The Outsider Perspective Issue 416 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Especially to the last days of this election, and the garbage truck that Donald Trump commandeered for his last big optics splash. If you haven’t seen that, Joe Biden called Trump supporters garbage on a Zoom call, and Trump turned around and had a garbage truck drive him around on the tarmac in Wisconsin. He even gave a press conference from the truck.

The NYPost interviewed the truck driver, who was just as surprised by the events as anyone else. I’m convinced that if the Trump campaign started selling safety vests with MAGA on the back, they’d be sold out.

But we have hit the final days of this election cycle, and this is the last newsletter before the results. In past years, I’ve written a full write-up of my predictions. This year, I decided to do that on YouTube, where I can easily review numbers and charts. Short version: I’ve got Trump in this election with a GOP Senate. I’ll cover the problems Harris is facing below—links to follow.

Quick Hits:

I realize we haven’t hit Election Day yet. But the 2028 field is taking shape, including for Democrats. My new dark horse Democratic candidate is Mark Cuban, the billionaire who just left the hit TV show “Shark Tank,” a show I do enjoy. Politico did a full glowing write-up on Cuban this week on how he’s pushing a better messaging strategy than anyone in the Harris campaign. He’s rich, lives in Texas, he’s done a lot of work on prescription drug prices/healthcare, and he’d be able to soak up the moderate lane of the Democratic Party while everyone else does the same stupid thing they did in 2020 – fight for the small niche of the hard-left. He’s in a similar situation to Trump’s in 2012 (same TV profile and X/Twitter habits); he’s become an overnight political star, which sets him up for the next cycle. On the Republican side, your front runners are J.D. Vance, Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio.
Sad news from the Hot Air site, as long-time conservative writer Jazz Shaw passed away this week. Hot Air and PJ Media had touching tributes to Jazz Shaw. If you’ve read the conservative blogosphere or X/Twitter sphere for any amount of time, you’ve read Jazz Shaw. He was a long-time presence in those circles and had made his home at Hot Air for a long time. If you didn’t read him, I guarantee just about all of your favorite writers and authors in the conservative space did. He’ll be missed.

Where you can find me this week

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Horse Race Ep. 015: FINAL Trump-Harris 2024 Map Predictions | Senate Map UPDATES

Harris Fumbles In The Final Week Of Early Voting – Conservative Institute

Jeff Bezos Admits The Obvious – But Does He Want To Fix It? – Conservative Institute

Kamala Harris Can’t Escape Biden’s Shadow – Conservative Institute

Trump Surges Into A Lead – What Is The Harris Path?

Every election cycle ends roughly the same way. There’s a lot of noise in the headlines, bluster from both campaigns, and everyone ignores the fundamentals driving the race. I gave my final predictions on YouTube, with maps and discussions of various parts of this race. It’s a close race, but many are missing some obvious points.

Harry Enten at CNN made a point of this, too. He singles out three facts that would tell us a Trump victory wouldn’t be surprising:

Only 28% of Americans believe we’re on the right track as a country. The losing party in elections typically has a 25% mark (RealClearPolitics has it at just below 27%).
Joe Biden’s approval rating is abysmal—it’s under 41%. George W. Bush was the only incumbent to win with an approval rating below 50%. Still, it increased as Election Day neared in 2004.
Republicans are dominating the registration edge in all the swing states. That signifies a much more active base.

None of these factors is shocking. I’ve been pointing to them for what feels like a year now. Trump’s consistency in his over-performance in national polls suggests that his base isn’t hiding from pollsters either.

As this election wraps up, it’s indisputable that Trump is in the driver’s lane for this race. That’s not just me: both the Trump and Harris campaigns believe it. The NYTimes editorial page is a list of jeremiads against voting for Trump.

At this stage, the path forward for a Trump victory is easy to imagine. The more complicated question is, “How does Harris win?” She’s only got one, according to polling data:

Step 1: Hold all non-battleground states (cannot lose in the fringe battlegrounds like VA, NH, NM, etc.).
Step 2: Overperform with college-educated whites in the suburbs.
Step 3: Win PA, WI, and MI. If she does this, she will have 270 electoral votes compared to Trump’s 268. She cannot have any faithless electors in this scenario

That’s the path. To win the Rust Belt, Harris needs a polling error in her favor and a deluge of voters on Election Day.

