Today’s guest (our final preelection guest) is David Wasserman, political analyst with the Cook Political Report, who also helps out with the NBC decision desk. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people whose job on election night is to help Americans understand when we can safely call specific districts and states for Congress, Senate, or the presidency. However, I truly don’t think I know anybody whose calls I trust more than David’s. And the even deeper compliment is that David is perhaps the most trusted election night consigliere among all the other people I trust. So, when I wanted to put together a show on how to watch election night like a pro, I’m grateful that the pro of pros said yes.
With a week to go, this election has attracted several theories about which trends will determine the outcome. We’ve done shows on the rightward shift among men, especially young men; the politics of working class decline; the possibility that we’ll see non-white voters move into the Trump column while college-educated white voters move into the Harris column. But these are all theories. It’s going to take a while to know if they’re actually true. When polls close at 7 p.m., you’re going to see some people dive into exit polls and incomplete county-by-county returns, claiming that they can see trends and predict the outcome. But as Wasserman tells us, this is not wise. Exit polls aren’t special. They’re just another poll. And their non-specialness is important to note in an age when so many people are voting early and therefore aren’t counted among surveys of Election Day voters.
Meanwhile, different states have different rules for when they can start counting early and mailed ballots. These rules dramatically and sometimes confusingly shift our understanding of election night. Pennsylvania cannot start counting mail-in or early votes until Election Day morning. This often leads to slower reporting of mail-in results, while Election Day votes are usually counted and reported first. Last election Republicans were more likely to vote on Election Day while Democrats were more likely to vote by mail. If the same thing happens in 2024, what we should expect to see is a red mirage followed by a blue wave—as right-leaning ballots are counted first and left-leaning ballots are counted second. This is not a conspiracy. It’s just state law.
In the state of Georgia, it’s the opposite. Georgia and other Sunbelt states can begin processing and counting mail-in and early votes before Election Day, which means what you might see a blue mirage followed by a red wave.
One conspiracy theory that’s already starting to attract attention is that any state that looks like it’s voting for Trump that sees a blue wave is a sign of voter fraud. But there’s nothing fraudulent about the state laws that determine the orders in which votes are counted.
For this reason, Wasserman says, it’s tantalizing but misleading to draw strong conclusions about the election from incomplete county results. If you want to understand where the election is going, if you want to watch the returns, like a good faith pro, the better solution is to wait for full county results in key bellwether counties like Nash County, North Carolina. Understanding what those key, predictive, canary-in-a-coalmine counties are is the focus of this show.
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In the following excerpt, David Wasserman discusses with Derek the fallibility of using incomplete county results as election predictors before all mail-in, early, and Election Day votes are accounted for, then delves into how best to accurately do so.
Derek Thompson: So what I wanted to do here is to have an episode that teaches me, and by extension, teaches listeners, how to follow election night like a pro. And the truth is, to pay you the most technical of all compliments, of all the people I could follow on election night, the only person for whom I click that little bell feature on Twitter is you.
So what I thought we’d do is have you on to provide a kind of road map for election night. What are the bellwether counties? What should we be watching in the 7 o’clock hour, in the 8 o’clock hour, in the 9 o’clock hour? When will we have an inkling that Trump or Harris are outperforming among key demographics or in areas that suggest a meaningful shift versus 2020? Or frankly, just importantly, the absence of a shift. How will we know if we’re essentially just watching 2020 all over again?
Before we dive into this truly nerdy exercise, can you tell me literally how you watch election returns? I mean, there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people that are watching you watch election returns. How do you do it? Do you have five screens going? Do you have an IV drip with electrolytes? Are you alone in a dark room with a couple of TVs, like a monk? What is your setup?
David Wasserman: I discovered early on when I was a teenager that I had a knack for this. I think there are a ton of people on Twitter, including a lot of young people, who have basically the same skill set that I do. I just probably started from a perch at the Cook Political Report that people listen to. But basically, the manna from heaven for every election analyst that’s trying to figure out what’s going on during election night is completed counties or precincts. And the ability to calibrate how counties vote in relation to each other, what demographic components there are within a certain state or district, because it’s almost always true that the patterns across those demographics are similar. And so, if we have a preconceived idea of how a state or district has behaved in a past election, we have exact election results from those counties, those precincts, and we have a precinct or a county that is done counting on election night, and the total votes cast are nearly equal or above what they were in 2020.
We have a pretty good idea how that place has trended. And then it becomes a question of, is turnout higher or lower in other parts of the state? Are we seeing one candidate specifically underperform with Hispanic voters, for example? Are they overperforming with whites with college degrees? Are we seeing an unusually high or low turnout among whites without college degrees? And knowing what’s in and knowing what’s left can allow you to be ahead of the networks, who are understandably cautious about calling these races. And in full disclosure, I’m going to be working for a major network on election night, and on the very big election nights I’m off of social media because there’s so much data coming at you so fast that you need a big team if you’re going to do it right. I know my limits.
Thompson: Can you tell us what network you’re going to be reporting for?
Wasserman: I’ll be at the decision desk at NBC News in Philadelphia.
Thompson: And so, a 100,000-foot picture: Where do you see this race right now before the votes are being officially counted? Obviously it’s close; 2016 was decided by about 80,000 votes among key states; 2020 was decided by about 80,000 votes among key states. It’s hard to imagine that any election could be closer than that, and yet by some measures, it seems to me like polls show this election is even closer. Why do you think that is? How do you explain in the biggest picture what makes this election so historically close?
Wasserman: It’s the closest election in the polling that I’ve covered in my 17 years doing this for the Cook Report. That doesn’t mean it’s going to produce the closest result. We’ve had two elections in a row that have come down to less than 80,000 votes across three states. Now, statistically it’s unlikely it’s going to come down to a margin that small this time, even given that the polls are very close. But look, the polls lack the precision to tell us exactly where these states stand or where they stand in relation to each other.
It could be that Harris overperforms in the Sun Belt, as Democrats have done in the past, and that Trump overperforms by more in the Great Lakes states, where we’ve clearly seen polling errors that have underestimated him, and yet we don’t know. What we do have a good handle on, though, is how the coalitions have changed since 2020, because we have a large set of data that suggests that Harris is performing better with professional college degree holding white voters, then Biden performed in 2020, and that Trump has gained ground among Hispanic and, to some extent, Black voters, particularly among young voters in those demographics, and young men who identify as independents. The extent to which those trends materialize on election night is still up in the air.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: David Wasserman
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Subscribe: Spotify
