counterbalance the type of hard swings we're seeing against Republicans in the suburbs.

So what does that mean then for the Senate? Where are you forecasting Senate control? Again, there's four days to go, and I'm sure you are open to changing your mind. But as we're talking, where do you see the Senate going? I'm kind of on team Republicans barely hold.

You know, a lot depends on whether Trump wins or loses because those Georgia races are going to go to runoffs. And I think they have very different dynamics with Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, if that's where the battle for control is. But, you know, I think I feel pretty comfortable saying that the only seat Republicans are going to flip.

unless Trafalgar and at all are correct, uh, is Alabama. And then the Democrats will again, unless we're talking in Trafalgar or Susquehanna world, the Democrats flip Colorado, um, Arizona and probably Maine. Um, I'm, I'm pretty sure. Um, I might even say Maine's more vulnerable for Republicans right now than Arizona. Um, and, uh,

There's this universe of Senate races kind of out on the periphery, right? Not on the periphery, but if things got really bad, they would flip. South Carolina and Montana and Alaska and Kansas. But it doesn't look like right now it's probably going to happen for Democrats. So it really, for me, comes down to what you think is going to happen next.

in Iowa and in North Carolina. And I think those races are basically tied. But I just kind of like the Republicans' chances given the fundamentals of those states. Yeah, and I'm not that far off for you right now. I'm a little more pessimistic, but I'm doing my final calculations and I might move myself closer to where you are by Saturday morning when I file my biennial predictions.

You know, right now I'm looking at Biden plus eight to plus eight and a half. And that moves me towards putting North Carolina and Iowa in the Democrats camp, both for the presidential level and at the Senate level. But at plus six, I would definitely have Iowa in the Republican camp and I would say.

think that North Carolina would be going down to a horse race for either side. It would be like within a point of either side and whoever carries the presidency will carry the Senate race as well in North Carolina. So, uh,

We are not a part at all on how we're looking at the race. I'm at one end of your range and you're at another end of your range. Yeah. I mean, I think the range is probably Democrats have 49 to 51 seats, you know, and I agree if Biden is winning by eight or eight and a half points, those those races probably narrowly go to the Democrats and then we can fight over what's going to happen in Georgia. But.

Yeah, I'm not going to predict the Georgia races because I'm pretty sure they will both... I mean, we know, barring... Yeah, there's now one poll from Civics, which polls for the Daily Kos, and it's got Raphael Warnock at 48 in Georgia in the special election. But I don't think anybody seriously believes that a 17 or whatever number candidate race can produce a 50% winner that would be required to avoid the runoff. And I think that...

It's very likely that the Ossoff-Purdue race is going to go to a runoff as well because it seems that that's tracking the presidential race and that the third party candidate will get a couple of percent of the vote, probably less than the four or five he's polling now. But

unless somebody's, unless Biden gets like 51%, it's hard to see Ossoff getting over 50. And the same, I think is true with Trump is that Trump would need to, he might carry Georgia with 49 or 50% and it's hard to see Purdue out polling him. So I think that goes to the runoff as well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the only kind of caveat I'd have on that, uh, is that Purdue is an incumbent. So maybe he runs a point or two ahead of Trump. Um, but, but look at the end of the day, uh,

I agree. Those are going to runoffs, and I think it depends who's in the runoff, especially whether it's...

I can't think of the two Republicans in that one race, the incumbent Kelly. Leffler and Collins, Doug Collins. I think it matters. I think it matters which of them is the Republican in the runoff. And then who I think who the president is perhaps plays differently with each of them. You know, like.

If Trump wins, it might be worse to have Collins instead of Loeffler. But if Biden wins, I think it might be better to have Collins. But we'll have plenty of time to sort that out. Yeah. And the runoffs are in January. And then you've got to ask the question, if the Democrats control the Senate...

Will they be able to motivate all their people to come out in a January runoff or when Republicans might be motivated to come out and cast their first vote against the president-elect? I mean, usually you have to wait till a special election after he's inaugurated. But that's...

the Georgia runoff should be a chance for Republicans to get their anger on early in January. Yeah, the best thing about the Georgia runoffs to me are the most interesting thing is they're going to give us assuming Biden wins. They will give us or I guess even if he doesn't, but they'll give us a sense of just how strong the suburban swing against the Republicans is.

