Wherever I go in my personal life these days, whether it's to mid-week Bible study, Church on Sunday, the e-bike shop, or even taking the trash cans out to the curb, people who know me are peppering me for the latest info on what's going to happen in November. As Amos said in Chapter 7, I am not a prophet nor the son of a prophet. But what I can tell you is what I think is the most likely scenario as of right now, based upon both current metrics within a whole host of polling, and recent historical track records of these same polls. I think Donald Trump is going to win, even with Kamala Harris up 2 points in the Real Clear Politics national average, and up 0.2% in the battleground averages. 

Gallup has been tracking the entire electorate in the United States by party identification for decades. They updated their survey for this cycle, comparing it to previous cycles going back to Bill Clinton's first presidential run in 1992. It serves as a background for which way the tide may be moving when the votes start coming in via early mail, and whether that will translate to a wave, large or small, on Election Day. 

In 1992, the country was far more Democratic by party identification than before Ronald Reagan's era. 52% of the country were registered Democrats, while only 40% were Republicans. With Ross Perot siphoning away millions of votes from George H.W. Bush as an independent, Clinton won. In 1996, the party registration advantage for Democrats was still pretty lopsided - 50-41. 

It wasn't until George W. Bush's reelection campaign of 2004 when the country achieved registration parity between the two parties, tied at 47%. Democrats opened up a lead again with the Barack Obama era, and continued holding that advantage in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, although the margin had narrowed significantly. Democrats led Republicans, 46-43 in party ID, which translated to a 2.1% popular vote victory by Hillary over Donald Trump. She got thumped in the Electoral College. 

In 2020, Joe Biden's party ID advantage swelled to 48-43. He won the popular vote by 4.5%, and eked out a very narrow Electoral College victory. The bottom line? Democrats have never led Republicans on party ID in front of a presidential election by less than 3 points going back to 2004. It's the end of September, 2024, and Republicans currently hold a three-point advantage of their own over Democrats in party registration, a net 6-point shift in four years. 

That's the macro. The micro is just as telling. In Arizona a couple days ago, New York Times/Siena released a series of Battleground results, and showed Donald Trump opening up a 5-point lead in the Grand Canyon State, outside of the margin of error. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued amongst the left, trying to poke holes in the methodology of the poll. They complained because they believe it oversampled Republicans. Nate Cohn has the details both from 2020 and now. 

There is a very good and simple case:
AZ was R+3.0 in 2020 among all RVs;
AZ is now R+6.1 in 2024 among RVs, as of July.
It is not some coincidence that the likely electorate in this poll (R+7.6) has shifted almost identically to the righthttps://t.co/cL5rl7rRVW

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) September 23, 2024

Have you heard that kind of data reported anywhere in regime media, that Republicans have doubled their party registration advantage over Democrats in last four years? If Arizona is now at R+6.1%, it's not a busted poll by the NYT/Siena when their sample base is R+7.6. They're a point and a half over, but that's not enough to blow the overall top line number. Their sampling is within the ballpark of where the state currently sits. 

We keep hearing Pennsylvania is the whole enchilada this cycle, right? Whoever wins the Keystone State, and more importantly, Erie and other parts of Western Pennsylvania, wins it all. Michael Pruser over at DecisionDesk notes that in the last week alone, Republicans are picking up a lot more new voters than their Democratic counterparts. 

Pennsylvania Early Voting Update - 09.23

Net voter registration changes over the last seven days are reflected below:

🔴Republicans: +12,615
🔵Democrats: +7,940
🟡Others: +7,404

Pennsylvania is still revving up mail ballots; as of today, just five counties have begun to mail… pic.twitter.com/CJnmuwdRct

— Michael Pruser (@MichaelPruser) September 23, 2024

Just shy of five thousand new Republican net voters just in the last week alone. That's a good sign for Team Trump coming down the home stretch. What about the rest of the country, though? Would you be interested to see some data on the net change from 2020 to 2024 of Republicans and Democrats by state, just to see if Gallup is an anomaly or on to something that's not being picked up in election coverage by media pundits? 

Here you go. 

Voter Registration Changes: Nov 2020 to Jul 2024

🔴 Republicans: +393,365
🔵 Democrats: -3,584,321
⚪️ Independents: +1,802,932

Data via @MichaelPruser https://t.co/Ub5HNaKqz5 pic.twitter.com/iMIfuE6ZdK

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) September 26, 2024

The Republican Party, since 2020, have increased their voter rolls by almost 400,000 people. The Democratic Party in that same period of time have lost over three-and-a-half million. And for all the talk, including by me, that independents are a shrinking percentage of the electorate, the level of disgust with both parties has actually swelled the ranks of indies by a fairly significant 1.8 million. They're the ones up for grabs. They're the voters that are going to have to hold their nose and choose between two perceived bad options. Only one of those options is actually talking about policies and proposals that make a lick of sense, and that candidate definitely is not Kamala Harris. 

