Two Good Signs for Harris

The last Marquette poll before the election is out and it holds few surprises. Trump v. Harris? Dead heat. Baldwin v. Hovde? Dead heat.

While those results were expected, Democrats should be especially nervous about Tammy Baldwin. When this race began, I thought she’d beat Hovde pretty comfortably. But when the polls tightened last month, the Republicans saw blood in the water and pumped more national money into the race behind Hovde. Now, it’s anybody’s race.

But I did find two things in the poll to be especially interesting and both slightly favor Democrats.

The first is turnout. The poll found that 70% of those who have used mail-in ballots voted for Harris, and since about 600,000 mail-in ballots have been cast so far, that would suggest that Harris already has around 420,000 votes in the bank. Trump holds a slight lead among those who have voted early in person, 52% to 47%. Another 600,000 or so ballots have ben cast in person, so that would bring the total early vote at this point to, say, 710,000 to 490,000, advantage Harris. Bottom line: Harris will go into election day with a lead of somewhere in the neighborhood of more than 200,000 votes.

There were 3.3 million total votes cast in Wisconsin in 2020. If turnout is about the same this time and 1.2 million votes have already been cast, that would leave 2.1 million voters waiting to show up on election day. The Marquette pole has 56% of those saying they’ll vote on election day also saying they’ll vote for Trump. That would give him 1,176,000 election day votes plus the 490,000 early votes, for a total of 1,666,000. (The “666” being especially appropriate.)

Meanwhile, if Harris gets 47% of the election day turnout, that would be 987,000. Add in her 710,000 early votes and you get 1,697,000.

Harris wins by 31,000 votes, which is a little better than the margins in the last two presidential races in Wisconsin. And it could be better because so many of Harris’ votes will have been cast early while Trump is relying on low propensity voters who need to show up on Tuesday — when the forecast calls for rain.

But this also means that Trump would have a strong lead early in the evening next Tuesday, only to see his lead shrink as absentee ballots are counted later. And, to make matters worse, the bulk of those will come from Milwaukee, where for reasons that are incomprehensible to me, they can’t start processing their absentee ballots until the polls are closed. The bottom line is that, if Harris wins, it won’t happen until the wee hours of November 7th, feeding crazy conspiracy theories.

The second thing I found interesting is the effect of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The Marquette poll has his support go up from 3% to 5% — after he dropped out of the race and tried to get his name off the ballot. Previous polls had shown that those are mostly Trump voters.

The counter to that is Jill Stein. She got 30,000 votes when she was last on the ballot in 2016. Those were mostly Democratic votes and Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin by 22,000 votes. So, Stein could cost Harris the election, but it looks like RFK, Jr. might wipe that out and then some. Stein only got 1.1% of the vote in 2016 and, when it’s all said and done, Kennedy might get, say, 3%. It looks to me like the third party candidates will be a wash and maybe a slight advantage for Harris.

In a race this tight you’d have to be a fool to hazard a prediction. Well, okay, that shouldn’t stop me then. I’ll go with Harris by 35,000 votes with the Wisconsin election called at 3AM on November 7th. And, since I’d expect Baldwin to run a bit ahead of Harris, I’ll say that she will win as well.

Unless I’m wrong.