Last week, Josh Cohen—a regular contributor to The Nation, the author of the Ettingermentum newsletter, and the left’s favorite data wonk—was a guest on The Nation’s election podcast, See How They Run. You can listen to the full episode here.
Today, we’re sharing an edited excerpt of that conversation, in which Cohen told Nation editor D.D. Guttenplan about the specific states and counties he’ll be keeping an eye on when the polls close on Tuesday night to get a sense of who will win the presidency.
What are some of the races you’re looking at the most this cycle?
I think that the congressional races, especially the Senate races, have been some of the most fascinating and interesting and overlooked contests this whole year. You have seen Democrats putting up very, very, very strong polling numbers. Republicans in those races are [running behind] Trump substantially in a lot of cases. So there is a clear population of people who are open to voting for Trump but are also not sold on the Republican Party at large and are also planning to vote for Democratic Senate candidates.
What are the places you’re going to be looking out for right away after the polls close as potential signs of how the overall race is going to go?
I would tell people not to really pay much attention to Florida. It gets a lot of attention early on because the polls close very early there and it counts the votes very fast, but it’s a very unique state. In 2020, it was one of the few states that swung out right towards Trump. That seemed to be a sign that he was doing well nationally. It was more of a sign that he was doing well in states like Florida—[and there] are practically no other states in the country that are like Florida.
Central Indiana and eastern Kentucky close their polls at 6 pm ET. Neither of those states are too competitive. But there is one county in Indiana that may be worth keeping an eye on very, very early, called Hamilton County.
It’s a suburb of Indianapolis and is a historically very, very strong suburban Republican county. I think it’s voted Republican nearly every election in 100 years—just one of those classic Yankee Northern Republican areas that just always stuck with the party no matter what. But it’s very well-educated, relatively affluent, and it swung a lot towards Democrats. I think it was only within a single-digit margin in 2020 when Biden made a lot of gains in the suburbs. So it can be kind of seen as a metric for how well Kamala Harris would do in those kinds of suburbs around the country, which could really like be a sign of whether she’s going to be on track to win or be on track to lose. [There are others] like Cobb County and Gwinnett County in Georgia, the county surrounding Detroit—
The collar counties around Philadelphia.
Yeah. Montgomery County, Bucks County. Or Maricopa County in Arizona, which is really just the whole city of Phoenix, but has started to act like a suburban county in recent years.
If she runs even with Biden’s performance, I don’t know if it would necessarily be a positive sign for her. It would be a sign that she’s probably on track to create a similar coalition, but she might want to outrun him a little bit because with the way trends are going, Trump will probably increase the support in rural areas and Democrats will need to increase their support in suburban areas to account for that. So if it’s a very close race there in Hamilton County, I think that that’ll be a sign that Kamala is going to get a surge in the suburbs that would put her in a position to win in the states that matter. If she outright wins it, I think that would be a very good sign for her.
So that’ll be a place really worth keeping your eye on, because it’s so representative of these kinds of places that matter so much in these states around the country. There’s a congressional district in northern Indiana around Gary that does sort of represent how Democrats may be doing in working-class areas. And if Democrats are doing very poorly, they are at risk of losing the seat. That could be a sign of a potential red wave.
What are some other states you’re going to be watching?
Georgia closes very early [at 7 pm ET] and that’s my home state. So I like paying attention to it. Virginia also closes at the same time. Their suburban counties count a bit late, so they might not be able to tell us much. North Carolina also closes early [at 7:30 pm ET]. Georgia and North Carolina will be very, very important states. Those are places where Trump’s numbers have wavered a little bit in recent weeks. They are must-win states for him. He needs to win those to be in the position where he can win if he just knocks out one of the three Midwestern states.
In the last couple of elections, there was a lot of talk about the Electoral College—about how it’s skewed towards Republicans, about how unfair it is. But you’re not seeing so much talk about that this time. Is that because Trump might actually win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College?
People are more attuned to it than maybe how likely it is, but it does represent a trend that could happen. [Trump] could end up only winning the popular vote by a small amount but still winning the Electoral College because he could make a lot of gains in states that don’t matter—places like California or New York, where the question of abortion is a lot less salient and voters are more inclined to make a protest vote against local Democratic leadership, who they’re not too fond of. That could net Trump millions of votes that don’t really end up gaining him a single electoral vote.
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“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →He could gain a lot of votes in rural areas in the Deep South, but outside of Georgia, that’s not really going to make too much of an impact on the Electoral College. He could win Alabama or Mississippi by a lot more than he did in 2020.
If Trump winds up getting millions more votes in places like New York and California, that’s a big problem, because he’s going to contest any election results that don’t go his way.
Even if it is a result of totally legitimate stuff, just voters in these swing states being more mobilized, it will look a little suspicious if Trump happens to gain everywhere except in the states that matter. These Republicans are willing to scrape around for literally any evidence they can have to say that the elections are faked.
OK, so are you willing to make a prediction?
I personally would rather be Harris right now. I think that a lot of the signs we’re seeing point towards her party having strength. A lot of the warning signs that we might’ve seen in 2020 that showed the polls were off in a way that would hurt her party don’t exist.
The early voting, I don’t think tells us much one way or the other, so I’m not willing to go too much off of that. There are credible reasons for me to believe that the pollsters maybe put their thumb on the scale to make Trump look a little stronger than he might actually be. [But]the polling is still slightly tilted in her favor, even with that happening.
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On this episode of See How They Run, D.D. Guttenplan is joined by Ettingermentum’s Josh Cohen on how political junkies can get through the next few days.
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OK, and here’s my last question. When do you think we’ll know who’s won this race?
I think we could know relatively early, even if it’s a close race, unless it comes within a couple hundred votes. After 2020, [states have] made a lot of changes that allow them to count their votes very quickly. Georgia, for instance, will have most of its votes counted by election night. We’ll get a sense of what that’ll look like, I think, before midnight. States like Michigan also cast their votes fast. Pennsylvania, I think, counts votes quickly now. Arizona and Nevada are still kind of slow.
So if the race comes down to them, things could still be up in the air for a while. But I think we will know before we did in 2020. I don’t think it’ll take the whole week.
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