CHRIS CRUCIAL: The closest election in a 100 years? 🥵

PLUS: Hunter pleads guilty!

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1. A historically close election

I am a big fan of the folks at Decision Desk HQ. They do great work on the election modeling and data fronts. Bookmark their site.

They also send out a newsletter weekly. And, something in the latest edition really caught my eye. It’s this:

“The race for the White House is as close as its been this century and probably since Truman defeated Dewey (or maybe Kennedy beating Nixon in 1960).”

Intrigued, I reached out to Scott Tranter, a data scientist for Decision Desk HQ, for a little more information to back up the claim that the Donald Trump-Kamala Harris race could be the closest we’ve had in a century.

He made three basic points to me:

1. The Decision Desk HQ model gives Harris a 56% chance of winning. While that might make you think Harris has the edge, Tranter notes that what it really means is that the race is “essentially a coin flip.”

2. Over the past 90 days, all seven swing states — PA/WI/MI/AZ/NV/NC/GA — have been in either Trump’s camp or Harris’ camp at one time, meaning that, in Tranter’s words, “both camps can claim they had an edge.” But now all seven states are pure toss ups, meaning they could really go to either Trump or Harris.

3. All seven swing states are within “polling error standard deviation,” which, Tranter explains, means they could all legitimately go to Trump or Harris at this point. (Tranter is not saying there will be polling error in this election — just that there could be.)

This chart, from Decision Desk HQ, makes the point well. It shows the probabilities — based on their model — of Trump and Harris winning the 7 swing states:

The BEST chance either side has of winning a swing state is Trump at 65% in North Carolina. (Harris is at 64% in Michigan and Nevada.)

So, how close would this election have to be in order to make it the closest in 100 years?

Let’s look at the two elections Tranter cites: 1948 and 1960.

In 1948, Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey. Truman won 24,105,695 votes to Dewey’s 21,969,170 — a margin of 2,136,525 votes. (Truman won 303 electoral votes to 189 for Dewey. Strom Thurmond, running as a states’ rights candidate, won 39.)

Polls in the run-up to that race suggested Dewey would win. As the Chicago Tribune wrote in 2020: “An overwhelming sense of inevitability hung about the Republican nominee. The polls and the pundits left no room for doubt: Dewey was going to defeat President Harry S. Truman.”

In fact, one Chicago paper declared Dewey the victor — producing one of the most iconic photographs in history:

Twelve years later, Jack Kennedy beat Richard Nixon in the closest popular vote margin ever. Kennedy took 34,227,096 votes to 34,107,646 for Nixon — a national margin of just 119,450 votes. (Kennedy won the electoral college 303 to 219 with Democrat Harry F. Byrd winning 15 electoral votes.)

What Tranter is suggesting then is that this November we could see a popular vote margin of less than 120,000 votes. Which would be stunning.

It would also likely mean that Trump would win — due to the clear Republican tilt of the electoral college — as expertly explained by The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter here:

In fact, when looking exclusively at the Electoral College map, Republicans are enjoying a stronger advantage than at any point in the 25-year history of the Cook PVI. In 1997, the median Electoral College vote (located in Iowa) had a PVI score of D+1; meaning that the median Electoral College vote was one point more Democratic than the nation as a whole. By 2005, the median Electoral College state (Florida) had a PVI of R+1. In 2021, Wisconsin, with a PVI score of R+2, is the median Electoral College vote. So, if, for example, a Republican presidential candidate were to get 49 percent of the national popular vote, we should expect that Republican to get 51 percent of the vote in Wisconsin. 

Remember that in 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote 51.3% to 46.9% — a margin of more than 7 million votes nationally. But Biden only won 306 electoral votes. And, as NPR noted shortly after the election, “just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.”

Four years earlier, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by almost 3 million votes nationally but lose the presidency in the electoral college 304-227. (Had less than 80,000 votes switched from Trump to Clinton in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan combined in 2016, Clinton would have won the electoral college.)

What all of this means is that the closer the popular vote is, the better for Trump. He can win it narrowly or lose it narrowly — under 2 million votes — and he would still almost certainly be elected president in the electoral college.

If Trump loses the popular vote but wins the election, it would be the 6th time that’s happened in American history — with half of those occurrences coming in the last 25 years.

2. Hunter pleads!

On the day his trial was set to begin on tax charges, Hunter Biden, the son of the president, pled guilty to all nine allegations against him, a stunning move that avoids a high-profile trial.

The judge overseeing the case set sentencing for Biden for December 16 — more than a month after the election.

At issue are allegations that Hunter Biden failed to pay $1.4 million in taxes — even as he was living what prosectors have described as an “extravagant lifestyle.”

According to the indictment, Biden made more than $7 million during the time in question. “The defendant spent this money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes,” the indictment alleges.

Biden has admitted to being addicted to drugs at the time and his behavior was, at the least, deeply embarrassing to his family.

Hunter has already gone through one trial — and been convicted — earlier in the summer on gun charges in Delaware.

With his father no longer the presidential nominee, the latest trial of Biden drew less attention than it would have even a few months ago. And Republicans’ efforts to make the case that the Bidens are some sort of crime family have fizzled — as Axios noted today:

Instead, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, Donald Trump's crusade against "Crooked Joe" is collapsing into political irrelevance.

It's one of many reasons Trump keeps wishing he was still running against Biden, whose family's foreign business dealings have been campaign fodder since 2019.

Republicans may find success tying Harris to Biden's record on inflation, the border and other policy issues — but on family baggage, Biden's exit has deprived Trump of one of his favorite cudgels.

Still, a trial would undoubtedly have been painful and difficult for the Bidens — especially as Joe Biden seeks to burnish his legacy in the final months of his term.

3. A Vince McMahon documentary!

As regular readers know, I am GIANT pro wrestling fan. And I believe that pro wrestling is the best lens to understand how Donald Trump took over the Republican party — and American politics.

And there is no more dominant — or important — figure in the world of professional wrestling than Vince McMahon who, until recently, ran World Wrestling Entertainment. (McMahon was forced aside amid allegations of sexual assault.)

Netflix announced Thursday that later this month it will release a documentary series — executive produced by Bill Simmons!— on the life and times of McMahon.

Even if you don’t care about pro wrestling, you need to watch this. I promise it will help you better understand Trump and the culture he (and we) exist in.

If you are looking for more on McMahon, you can’t do any better than “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America” by Abraham Josephine Riesman.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence, I have no interest in wading into politics. I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection. It is beyond shortsighted to give up journalistic independence out of fear that it might later be taken away.” — New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger

ONE GOOD CHART

Who, exactly, are the undecided voters in this election? The New York Times’ David Leonhardt did a detailed breakdown of just that question today. Read the whole thing — but this chart does a good job of summarizing it:

SONG OF THE DAY

Hurray For The Riff Raff made one of my favorite albums of this year. If you haven’t heard “The Past Is Still Alive,” you need to. Like, now. And make sure to check out this awesome recording NPR did of the band playing at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

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