You know, in Georgia, you know, we went to a runoff in 2008 and then it got blown out in the in the runoff. And that was kind of to me the first indicator that, hey, this is Obama's coalition that showed up on Election Day and not, you know, the new Democratic coalition.

And so if we see some – if Biden wins and we see some swing like that, the suburbs come home, that will tell me that a lot of what we've seen over the last couple of years are votes against Trump and not shifting allegiances. That would – that will be fascinating because one way or another, we'll find out if – at least in the Georgia special.

You had a very interesting post about on Twitter this week about what happens to the Republicans after this. And I was wondering if you could share the gist of that Twitter thread with the audience and then we could chat about it for a little bit. So.

Someone had posted like on Earth, you know, on a separate timeline. We're in a universe where Marco Rubio is cruising to reelection. And I just if Marco Rubio had gotten the nomination, I used to think that, you know, if it hadn't been Trump, the Republicans would have won handily. But I'm not I'm just not so sure anymore. Yeah.

Looking at the way Trump won, I think Marco Rubio, he would have done better with Hispanic voters to a degree. So maybe he would have won Nevada. We would not be talking about a universe where Texas and probably Florida are strongly in play. And I think the suburbs would have liked him, although Team Clinton would have hammered him over his stance on abortion and social issues. But Trump was just a uniquely difficult candidate.

candidate for for Clinton to run against. She couldn't run the playbook that they usually run. And I'm not sure other Republicans would have won that race. I've been there. I like Marco. I think he has learned a lot from 2016. He's a

Saw more than most people what he missed in the electorate about particularly the white working class voter and what motivates them. But the Marco of 2016, I think, would have been very susceptible to the standard playbook. He's too extreme on abortion. He's too extreme on taxes and beholden to the wealthy. And I think what that would have meant would have been

It would have been very difficult for him to win. Maybe he wins Ohio because that's always been the most Republican of the five Midwestern states. But it's very difficult for me to see him taking back Virginia or taking any of the other four. And with that, there's no path to the Electoral College majority. That's right. I mean, Democrats...

Ever since the kind of shift away from the Mondale-Michael Dukakis strategy to what I would call the Clinton strategy, and that Clinton strategy has kind of unraveled over the past few cycles, but...

The attack on Republicans has always been one of two things, if not both. First, the person wants to take away your Medicare and Social Security, which, by the way, Republicans usually do. I mean, not really, but, you know, Republicans run on entitlement reform that opens you up to that attack. And secondly, well, the Republican is probably a closet theocrat. You could run that against Republicans.

Rubio, who was running on fiscal austerity and who I mean, he had a very conservative stance on abortion. It's I suppose principled stance. But, you know, not having exceptions for rape or incest is not popular. Like I said, I think it's it's intellectually consistent, but not popular. Yeah. And his tax plan eliminated abortion.

tax on capital gains. And I argued with those people at the time. They said it took me five minutes to find out that that meant that – find Mitt Romney's tax returns on the internet and find out that that meant that Mitt Romney would have paid basically no income tax because like all of his income was capital income. Maybe $750. Yeah. I think he would have paid more than $750. But, you know, it was quite obvious that –

given what they had done to Romney, that the first thing they were going to do is, do you think that Mitt Romney should pay no income tax? Marco Rubio does. Do you, you know,

And Team Rubio never had a response to that. And again, like I say, Senator Rubio has shifted since then. He sees America differently than he did in 2016. But the 2016 Rubio, I think, would have been classically exposed to the theocrat in in Wolf's clothing or sheep's clothing and the plutocrat in sheep's clothing. And that's exactly what the Democrats like to run against.

