Fine-tune your weekend doorknocking
Vote Maximizer has the latest updates to give your effort double or triple the impact.
Vote Maximizer has updated its voter power metrics. Based on the latest polls, they have quantified the leverage afforded by getting one more voter to the polls. Let this drive your efforts this weekend and next.
If you work in a swing state, anywhere will affect the statewide outcome. But you can do better than that. You can focus your effort on specific competitive districts and multiply your leverage, by affecting:
11 knife-edge Congressional districts (current margin in House: 4 seats)
4 knife-edge Senate races (current margin: 1 seat)
6 state legislatures, all on the edge of control
2 states with key reproductive-rights measures
2 states with ranked-choice voting/open primaries measures
This is enough to flip control of Congress, as well as materially affect the lives of people in half a dozen states. So you can affect much more than the Presidential race.
First, a sense of where the big questions stand.
Presidential Race: Seven states on the edge, Harris range 225-319 EV
Based on the Princeton Election Consortium tracker, the presidential race is far too close to call. Therefore everyone’s work in coming days will be critical.
Commercial sites give you what is called a “point estimate,“ that is, the center of the range of likely outcomes. This leads to false precision. They do this to make themselves seem important, and to drive traffic.
For example, the median point of the PEC tracker is at Harris 266 EV, Trump 272 EV (270 are needed to win). However, move polls toward Trump by two points, and Harris goes down to 225 EV. Move polls toward Harris by two points, and Harris goes up to 319 EV. Considering that the post-election polling error in 2016 was 1.3 points, these are realistic scenarios.
I have long thought that we should stop trafficking in win probabilities. These give false certainty. Just yesterday someone was asking me about the magical crossover of a probability to 52%. If a coin had that probability of turning up heads, you would have to toss a coin a thousand times to even begin to distinguish it from a perfectly fair coin. Did I mention that we only get to toss the 2024 election coin once? tl;dr, based on available data, the Presidency looks like a tossup.
A better metric is how close the race is to a tossup, measured in terms of popular support. By that metric, Trump “‘leads” by 0.5 percentage support. In other words, if state polls moved away from him by half a point, it would be s perfect coin toss.
So unless something drastic happens, we’re not going to have any certainty about who will win the Presidency. It comes down to actual voting. (Which is where your efforts come in!)
The situation is not perfectly symmetric. Here is a histogram of all possible outcomes based on the PEC poll tracker:
Note two features. First, Harris has a pretty hard floor around 225 EV (and Trump has a hard ceiling at 313 EV). That’s because nearly all close states have a narrow Trump lead. Second, for the same reason, the histogram has a long tail starting at Harris 300 EV and going upward: even a two point polling error, which would not be terribly surprising, moves the outcome quite a lot toward Harris.
Trump‘s emotional message, combined with its fascist content (as defined by bipartisan actors), will have unpredictable effects. Maybe he is slowly consolidating support. Maybe his former cabinet officials and staff coming out against him are forming a popular anti-fascist front. Either could happen.
Either way, you would be quite correct to go door-knocking in one of those key states this weekend: Nevada, Arizona, Nebraska (greater Omaha), Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Sharpen your efforts with Vote Maximizer
If that’s your plan, you can use Vote Maximizer to focus your efforts where you can hit multiple levels of race at once: Congressional power, state legislatures, and other key races. For this, Vote Maximizer can help you.
Here is a table of places in swing Presidential races where your efforts will have double, triple, or more effect. To see where the Congressional and legislative districts are, visit VoteMaximizer.org and click on a state.
Have a great weekend out there!