The Runaround, Vol. 0.9.3

How Could They Possibly Vote for *That* Person?

Welcome back

Y’all ready for three more months of this?

This newsletter covers:

• What to expect on Election Night (not much)

• What to expect during Election Week (a lot)

• A self-indulgent ramble on why people vote in ways that we just can’t understand

But first, I encourage you to check out some of my UTA students’ posts about the election. They’re pretty smart!

What to Watch On Election Night

The race remains tight. Republicans are reportedly feeling confident and Democrats pretty anxious. The polling averages have Harris up by a little over one percentage point nationally, giving Trump a slight edge in Electoral College win predictions.

• Of note there: in the last few cycles, Democrats have had to do much better than +1% to win the Electoral College. Polling in battleground states, though, suggests that all seven races there are tight, too.

On election night itself, we won’t likely know the results of those seven states, assuming they’re close. They might not be close; independent voters might break toward Harris or Trump at the last minute in a way polls won’t catch.

So what should we be watching? Eastern states close polls first, and the NYT has an *excellent* map of when to expect all fifty states’ results and another on when to expect the battleground states’ results.

• Helpfully, the first link also shares when to expect what kinds of ballots to be reported. That matters this year, as a record number of Americans will have voted early, and Democrats seem to have lost their edge in early voting.

I’ll be watching Florida (h/t DD), where results should come back pretty quickly starting when polls close at 7pm ET. Polling averages there have Trump up by a little over 6 points.

• How Trump does in Florida might give us some insight into how good polling is this cycle, offering early clues about how the election might turn out in battleground states.

• If you’d like to go deeper and wonkier, read Patrick Ruffini’s What to Watch for on Election Night.

Surprise! Each election brings its own wonkiness, and odds are something will crop up over the course of election week that few of the pundits foresaw. But people are saying about everything there is to say, which will mean that some rando on Twitter will look like a fortune-teller after the election.

What to Watch During Election Week

This election could be over pretty quickly. If Harris wins Georgia and North Carolina, or Trump wins both by wide margins, we might have a pretty good idea who our next President will be.

• But the odds are still good that it will be close, which will mean that we’re likely in limbo, potentially until Saturday, when Pennsylvania was called in 2020.

• So given a close race, what I will be watching is how the Trump campaign works to challenge the election, which they have already begun to do both by lawsuit and by tweet (see Politico, Axios, and Wall Street Journal coverage on that).

Given that, I’m going back over the 2020 election and reading up on what the Wall Street Journal is calling Stop the Steal 2.0. Here are some of the things I’m having my students read and listen to on that:

• Stop the Steal 2.0, from the (center-right) Wall Street Journal

• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Election Integrity, from the (conservative) Hoover Institution 

• Do Fraud Claims about the 2020 Election Stand Up to Scrutiny? from the University of Chicago—an OK podcast about an ambitious, impressive, nerdy paper examining all the various claims of election fraud from the 2020 election.

But wait! Isn’t there evidence of voter fraud? Yes. The (conservative) Heritage Foundation, which maintains a database for this, has found 1,561 instances of voter fraud in the 21st century. Given that between 80 million and 160 million Americans vote in federal elections every two years, that’s something like one fraudulent vote out of every million votes cast, not including the votes case in off-cycle local elections.

How Could They Possibly Vote for *That* Person?

As someone with both committed Harris and Trump voters in my circle of family and friends, it’s not unusual for me to hear folks ask this kind of question. “How could the possibly vote for Trump?” “How could they possibly vote for Harris?”

The easiest answer is that we live in separate media silos, but I’ve read good political science research that suggests that’s not the case; the folks trapped in media silos are the political junkies, not the average voter.

But I regularly read news from across the political spectrum (kudos to Ground News for its Political Blindspot feature) and I’ve increasingly come to think those previous results don’t hold anymore. Consider this:

• If you get news mostly from Fox and farther right, you are not likely to have read stories about Trump allegedly wishing he had Hitler’s generals; Trump calling America a “garbage can;” Jack Smith’s latest indictment against Trump for overturning the 2020 election; Trump’s plans for mass deportation, including the relatives of 4 million American children; analyses about his increasingly violent rhetoric; or threats to use the military against his political enemies. You might also not get coverage about the US economy might be the envy of the world, or why economists are particularly sour on Trump’s economic plans.

• If you get news from the other side, you are not likely to have read stories questioning Kamala Harris’s record as a prosecutor or accusing her of plagiarism. You might not be thinking about Trump’s role in the Abraham Accords or the First Step Act, and you might be too quick to dismiss arguments about the strength of the pre-pandemic US economy.

If you know someone who is voting for the other candidate, you’re probably not walking around with the same facts they are. If you were, you might think a little more like they do.

But maybe more important is the reality that most Americans vote not based on gathering evidence and making a decision, but based on stereotypes of each party: Republicans good on the business, foreign policy, and social traditionalism; Democrats good on education, healthcare, and social equality.

• I don’t think these stereotypes are very true anymore, but by their nature stereotypes change more slowly than the facts on the ground.

In any case, the upshot here is that it’s worth giving your political opponents a half-inch more understanding than you might otherwise. Doing so might open up a different conversation, one in which you are able to learn enough about why they’re voting the way they do, in turn giving you an opening to connect their values to some of the things you care about. Here’s one example a student sent me:

LGBTQ activists canvassed in a red state. The conversations surprised them. (PDF here)

Photo by Kelsey Knight on Unsplash