Yeah. And you couldn't do that with Trump. Like, you know, he was like, no, I'm not going to cut your Social Security and I'm not going to cut your Medicare. Period. Full stop. Like, matter of fact, I'm kind of a big spending Republican. And like the theocrat line, I mean, come on. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's just not going to fly against that guy. So so it kind of kept Clinton, I think, somewhat off balance. And it left her with these personal attacks on Trump that just didn't resonate. But they would have. People would have liked Rubio, just like I think people like McCain and they liked Romney, but they wouldn't have voted for him. Right. Right.

So you then said after this part of your tweet storm or thread where you that you don't think that that's type of Republicanism has a future, that the 2016 era consensus, which is somewhere between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, where all of the other candidates occupied some spot on that

On that spectrum that you don't think that that's something that has resonance in a post Biden era or post Biden election era. Is that a fair statement? And can you elaborate on that?

I'm not sure how long it's had. First off, that's the point where I think my tweet thread really does turn into a storm. And a lot of things that I've been feeling over the past couple of years just went kind of pouring out over the Internet. But I'm not sure how much resonance that that ever had. I mean, you know, George W. Bush was was probably the most culturally in touch with white working class nominees, the Republicans had had since Reagan.

And that political stance and he had things like compassionate conservatism, right, that were spending money. But but, you know, as a wartime president, he got 285 electoral votes, you know, kind of slid into winning his reelection bid among a time of war. I think I think the as I put it, you know.

cut entitlement spending, be the world's policeman and kind of get the worst of both worlds by being socially conservative. But everyone knows you don't really mean it.

Um, just, I think it's popular in DC conservative circles and dare I say, we're both think tank affiliated, but to a certain degree in think tank, uh, circles. Oh, it's the state religion in think tank circles. Yeah. But I think among the American people, it just, it leaves you too many openings. So, um,

I just don't think – and part of it, part of what I think conservatives don't get, and this is less true now with the reopening of Bernie Sanders and AOC, but they kind of wasted an opportunity to come up with a new synthesis because as of 1992, the Reagan revolution had largely won or at least it had won the things it was elected to do. It got inflation under control and controlling inflation was kind of seen as the main goal of the Fed.

It got rid of the 70% top tax bracket and we were left, you know, having knock down, drag out fights over whether it should be 35% or 39 and a half percent, which I mean, far removed from what we were talking about in the seventies. And you weren't, you know, I think,

Social liberalism had to rebrand itself and it did effectively, you know, trying to glom itself instead of being kind of the 1960s era freedom thing. It rebranded itself as family values, you know, and so and I think that is actually part of why the fight for marriage equality succeeded, because it was it was a normalizing effort and not a kind of liberationist effort. Yeah.

And during that time, people, you know, Republicans were still running the same. It was as if it was 1980 still with the campaigns they were running. Oh, they're going to raise your taxes to, you know, 39.86 percent instead of 39.4 or whatever. Yeah. And when and when most Americans weren't upset at taxes, you know, one of the things in 78 and 80 is that it wasn't the top rate. It was.

inflation, pushing people from, you know, into different tax brackets. It was property taxes going out of control. And that's what Reagan ran against. He ran to cut all tax rates by 30 percent, never talked about the top rate. That's right. That's right. And so I think, you know, Republicans had a good long time to kind of retool, but they never did. And so finally,

You know, Trump came along and was something different. I think that's why he had some success in the Republican primary. He was whatever else you want to say about him. He was not a D.C. cocktail circuit Republican. And people, you know, the base responded to it. He had a new type of conservatism that I think if Republicans had adopted in more measured tones in the middle would have been reasonably popular.

you know, without some of the frankly offensive, harder edges of Trumpism. So I kind of think Trump reflects a missed opportunity among Republican elites to come up with a new synthesis of what conservatism means in the 21st century. Well, now, as you know, you're preaching to the choir with me that I've been arguing for this for the better part of a decade. And, you know, you wrote a very influential essay about

that became more influential after it proved to be pression, which is the missing white voter when you argued after the Obama reelection that the story wasn't the rise of the non-white voter as much it was the disappearance of the white working class voter who four to five or six million of them chose not to vote in 2012 when they had voted in 2008. And they came back largely when they had Donald Trump on the ballot.

