FROM YOUR KEYBOARD TO GOD’S EAR: This Election Might Not Be Close.

And what we think is happening is that Donald Trump is doing far better than many of the polls, and the print and broadcast media coverage, are letting on. If we’re wrong, we’ll be the first to admit it, and you can feel free to come back here next week and heckle us in the comments.

The first point to make is that despite some razor-thin poll margins and talk of a “coin-flip” election, the environment is extremely favorable to Republicans. For one thing, the GOP has made significant party registration gains since the last election cycle. In Pennsylvania, widely considered to be the key to the election, Republicans have cut the Democrats’ registration advantage from more than 685,000 in 2020 to less than 300,000 this year—a gain of more than 385,000 in a state that Biden took by only about 80,000 votes. And in late September, Gallup released the results of its survey on the 2024 election environment, concluding that “nearly all Gallup measures that have shown some relationship to past presidential outcomes … favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party.” . . .

We have also, for a couple of weeks now, been receiving early vote (EV) numbers in some of the major swing states. The conventional wisdom is that you can’t pay attention to EV numbers because EV totals have historically been misleading in predicting final results, not to mention that elections have changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We think some of that is being overstated, but sure—don’t take the EV numbers as gospel truth. Still, they give us a chance to look at real-life voter behavior and shouldn’t be ignored.

What the EV numbers show right now is that Trump is doing much better than anyone anticipated. This is exactly what we might have expected if we’d tuned out every media story about Trump: Hitler II and looked at fundamentals like registration, party ID, and the electoral environment—which is another reason to take these numbers seriously. . . . Again, anything could happen, so don’t bet the house. But as we read headline and X post after headline and X post this morning, suggesting the closest election of our lifetime, we thought it might be helpful to at least offer an opposing view: Trump is doing extremely well right now, and the final result may not even be that close.

If it’s not close, they can’t cheat. And if it is close, they will. So I hope this is right, but: 1, 2, 3: Don’t Get Cocky!

And we’ll know the truth soon enough.