Legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes used to say there are three things that can happen with a forward pass, and only one of them is good.
Predicting elections is like that: You can get it wrong, say it’s too close to call or get it right.
No wonder most analysts prefer the middle course, rationally relying on polling margins of error and the unpredictability of turnout to avoid making tough calls in races like this year’s.
I’ve been predicting elections for 20 years and believe I owe the people who read my work my best estimate of what will happen. That’s what I’ll do again this year, even though every statistical tool we have available says the outcome could be decided by tenths of a point, the political equivalent of scoring a touchdown by inches.
The weight of the evidence leads me to predict Donald Trump will win the Electoral College and could under a best-case scenario even win the popular vote.
I’ll explain my reasoning below. Nevertheless, I’m locking in my final answer: Trump wins the Electoral College 297 to 241, with Kamala Harris winning the popular vote 49.6% to 48.3%.
Congress goes GOP, too
Trump’s victory will also carry the GOP to enhanced majorities in the House and a good night in the Senate.
If Trump wins Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as I think he will, the Republican senatorial candidates should also win their races. Coupled with pickups in the last three states Trump won in 2020 where Democrats hold Senate seats — Montana, Ohio and West Virginia — Republicans will gain six seats and hold a 55-45 majority, tying their post-1930 high.
The House is harder to project with precision, but Republicans should expand their 221-214 majority by three to seven seats.
To reach this prediction, I did my own examination of the national likely voter polls and averaged their partisan crosstabs together.
I found that Harris leads with Democrats by 89 points (94%-5%) while Trump leads with Republicans by 87 points (93-6). Harris leads among independents by a mere 2 points (48-46). Assuming Democrats and Republicans will have equal share of the electorate, and independents are their typical 30%, that means Harris wins the popular vote by a mere 1.3 points.
This is likely an insufficient margin for Harris to win because of the way Trump’s coalition punches above its weight in the Electoral College. His blue-collar, white-heavy voting bloc is a larger share of the vote in the all-important states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
That’s why he could beat Hillary Clinton, winning all three of these states, in 2016 even as he lost the popular vote by 2.1 points.
Trump nearly won the Electoral College again in 2020 even though he lost the popular vote by 4.45 points. Had he lost by only 3.7 points, assuming a uniform shift among the states, he would have carried Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin and won a very narrow Electoral College majority.
As I write this, Trump leads in five of the seven swing states, trailing in Wisconsin by 0.2 points and Michigan by 0.5.
There’s good reason to think the state polls in Wisconsin underestimate Trump. Pollster Patrick Ruffini found the state had the largest polling errors in 2016 and in 2020, both favoring Democrats by 3 points or more. He also found that as of September, the polls still appeared to be overstating Harris by 2.6 points.
This Electoral College gap is a huge one for Harris to surmount. It’s likely she cannot win the election if she wins the popular vote by fewer than 2 points.
And if the national poll averages are accurate, she cannot do that unless she either has a incredible Democratic turnout or wins independents by more than 5 points in an even-partisan environment.
Party over personality
The Senate is also on the line in this election. Virtually all observers concede Republicans are highly likely to regain at least a narrow 51-seat majority.
That’s because retiring West Virginia Democrat-turned-independent Joe Manchin will be replaced by Republican Gov. Jim Justice in one of Trump’s most solid states, and Republican Tim Sheehy is consistently ahead in Montana polls against incumbent Democrat John Tester.
The issue is whether Republicans can win any of the other seven Democratic seats they are seriously targeting and whether Democrats can unseat one of the three GOP incumbents they’re taking a shot at.
It used to be common for senators of one party to represent states won by the presidential candidate of the other party. That is no longer true. In 2016 and 2020, only one senator (Maine’s Susan Collins in 2020) won while the presidential nominee of the opposing party carried the state.
If Trump wins in the swing states, the Republican candidates for Senate should as well.
Some might protest this conclusion, noting the Democrats are currently leading in their polls in every one of the most contested states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and Maryland). That’s true, but this merely points to another factor of the Trump era: the declining predictive value of Senate polls.
Polling “losers” have won an average of three Senate races per election from 2016 on. And many large states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia and Florida have seen surprise outcomes. Polling leaders are no longer the clear favorites heading into election night.