Do you think that such a synthesis is possible in the post-Republican Party? I know people are trying. You know, that's something I think Senator Rubio has come around to. There are people like Senator Cotton and Senator Hawley who seem to be talking in that vein. There are certainly talk show hosts on Fox who are talking in that vein. Do you think that there's a there there that can resurface or do you think that

The iron triangle of think tank donor campaign consultant that has governed Republican strategy for the better part of three decades will stand firm.

So, again, I say this as someone who is think tank affiliated and is kind of thankful for that donor money himself. But I, you know, part of the problem the Republicans have is that it was Trump. And so from now on, if you're not 100 percent on board with, you know,

liberal immigration programs. And by the way, I personally am fairly liberal when it comes to immigration and classically liberal on trade, although I see the downsides, I think, more than most advocates do. But, you know, from now on, if you don't take that stance, it's going to be Trumpism, right? You're going to be branded with Trump. And if you are tough on crime, it's going to be branded as Trump.

And I think that's going to be tough to overcome. I think there's a reasonable chance, especially if we're both undershooting, which is possible, and Trump loses by nine or 10 points, that Trumpism being compared to Trump for Trumpism is going to be sort of like being compared to Carter for liberalism. And it took...

12 years for even a moderate Democrat to be able to win after that. And then probably another 20 or 30 before a genuinely liberal Democrat could win with that. Well, that sounds to me like a pretty bleak outlook for the Republican Party, that the thing that could get them over the hump with the national electorate is the thing that will be out of favor with the party base. You know, that is kind of the...

The gloomy take on it, maybe it's because I'm up here in Ohio and it's cold and it's already overcast and winter is coming and I need to get my vitamin D intake up. But, you know, the positive the positive spin on that is that, you know.

At the end of the day, I think Trump is going to make some real inroads with groups. I do think he's going to improve over Romney's vote share, certainly, and perhaps even McCain's with African-Americans and Hispanics. I think the economic populist approach isn't just an approach for the white working class. It's an approach for working class minorities in general. And I think that's part of why we're seeing the poll results increase.

That we're seeing. And so, you know, you can kind of see the seeds of the future being laid there. And Carter kind of got a bad rap for being liberal. I mean, he was ineffective and I think he was a genuinely bad president. He kind of didn't have what it takes. But his approach recognized, I mean, in a way, he's similar to Trump. His approach recognized the New Deal coalition wasn't working anymore and we needed something new.

He had too much resistance within his party to get, you know, and he did a lot of things like deregulation. And at the end of his term started the defense buildup. You know, I kind of think Carter is the precursor for Bill Clinton, who sort of reset the debate in America. If Trump does lose and loses bigly, he could be the precursor for something that comes along in 8 to 12 years for the Republicans. Yeah.

Well, we'll be talking about it for the next two, four, six, eight, 12 years. And it'll be a continuing conversation between you and I and many other of our think tank affiliated friends. But, Sean, thank you for taking the time to return and share your wisdom with the horse race. Thank you.

Well, we almost have the final polls. They'll be coming in in the next few days. But there's no one I'd rather have talk about what the show today and what they might show over the weekend than my guests now. Carlin Bowman, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the director of Election Watch, the longest running political analysis program in Washington.

something that I appear on and we'll come back for another edition on Thursday after election to deconstruct the

results, if we have them at that time. Carlin, welcome back to the horse race. Thank you so much, Henry. It's hard to believe we're almost there. Yeah. No, I feel like this has been a marathon and or actually a triathlon. And we've been through the swimming race and the bike race and it's at mile 25 and there are still people running. In fact, you've got a guy with a

formerly of coronavirus, who's flying all around the country. Where does Donald Trump get his energy? I have no idea. He has more energy than I have at this point. Yeah, I'm 15 years younger than the president. He's got more energy than I do. I guess that's why he is a multibillionaire. And I am what I am, a multi-hundredaire.

But what do the polls tell you right now? Have we seen any tightening in the polls since the second debate? And based on your experience, what can we expect to see over the next few days as the final polls come out?

There is certainly a range of outcomes in the polls these days. The Economist, YouGov had Biden plus 11, USC in its latest poll had Biden plus 12. Those are similar to the things they've found for quite a while. But if you look at Emerson, it's Biden plus five.

