I’ve decided it’s okay to indulge in optimism. It is very possible the polls are wrong, especially regarading Kamala Harris’s base of support. See Justin Brown at Politico, for example, who argues there are Harris voters the pollsters are missing.

In this election cycle, pollsters have made a clear effort to explore various methodologies that enable a deeper dive into Trump’s areas of support that were previously underrepresented in past polling. But when asked about the challenge of tracking an abbreviated Harris campaign in the wake of an historic candidate swap, some pollsters believed that the polling transition from Biden to Harris would be “relatively seamless.”

Justin Brown makes a persuasive argument that the polling companies, who had adjusted and fine-tuned how they “weighted” the data to be sure they were not undercounting Trump voters, have no clue about Harris voters. For example, the much discussed Ann Selzer poll that shows Harris ahead of Trump in Iowa found that older voters, expecially women, were moving in the direction of Harris. Many are also questioning if the pollsters have fully integrated the effect of the Dobbs decision into their projections. See Marcy Wheeler,  Male Pollsters Shocked — Shocked!! — When a Woman Pollster Discovers Women Voters.

It’s also the case that a lot of those older women are registered Republicans. And this takes us to another question — are the pollsters finding the “Liz Cheney” Republicans who are voting for Harris to stop Trump? See Josh Marshall on this point.

See also Final GOP push in Pennsylvania focuses on imaginary voters over real ones by Philip Bump at WaPo. He observed GOTV activity in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

As I did in 2016 and 2020, I traveled to Scranton to see how the campaigns were tackling this task. Both of my prior visits were, at least in retrospect, revealing. In 2016, I was surprised to see little activity for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a bustling turnout operation for Donald Trump. Four years later, it was Joe Biden — who often speaks of the time he spent in Scranton as a child — who was running an effective operation. Trump’s supporters seemed to be more focused on handing out lawn signs and boisterous parades of trucks.

In other words, in 2016 and 2020, the campaigns with the more robust GOTV field operations in Scranton (and presumably across the state) ended up winning. In Scranton in 2024, that was clearly the operation being run by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and its allies.

On the other hand, volunteers at a Trump office were being trained to be poll watchers, not canvassers.

Those volunteers, though, weren’t going out to turn out voters. Instead, Medeiros was helping them fill out the documents they’d need to be poll watchers on Election Day. Others were being trained to be greeters, welcoming people at polling places and providing information about Republican candidates. The focus was on managing those who came out to vote, not on making sure they came out in the first place.

Back in April, the then-new co-chair of the Republican Party, the Republican nominee’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, made clear that poll-watching would be a central focus for the party in November. It was an institutional bet on the idea that Trump’s 2020 loss was attributable not to having more Biden voters turn out, but to that pro-Biden majority being a function of some wrongdoing at the polls. Never mind that there were poll watchers in 2020, too (including some I spoke to then). The party would in 2024 have its volunteers combat imaginary illegal voters instead of turning out real, legal ones.

Well, we’ll see how that worked, or not, by the end of this week. Maybe the election will be a squeaker. But it’s very possible that the polls are wrong, and if so they are more likely undercounting Harris support than Trump support.

Looking at the closeness of the election from another angle — Matt Yglesias, in the New York Times, points out that around the world post-pandemic voters are turning out incumbents. This applies to both left-wing and right-wing incumbents. And this is mostly about inflation, apparently.

It appears that the unhappy electorates are unhappy in fundamentally the same way. Inflation spiked, largely because household spending patterns seesawed so abruptly during and after a global pandemic, and though it’s been tamed, prices of many goods have not fallen to what voters remember, and what’s more, the process of taming has involved higher interest rates, which in their own way raise the cost of living. The question of why, exactly, voters so hate inflation — which increases wages and prices symmetrically — has long puzzled economists. But the basic psychology seems to be: My pay increase reflects my hard work and talent, while the higher prices I am paying are the fault of the government.

Harris is swimming against the tide, so to speak. Yglesias thinks the real question ought to be, not why is it so close? but why isn’t Trump running away with this? And the answer is, basically, that Trump 2024 is a really terrible candidate who should have listened to his advisers and stay focused on the economy instead of pet-eating immigrants. See also Michael Tomasky at The New Republic, Donald Trump Has Lost His Sh*t.

I understand there is some indication in some polls that late-deciding voters are more often deciding for Harris, but other polls contradict that. So, basically, nobody really knows what’s going on out there. Until we know something, I say we might as well give our nerves a little rest and be optimistic.

Tomorrow I intend to be here commenting sporadically as the returns start coming in, and you are welcome to drop by.