I voted yesterday. It was a lovely day. The Jones-Lawler House race in my district is very close, I understand. I finally found some polls that say Republican Mike Lawler is ahead by a couple of points. Republicans have been running ads that paint Mondale Jones as a wild-eyed defund-the-police radical. Democrats have run ads reminding voters that Lawler’s voting record is anti-abortion rights. So we’ll see next week what worked.

At his Sunday night Nazi Nostalgia Rally in Madison Square Garden, Trump revealed he shared a “little secret” with House Speaker Mike Johnson. “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a little secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over.” Johnson, of course, refuses to talk about it.

At The Nation, Elie Mystal explains the two different ways Trump could become president again by having the election decided by the House of Representatives, which he assumes is “the secret.” The most likely plan, Mystal says, is to delay certification of votes in enough states to deny Kamala Harris 270 electoral votes. Josh Kovinsky at Talking Points Memo talked to some Trump electors in swing states who suggest they will “show up” to stall certification of the vote in their states if Trump loses. So, yes, Trump definitely has a plan and at least some people in place to carry out that plan.

I’ve read a couple of analyses recently that said it’s unlikely Trump could pull this off. I’m sure the Democrats are preparing for this. I would also like to point out that most of the infamous swing states have Democratic governors who might be able to intervene if something hinky were going on with certification. And the Republican governor of Georgia is already on record as being unwilling to break laws on Trump’s behalf.

There is a lot of speculation going on that Trump’s internal polling shows him losing, which is why he’s putting so much effort into sowing chaos after the election. But then it’s often been said of Trump that he’d rather succeed by cheating than by, you know, actually succeeding.

It’s also the case that the polls could be wrong. Josh Marshall discusses “herding,” or the tendency of polling companies to try to stay in line with what the other polling companies are reporting.

If you’re watching the latest polls, make a note of something called “herding.” It could be relevant for discussions of polling after the election. The concept is straightforward. In the final days of an election, poll results tend to trend toward consensus. One possibility is that everyone is finally making up their mind and the picture and reality is coming into focus. But that’s not the only possibility. For a mix of good faith and maybe less than good faith reasons, pollsters can become increasingly leery of publishing an outlier poll. There’s a tendency to “herd” together for extra-statistical reasons.

Let’s say you’re five days out from the election and the polling averages say candidate Jones is up 2 points and you’ve got a poll which says candidate Smith is up 3 points. (Pardon my defaulting to anglo surnames.) Everyone has an outlier result sometimes. But do you really want your final poll to be a weird outlier? In the modern era with aggregators, pollsters are often graded on the predictive accuracy of their final polls. So it kind of matters. If you’re a bit shady maybe you just tweak your numbers and get them closer to the average. If you’re more on the level maybe you take a closer look at the data and find something that really looks like it needs adjusting. Maybe you just decide that you’re going to hold this one poll back.

The weird consistensy of the polling over the past few weeks may be pointing to herding, or it may just be telling us people aren’t changing their minds. It’s also the case that a normal polling error might cause the polls to be wrong by as much as eight percentage points, and one or the other candidate could win decisively. So there’s really no point wringing our hands over the polls.

See also David Kurtz’s Morning Memo at TPM, Major News Media Fall For Fake GOP Outrage Yet Again.