Business Daily is Biden plus five. So again, you've got quite a range. There's no example of hurting in the United States where all the polls are moving. They're certainly moved in the same general direction, which is pro-Biden, but there's still a range of outcomes people are predicting at this point. And Rasmussen, of course, has Trump at plus one. He uses a very different methodology from most of the other polls. But again, from plus one to plus 12,

From Trump at plus one to Biden at plus 12 in the USC poll, that's a big range. So what's your judgment? And I know in 2018, Rasmussen, which is, in fairness, no longer affiliated with its namesake, Scott Rasmussen, but the current people are...

Holding the old name, even though Scott is in the field with polls for just the news under his new outfit, RGM Research. So in 2018, Rasmussen said Trump was more popular than unpopular or roughly 50-50 and the exit polls proved them wrong.

Do you think that this time Rasmussen is right? I think most of the polls have moved in Biden's direction. They've been very stable for a long time. So I think this is a stable race for Joe Biden. And so what's driving that? Why is it a stable race for Joe Biden that I take it you don't see changing appreciably over the next? No, I don't see it changing. And I think it goes back to

Trump's personality. I think people made up their minds about him very early, about whether they could vote for him for a second time. And after his performance in the first debate, which was watched by an awful lot of people, and of course, many people read the news accounts of that debate, I think people were even hardened in their choices in terms of a very negative view of the way that Trump carries himself. And I think that even more than coronavirus is what this election has been about. Yeah. Yeah.

I am doing my annual or biennial prediction memo, the first draft as we speak. And what two of the points I'm making is that Trump had not been at 47 percent.

job approval rating for the entirety of his presidency, except for six days at the end of March when the rally around the flag effect kicked in post-coronavirus. And you can't win re-election with a 45% job approval. Exactly. And he's never been above 50% in the entire Gallup poll over the course of his presidency. And that's a very serious problem. And it's unprecedented as well. Yes, absolutely. The other thing I'm pointing out is that

that even with all of this,

Trump had hit 41 percent in mid-July job approval, and he had inched up on the eve of the debate to a little over 45, which compared to the rest of his presidency was actually high, but still short of where he needed to. And it completely stopped any poll taken after that debate. The movement that had been going on for 10 weeks stopped. He's dropped down. So now he's in the real clear politics average at 44 percent.

And it's clear that there were people, unless the polls are completely wrong, that there are people who

were willing to give him a fifth chance, and his performance made them close the door. It was a serious self-inflicted wound, no question about it. It was all his doing. So where do you see the results going? There are people who say polling error. Dave Wasserman isn't a believer in systemic polling error anymore.

But he did publish a piece that showed that at state levels, there are consistent biases by region. The state polls in the Midwest tend to understate Republicans by a couple of points. They tend to overstate Republicans in the Southwest. Yeah.

Do you think that we will see some polling error that even if it doesn't produce a Trump victory, could shape the post-election night narrative about a Biden victory? If there's a Trump victory, it's the Waterloo of the polls. No question about it.

If it's close, I think there'll be a very careful analysis of all the final polls in states and nationally. And I think it'll be a serious dent if, in fact, this is a much closer race than people think it is. And what would be a much closer race? You know, if you say the range is between plus five and plus 12, I'm not sure exactly where the average is, but somewhere in the high sevens or the low eights.

What would it take for somebody to say, whoa, this the polls were really, you know, regardless of the outcome, the difference in the margin, what would it take for them to say, wow, the polls really missed this one? At the national level, I'm not sure what exactly the number would be. But if it's, let's say, Biden plus two, I think I would want to look very seriously at what all the polls said at the state level. You really can't.

