Presidential approval suggests vote share
There is an interesting piece from First Read today that demonstrates the direct correlation between an incumbent president’s job rating and actual reelection vote share. Consider this:
1984: Reagan’s job rating was 58%; he got 58.8% of the vote.
1992: Bush’s rating was 36%; he got 37.4% of the vote.
1996: Clinton’s approval was 56%; he got 49.2% in that three-way race.
2004: Bush’s approval was 49%; he got 50.7% of the vote.
2012: Obama’s approval was 49%; he got 51.1% of the vote.
Trump’s job rating in the most recent national NBC/WSJ poll was 44%. This suggests he will get between 43 and 45 percent of the vote, not enough in a two-way race.* This is consistent with Larry Sabato’s simplified political science model, which we discussed a few days ago.
Volunteer opportunity of the day: Iowa Senate
Help Nevada voters cure their ballots so that technical mistakes and errors do not cause them to be rejected. Today from 1:30 ET to 9:00 ET. Sign up here.
You can find additional opportunities on Mobilize, Swing Left Boston, and Together for 2020.
Voter protection news
“Potentially thousands of mail ballots requested by Butler County voters appear to be lost… and the U.S. Postal Service has been asked to immediately investigate what happened to them.”
“Nearly 40,000 registered voters in the county requested mail ballots. So far, only 24% of them have been returned to the county, by far the lowest rate among the state’s 67 counties. The county with the next-lowest return rate, Fayette, has received 50% of requested ballots.”
NC denies access to international election observers
“The North Carolina Board of Elections has denied international observers access to polling sites on Election Day, a decision that caught members of the mission by surprise as they prepared to arrive in the state,” McClatchy reports.
“North Carolina had allowed election observers to monitor their polling sites in the past, but decided against it this year, forcing the international team to cancel its visit at the last minute.”
North Carolina rules left unchanged by Supreme Court
“The Supreme Court will allow absentee ballots in North Carolina to be received and counted up to nine days after Election Day, in a win for Democrats,” the AP reports.
“The justices, by a 5-3 vote Wednesday, refused to disturb a decision by the State Board of Elections to lengthen the period from three to nine days because of the coronavirus pandemic, pushing back the deadline to Nov. 12.”
What is the Court up to?
Folks might be wondering what is going on with the recent orders in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and now North Carolina. I have been talking to a few people who don’t understand why the Court prevented Wisconsin from accepting ballots after Election Day, but allowed it in Pennsylvania (and now NC). The reason is rather simple. The rules at issue in PA and NC were set by state government entities (a state court in PA and the state board of elections in NC), but by a federal judge in Wisconsin. Additionally, the Court was concerned about changing the preexisting rules so close to the election. The Court has been consistent in these decisions.
Is this because the conservative justices respect precedence – the Anglo-American legal concept of stare decisis which holds that settled case law should not be disturbed? Don’t get your hopes up on that. I think it has much more to do with conservative justices respecting the opinions that they have already put it writing. The key vote here is not Chief Justice Roberts, although his vote is important. It is Justice Kavanaugh, whose concurrence in the Wisconsin case outlined his reasoning that federal judges should not be changing rules made by the states and, in any case, election rules should not be changed by the courts so close to an election. That is why the Supreme Court has a majority – even with newly confirmed Justice Barrett, who we would guess would be in the minority here* – to let states accept absentee and mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day where states have existing rules to do so, but will not order states to do so in the absence of those existing rules.
Here’s the problem for Trump’s bluster about not counting any votes after Election Day. The Supreme Court now has a clear majority of five votes to (1) allow existing state rules on counting late-arriving (but postmarked by November 3rd) votes and (2) not change existing state rules so close – and presumably after – Election Day. The flip side is that the Court will not allow federal courts to order states to count late-arriving votes in violation of currently existing state rules. So, the rules on counting votes that are currently in effect across the states will remain that way this year. The Court may decide on the merits*** later that the rules in Pennsylvania or North Carolina are not legal, but those decisions will be made after this election and will only apply to upcoming elections. The majority on the Court is balancing the equities here and prioritizing the rights of voters to comply with state rules over any constitutional technicality about when votes can be counted.
It’s hard to know how this new solidly right-wing Court will decide the issue on the merits, but I think it’s unlikely the Court will ultimately rule that all votes must be counted on Election Day as Trump wants. They may rule that all votes have to be in on Election Day, which is the actual issue in WI, PA, and NC, but I doubt they will even do that. The state rules on accepting late ballots that are postmarked by Election Day historically are to allow members of the military and Americans living overseas to have a fair chance to cast ballots. If states have to accept these ballots, it follows they have to count them. There is a reason that Election Day is six weeks before the Electoral College formerly votes in mid-December. Sure, in olden times it was to allow time for travel to DC, but it was also to allow time to count votes and make sure states were certifying and sending the correct slate of Electors to vote in December. Even aside from that, there is no good reason to count ballots only on Election Day. It’s a bunch of nonsense, and while Trump and McConnell don’t care about how history judges them I am confident that even (most of) the conservative justices do.
Today’s numbers:
Polling Averages
FiveThirtyEight: Biden +9.0 (change to Biden)
The Upshot: Biden +9.0 (no change)
Real Clear Politics: Biden +7.7 (change to Biden)
Forecasts
FiveThirtyEight (probabilities of winning EC): Biden 89%, Trump 11% (change to Biden)
The Economist (probabilities of winning EC): Biden 96%, Trump 4% (no change)
The Upshot (probable EV totals): Biden 357 EVs, Trump 181 EVs (no change)
Total Early Votes: 73,002,204 (+6M since yesterday)
Mail Ballots: 51,423,838 (+3.1M since yesterday)
In-Person Votes: 27,581,867 (+2.9M since yesterday)
Mail Ballots Outstanding: 39,520,712
* Minor party candidates are polling no higher than three percent collectively, which is less than half of what they got in 2016. At this point, polling is showing almost no undecided voters left anywhere. In 2016, FiveThirtyEight estimated that 15 percent of voters were undecided three days before the election. Trump won undecideds by about 17 percent, which was probably the main factor in his victory.
** Barrett took no part in the Pennsylvania and North Carolina decisions, claiming that time was of the essence and she did not have time to review the arguments since she was just confirmed on Monday night.
*** The Court was considering an injunction in each case here, not deciding the legal question on the merits. An injunction is an order from a court for someone to do or refrain from doing something. The question of whether a party is likely to succeed on the merits is an element of whether a court should order an injunction, but so is balancing the equities - meaning, doing what is fair considering the circumstances. It’s not clear where the Court stands on the merits, but it found that not changing the rules so close to the election was more important (fair) than preventing votes from being accepted.