To highlight some of the numbers that should make your eyes bug out as much as they did mine, look at North Carolina. Republicans have gained 36,422 new voters since 2020, while Democrats have lost 221,437 voters. Indies in North Carolina have exploded by a little over 400,000. It's hard for me to buy the concept that North Carolina is as close as polling indicates with this new baseline, and especially hard to believe that the increase in indies are breaking for Kamala Harris, the current vice president that caused many of them to leave the Democratic Party in the first place, as a brand-new agent of change. 

In Pennsylvania, going again from micro to macro, Republicans statewide have lost 1,466 registered voters in the last four years. That's bad. Democrats have lost 329,289 registered voters in the same period of time. That's not just worse, that's catastrophic. 

I'll give you two more examples from states that won't necessarily be in play this time, but do bring into focus the Republican El Nino effect I'm talking about in this column. 

In New York, a state that has seen their population decline since the last Census, costing them a House seat in Congress, Republicans currently have just under 50,000 fewer voters on their rolls than they did in 2020. Compare that to the Democrats, who have over 410,000 fewer voters on their rolls. 

Do you remember the talk before the Democratic Party swapped out Harris for Biden that New Jersey might be in play after some polling Garden State voters were dissatisfied with the Biden-Harris administration's performance on the economy and immigration? That talk evaporated when Harris was placed on the ticket, but take a look at the registration numbers. Republicans have added 153,000 new voters at the same time that Democrats have lost 2,500 and change. 

Kamala Harris is 5 points behind where Joe Biden was in national polling on September 27th, 2020. She's 3.3% behind where Joe Biden was in the Battleground state average. She is 8 points behind Biden with Latinos in Pennsylvania. She has lost the Teamsters rank-and-file vote, in some states like Wisconsin, seeing a net swing of 75% to Donald Trump. She's polling weaker than Biden with Blacks, and with white men, educated and non-educated. She's got weaknesses compared to her predecessor in virtually every metric in a voting climate that, according to Gallup, has now swung from D+3 to R+3. 

This is why I tell everyone who asks me what's going to happen, that I think Trump's going to end up pulling this off. That said, the former President is fully capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory if he does not stay on message consistently and continue barnstorming the swing states. I believe the strategy in Team Trump was to keep their powder dry until the home stretch in spending money on ads. Harris is outspending Trump on media ads by a ridiculous margin. It's time to open up the purse strings. It's go time. 

As for ground game, not much has been reported about how each campaign is doing in door knocking or converting their prospective voters to actual voters. Kamala Harris will have fewer union resources to be her ground army after the Teamsters debacle, but the SEIU remains staunchly supportive and will be formidable in voter turnout. As for Trump, looks like they're ramping up their ground operation as well. 

TRUMP POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Between the Trump campaign and our supporters, we’re knocking 1 million doors per week. From the end of Aug. until Election Day, 15 million or more doors will have been knocked. We’re focusing on low propensity voters.

Watch interview:… pic.twitter.com/wOiBGiGwI0

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) September 25, 2024

The Republican El Nino is in effect. Will it result in an electoral victory in November? No clue. Climate change gurus have tried to make all sorts of dire predictions based upon the temperature of the water in the Pacific. Too hot, it's El Nino and calamity ensues. Too cold, and it's a La Nina, and all sorts of calamity ensues. But I digress. If the election is decided over the economy, the 'are you better off than 4 years ago' question, immigration, crime, foreign policy, and education, Trump will win, and I believe he will win by a margin much larger than any of the polling currently indicates. 

If, however, the election ignores all of the issue sets Americans say they care about and becomes a referendum of liking or not liking Donald Trump, Kamala Harris could win. I don't think that's a likely scenario, precisely because if the election were to be a referendum on Trump, you would not see the Gallup party ID registration numbers flipping the way they have. 

Another reason why I don't think Kamala would be a lock even if it's a referendum on Trump is because of the personal approval index. From 2020 to 2024, Kamala Harris is running 7.3% behind where Joe Biden was compared to Trump. Trump is still a net negative in approval, but he has halved that deficit since the last campaign cycle. And again, that has to be measured in the context of how razor-thin the 2020 race was decided - 43,000 votes between Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. There's just not that much wiggle room for Democrats and still have a viable path to win. 

For all of you who are suffering from polling anxiety and just want it to be November 5th already to put this crazy campaign season behind us, I get it. My spectacular wife has been there for weeks. Polling PTSD is a very real thing these days. I've been wrong before. I may very well be misreading the tea leaves this time. But I have a much better level of confidence about this election than I did about many of the previous cycles. There's just too much ice below the surface of the polling water that makes the iceberg I think the HMS Kamala is headed towards unavoidable. 

If the data reverses itself over the course of the next 40 days, and people then ask me who's going to win, my new answer will be, "I was born into a middle-class family."