Look at that because the polls move around a lot, a lot more at the state level overall. In many states, we have the final poll. It's early. I suppose it's possible people could change their minds. I don't see the evidence of that this year as we did in 2016. So if it's a close race, I think the polls will have a lot to answer for. Well, if it's Biden plus two, Trump wins because Biden

It was Clinton plus two and given the composition of Trump's constituency. I remember Sunday afternoon election day, I was doing my prediction memo. I did my calculations and came up with what I eventually wrote, which was, boy, is this going to be different than the narrative? And I called you and said, you know, Trump can win. And it's kind of like,

You're so polite. You know, a guy would have said, no, duh, dummy. You know, for you, it was just, yep. Um,

Do you see any outcome where that's possible, where you could look and do a deep dive and say, whoa, I've just discovered something that the rest of the world is missing, but it's kind of hiding in plain view? Or is this really we're talking about the margin of a Biden victory rather than the fact of a Biden victory? I haven't seen anything yet that makes me doubt what the polls are showing in terms of a solid Biden victory at this point. Yeah.

Just haven't seen anything yet. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I just don't see the evidence of it yet.

So where would this leave the Senate? Is that if Biden wins and it's not significantly closer, you know, if Biden wins by three, I guess he can still win the presidency, but that might have a different outcome for the Senate. If it's somewhere in the range of reasonable outcomes that you're thinking, what does that mean for the Senate? Well, it could mean it's just hard to know, Henry, I think, because there's so many of these individual races, we just don't know which way they're going to go. But I

I think it's possible Republicans could hold the Senate, though I'm not sure I see it right now.

So what would it mean if it turns out that the USC and economists are right, that it's Biden plus 11 or Biden plus 12, the sort of landslide win that we haven't had in this country, you know, since 1984 and haven't had against a president running for reelection since 1980 when Reagan beat Carter by almost 10 points, if it is an 11 or 12 point

What would that mean for the Senate? I think in that case, then you would be looking at a Democratic Senate. But a narrow Democratic Senate? A little bit more comfortable Democratic Senate. It was plus 12. Yeah, I look at a plus 12 and think that they could be looking at, you know, a 55 seat, you know, a gain of like nine or something. Yeah. Back to Reagan territory in 1980. Yeah, exactly. As far as the level of the gain is.

So what do you think immediately after the election, if it's a Biden victory, there's going to be a lot of short term what just happened to the Republican Party takes. And of course, you'll be participating in those discussions. I'll be participating in those discussions. You and I will be participating together in some of those discussions. But what's your first sense of what the

Is there going to be a consensus that emerges as to what caused the defeat? Or do you think there'll be competing narratives that won't congeal into a consensus? About the Republican Party specifically, I think, yeah.

Yeah, there'll be a lot of different from the various factions that you've described so eloquently. There will be different views of what really happened and what was the cause of the problem. For Trump's core supporters, and we don't know how large that group will be, they will say that it's

fake news, et cetera, et cetera. And that's a faction of the Republicans going forward. But others who perhaps have a more nuanced or different view are going to blame other things. They're going to blame Trump's behavior. They're going to blame coronavirus and just say that he couldn't overcome it. So I think that there'll be many different, there'll be probably three or four, as you've said, different groups with different views of what went wrong and how to fix it. Wow.

So there'll be a new horse race. Which of these views is going to come out in front? What do you think the challenge? Generally, polls show some sort of a era of good feelings when a candidate wins that it didn't necessarily happen much for Trump. But typically you'll see people who are weak partisans say they like the incumbent president or willing to give them a chance.

What do you think some of the challenges that a Biden administration with a Democratic controlled Congress, even if it doesn't have large margins in the Senate, what do the polls tell you are some of the fracture points that will make governing easier or more difficult? And how could a halo effect or a

gosh, we wanted unity. Maybe you'll provide it. In fact, give Biden any momentum going into his first couple of months. In public opinion, I think there'll be a strong honeymoon for Biden in part because of his personality. He's seen as a nice guy. He's well-liked. His payroll numbers are much better than Trump's. So in terms of public opinion, I think that he will have the traditional honeymoon. Trump did not have that.

But in terms of his coalition, the progressives versus the smaller group of moderates in the Democratic Party, I think the push is going to come to him very, very hard, very early. And I think that progressives are already thinking about which cabinet appointments they want. That'll be the big area of speculation immediately after a Biden victory. And I think they'll push very hard. I mean, Bernie Sanders has perhaps suggested that he'd like to be head of the Department

of Labor. Does Trump go there? Does Biden go there? Will there be any Republicans in this cabinet? Who will the chief of staff be? There's a lot of pushback on that overall. So again, I think it could be a difficult time for the Biden transition team. But in public opinion, I think the marks will be good. People will be just so happy this election is over. And I share that.

