Since there will be an avalanche of post-election analysis on Wednesday, I thought it would be more helpful to give you some thoughts on what to look for tonight as the returns come in.
So in addition to the obvious stuff—swing states, the Electoral College path, the national popular margin—here are some smaller items that might be worth your attention:
1) Over the weekend, Iowa looked like it was locked down for Trump, making at least one Obama state that Big Orange will flip. If the state polling holds and Trump wins Iowa, look for two things: (1) What’s the count on Obama-states that Trump flips, versus Romney-states that Clinton flips? This will tell you the extent to which Trump scrambled the map in either a helpful, or deleterious, manner for Republicans. (2) Look at how Trump performs in neighboring Minnesota and Wisconsin. This will be interesting because a lot of observers suggested that Trump’s strong showing in Iowa could bleed over into those two states. To the extent this does or does not materialize, it will tell you how much Iowa is its own special snowflake.
2) The raw vote. A couple weeks ago I wrote about my interest in the raw vote totals. In the aggregate, they’ll tell you all sorts of interesting things about the potential upsides (or downsides) of Trumpism. But in the micro, they should also tell us something about the extent to which get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations matter in a presidential campaign.
So look to the battleground states (which is where the Clinton GOTV efforts are concentrated) and see what their raw votes totals are compared with 2008 and 2012. Is turnout up or down? Then look to see if Clinton is over or underperforming her final state poll numbers.
If turnout in, say, New Hampshire, is down, and Clinton overperforms her final poll number, that tells us that her campaign managed to warp the electorate and that GOTV matters. If turnout is up and Clinton still overperforms, then GOTV really matters.
On the other hand, if turnout is down and Clinton underperforms her number, then it suggests that the value of GOTV is overrated.
3) The other thing to watch for at the state level is how incumbent Republican senators run with respect to Trump. Here’s where the vulnerable Republicans were before the GOP convention, and then where they finished in their final polling averages: (Note, these are only the races that are close-ish.)
What you see here is a picture of Republican senators bleeding small amounts of support, but mostly hanging in there and running well, despite Trump’s weakness. It will be interesting to see if they can continue to defy the gravitational pull from the top of the ticket and win.
But the final danger for Senate Republicans is what we mentioned a moment ago: GOTV. Congressional campaigns rely heavily on the presidential head of the ticket to pour resources into voter turnout operations at the state level. So if Clinton’s turnout operation winds up having a big impact on the race, it’s not just going to hurt Trump. It’ll hurt these Senate Republicans, too. Watch to see where their numbers finish relative to their final polls.
Oh, and look to see if Trump runs ahead of a single competitive Republican senator. Does he have coattails that pull weak Republicans along with him, or is he an electoral black hole, sucking votes away from stronger down-ballot candidates?
4) Pulling back to the national view, look at Trump’s final percentage of the popular vote and compare it with where Trump was sitting when he fired Paul Manafort in August.
On the day Manafort was let go, Trump was at 37 percent in the Real Clear average four-way race and 41 percent in the two-way. Does Trump finish markedly better? (Remember, those third-party percentages always collapse naturally.) At the end of the race, campaigns that go through three leadership teams in less than a year don’t often show a ton of improvement.
5) The early voting in Nevada makes that state look like a lock for Clinton. If that holds, it’s another indicator in the importance of Clinton’s GOTV machine and a harbinger of two things: (1) Trump’s margin with Hispanic voters and (2) Levels of Hispanic turnout. Keep an eye on Nevada.
In general, watch to see if African-American turnout drops from 2008 / 2012 levels and if Hispanic turnout percentage increases. In 2008, 64.7 percent of eligible black voters voted; in 2012, 66.2 percent did—the highest percentage of any racial group.
Hispanic voters have lagged far behind in terms of voter percentage: In 2008, only 49.9 percent of eligible Hispanic citizens voted; in 2012, 48 percent. This suggests a lot of room for growth. If 2016 marks the beginning of a turnout revolution for Hispanic voters, it will be a very big deal.
We won’t know the answer to this question until after the data nerds at the Census Bureau and Brookings crunch the numbers in a few months. But we may get some hints about the baselines over the course of tonight.
6) After tonight we can put an end to the “lawn-sign advantage” once and for all.
Every four years people say, “The polls can’t be right—look at all the lawn signs for Candidate X!” In 2012, the mania was about how Mitt Romney was secretly winning Virginia because the state GOP had plum run out of Romney-Ryan lawn signs. (Romney lost Virginia by 4 points.)
Three days ago Laura Ingraham tweeted “Don’t count #Connecticut out! Signs all over the state for @realdonaldtrump! Very little for Hillary.”
There have been 39 major polls of Connecticut. Clinton has lead by double-digits in 21 of them. In the last ten polls, Clinton’s lead has been: +14, +7, +9, +15, +11, +15, +14, +13, +14. Connecticut has gone Democratic in every election since 1992. Trump has never led in a Connecticut poll. Not once. Ever.
And Laura Ingraham is arguing that Connecticut is in play because of signs?
So even though Connecticut doesn’t seem like a particularly interesting state tonight, it will actually be quite instructive. Because as you watch the returns come in from the Nutmeg state this evening, ask yourself this: Is it that Laura Ingraham just didn’t know any better? Or that she did know better, and was deliberately trying to snow her audience?
And then ask yourself which is worse.