I don’t focus on any other states for early voting other than Nevada. If you want to understand why, read Sean Trende’s piece, which explains why early voting data is fraught. Nevada is the lone caveat because most of the vote is already for that state, and we know the partisan mix of the electorate.

Jon Ralston estimates that 63% of the vote is in for Nevada, with 876,000 votes banked. Early voting is wrapping up there, leaving Election Day as the last chance for Democrats to make up the difference. Republicans hold the edge in ballots cast with a 42,000-vote lead. Ralston has wondered every day if Democrats would pour in, and while there are slight bumps here and there, a deluge of Democratic votes has not happened.

What does that mean? It comes down to how independents are voting. Harris MUST win independents. If Trump pulls even with Harris, Nevada is lost. And depending on the mixture of the electorate, Harris may have to win independents by as much as ten points to have a shot. Ralston adds:

I repeat: It is not worth modeling Trump winning indies because if he does, all of this is moot and he will easily win the state and there could be down-ballot carnage. (I don’t think a lot of people believe Trump winning indies will happen, but if it does, I have wasted a lot of time on my spreadsheets gaming this out.)

On YouTube, I mentioned a Politico story on how Nevada politics is getting reshaped by ex-Californians who hate Democrats. Gavin Newsom is the headache that keeps costing Democrats across the country. If the Democratic Party is dumb enough to nominate him in the future – remember all these California ex-pats who hate his guts and are changing swing states.

In Obama’s second term, he had a choice of intervening in Syria. He ultimately stepped away, which gave it over to Russia in the region. As a result, millions of Syrian migrants fled the country and ended up in Europe. It caused mass chaos, and the ensuing migrant backlash helped fuel the Brexit movement. Gavin Newsom, California, New York, and Illinois’s excesses are triggering something similar in the rest of the country. If you’re a true believer, you stayed in those states while everyone else fled.

Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report noted similar dynamics in Georgia. The places that are voting at the highest percentages are rural, Republican-dominated areas. There’s no sign that Democrats are voting with anywhere near the vigor that Republicans are in this election. I believe that Nevada is the canary in the coal mine – it’s telling us what is likely coming in other states.

Democrats need cities and suburbs to turn out. They’re not getting what they want. That’s why the Obamas are out lecturing Americans, and Harris has turned to a darker message late, blasting Trump as a unique threat to the country.

The next time I write this newsletter, we will have results. I’ll have a video on YouTube either the night or the day after. Here’s what I’ll be watching on Election Day:

Election Day turnout: which party is winning that? This will be especially critical in Pennsylvania.
What does the second wave of Exit Polls say? News organizations start reporting their exit polls as soon as polls close. These are ALWAYS wrong. A second wave of Exit Polls will come out later that are more accurate.
Ignore Florida: Democrats got wiped out in 2022. They’re going to get wiped out again in 2024. Florida is a red state.
Pennsylvania: Vote counting for this state is bizarre and awful, and they’ve done nothing to fix it. Recall, “In 2020, Biden took an early, temporary lead after mail voting results began to be released shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m. ET. By about 10 p.m. ET, Trump took the lead as more results from Election Day voting were released. By early Wednesday morning, Trump led Biden by nearly 700,000 votes, but that lead would gradually shrink as more mail ballots were tabulated. Biden eventually retook the lead by Friday morning.“ Pennsylvania does not start tabulating mail votes until the morning of Election Day. You get a burst of mail vote that’s prepped by the time polls closed, to Election Day being counted, and then they go back to working on the mail vote. Theoretically, the mail vote should be considerably less this cycle – but that remains to be seen. Also, watch the turnout in Philadelphia — if it’s down there, it will be down everywhere for Democrats.
Sunbelt + New Hampshire: My map says New Hampshire could be in play. If Georgia and North Carolina swing to Trump early, Harris will have a harder night. We will get better vote reporting from North Carolina and Georgia earlier, and that will dictate where people look the rest of the night. If Trump sweeps the Sunbelt states, Harris cannot afford to lose a single state—she must sweep the Rust Belt.
Virginia: I don’t expect Trump to win Virginia. But if this race is like 2016, as polls suggest, Virginia will not be a quick call on election night. If we have to wait until Northern Virginia gets counted because the rural voters overperformed, that will be a big positive for Trump early in the night. The reverse is also true; if Virginia is a quick call, it likely means Harris is over-performing with college voters. Pencil me in for Harris winning VA by ~4 points.