On election night, what will the polls? There'll be exit polls. And I guess we should chat a bit about them. I get questions about how is the exit poll consortium going to accommodate or deal with this record level of voters?

early voting. And you've been dealing with the exit poll consortium or, you know, back in the day, the competing exit polls for a while.

What sort of techniques do they have to try and address this and produce the most accurate exit poll results that they can? I was thinking about that this morning. The very first exit poll was in 1968. And since that time in presidential contests, we've had either individual networks or the consortium vote.

producing the exit polls. There's still a consortium, though it's changed a little from what it was four and eight years ago. One or two of the major networks, Fox, has dropped out of the exit poll consortium and is working with an outfit called AP VoteCast. The Associated Press, of course, has collected votes all over the country for many, many years throughout our history and

and that's not an exit poll. That is a poll of voters and people who voted early or absentee. I'm sure that they're in the field now. I'm sure that the exit pollsters are in the field right now asking people how they voted and incorporating different things into their, how they voted, when they voted, whether they're voting on election day. They have to

they have to incorporate all of that information. So needless to say, they're in the field with pre-polls to sort of figure out those basic indicators. But the vote cast, AP vote cast, is an internet poll taken on election day with other things going on before it. And again, you can, you can,

buy into the exit poll. Let's say you're a newspaper in South Dakota and you want to just look at the South Dakota results. You can buy into that. You can buy into the AP vote cast poll for certain things overall. But they are trying very hard to capture the meaning of this very large early and absentee vote. So let's turn to election night. Yeah.

So the exit polls are out. They'll be publicized within a few minutes of each state's closure, although, of course, those are always early exit polls. They're always late arriving totals from people who voted in the last couple of hours that will be added to a final exit poll total.

Aside from the exit polls, what will you be looking at on election night as the actual results come in? And when do you think we'll start to have an indication?

about the contour of the race? Well, I think I'll be looking at the times that polls close, which polls in which states close the earliest, and how they count votes in those particular states. And I think, as you and I have said, we look at a state like Indiana, which is very early, and we could get results from a lot of states very early. But I think that the exit pollsters will be incredibly cautious about

predicting Senate contests early, predicting

predicting the presidential race early. So I think they're going to be very cautious. And so I think we'll start seriously looking at what they have to say. Maybe, I mean, I'll be watching all night and so will you, but I'm thinking that 11, 1130, we will have enough states that can tell us where this race may be going. But there are some early states that I think people are going to want to look at. Florida, which tends to count its votes very fast, North Carolina. And what other states are you looking at at those in the early times?

Those two, those two in Ohio are the three that I'm looking at. They have a history of producing. They're used to counting a lot of early votes. They produce those totals very quickly. And given how skewed towards the Democrats, every poll says the early votes will be. We know that

when those totals are released, that we'll have a good sense of how good the night is going to be, is that if early vote totals are not hitting marks that Democrats think are needed to carry those states, we'll be hearing about it early because Democratic strategists will start talking about it among themselves. On the other hand, if

70 or 60 percent of the vote is released within 30 minutes of Florida's poll closings and the Biden campaign is euphoric, then that's something that we'll know as well. And so while nobody will call the states.

There will be very clear indications by 8.30 Eastern time as to whether the president's got a shot or whether or not we're just talking about the victory margin. Absolutely. Well, Karlyn, I've enjoyed chatting with you, as I always do. And thank you for being a regular guest on The Horse Race. And I hope to have you back when this podcast retools and reforms in the winter. Oh, I can't wait. Thanks, Henry. It's been great.

That's it for the horse race. I'll be taking a few weeks off to decompress after this stressful election season. I hope you've enjoyed this year's episodes and will be back when I return with a new post-election podcast later this winter. I'm Henry Olson, and I'll see you again in the winter.