It’s even more telling who comes from behind. Eleven of the 12 “comeback kids” were from the party whose presidential nominee won the state that night or in the most recent prior election. This simply reinforces the point about the power of party over personality.
This means whoever wins each of the key states in play will likely carry their party’s Senate nominee over the finish line.
It’s easy, then, to pick the Senate once this principle is applied. I think Trump will win Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada. Add these four pickups to the two gimmes, and the GOP gains six seats on the night.
If Trump does prevail in Michigan, it’s also likely Republican Mike Rogers will become the GOP’s first senator from the Wolverine State since Spencer Abraham won in the 1994 GOP landslide.
If this happens, Republicans will hold 56 Senate seats for the first time since after the 1928 election.
This also means, however, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan will not win his Senate challenge. He remains broadly popular in polls and is running well ahead of Trump. The state is nonetheless so Democratic that it would take a polling error of historic proportions for him to win.
The same considerations doom the Democratic chances for offsetting gains. It appears Republicans Sens. Deb Fischer (Neb.), Ted Cruz (Teas.) and Rick Scott (Fla.) will run behind Trump in their states. But Trump’s margin in each is large enough, they should still win.
It’s possible Trump’s margins will be so narrow in some of these states that the Democrat wins anyway. It’s likely Rep. Ruben Gallego will do that in Arizona owing to Republican nominee Kari Lake’s high negative name identification. No other Democrat, however, is running far enough of Harris’ share of the vote to think he or she can follow suit.
Crossover in the House
The House is much harder to predict at the district level because there’s a relative paucity of good-quality polls.
It’s nonetheless important to note the House is affected by the same trend toward emphasizing party over person that afflicts the Senate. The national popular vote, then, should serve as a tenable guide to the baseline district outcomes and hence toward predicting House control.
Both parties are first targeting the so-called crossover seats — districts where the party holding it is different from the one whose presidential nominee carried it in 2020.
There are currently only 22 such seats — five “Trump-Democrats” and 17 “Biden-Republicans.” (New York’s 3rd was won by Republican George Santos in 2022, but the Democrats regained it in the special election following his expulsion.)
Republicans come into the election holding a 221-214-seat lead, with 218 needed to control the chamber. They’re expected to gain one net seat from redistricting, picking up three seats in North Carolina but losing one each in Alabama and Louisiana. That means Democrats need to win a net five contested seats to get to 218.
If Harris does win the popular vote by 1.3 points, I think the GOP will pick up at least two of the five Trump-Democratic seats and three to five other seats President Biden won but Harris would likely lose in this scenario.
It will probably also win a seat or two outside this range even though it shouldn’t because that typically happens in any election. That’s a range of six to 15 potential gains.
Democrats will clearly win some of the Biden-Republican seats. Most in danger are the seats Republicans won narrowly last election that Biden won by 9 points or more without extenuating circumstances (more on that later). There are four seats in that category (OR-5, NY-4, NY-22 and NE-2) I expect to flip blue.
The rest of the potential Democratic gains are tougher. There are four Republican-held seats in California that Biden carried by between 6 and 13 points. You might expect those to easily flip, but California House results do not track the presidential outcomes. Instead, they track the gubernatorial results the GOP candidate against Gavin Newsom in 2022 won each of these seats. Dems could win some or all of these, but they’re not the layups the national results would imply.
Two New York targets — Reps. Mike Lawler and Marc Molinaro — also have extenuating circumstances. Biden easily carried these districts, but Gov. Hochul lost them in 2022.
And recent polling shows Trump running in a statistical tie with Harris in both. They, too, won’t be the low-hanging fruit the 2020 results suggest.
Democrats have tough seats to win once you get beyond these. They are looking at four incumbents who represent seats Biden won by 4 or less, the sort of seats Trump might win this year. They’re also attempting to flip six seats Trump won in 2020 by four or less. That’ll be hard to do if Trump is doing better this year than back then.
It’s also worth noting Democrats lost 13 House seats even though they had the majority in 2020 when Biden won by 4.5 points.
These soft predictions will vary if either presidential candidate’s total differs significantly from my call. If Harris does win by 3 or 4 points, Democrats probably will win the net five seats needed to control, plus a few more.
If Harris wins by less than a point or Trump wins the popular vote, Republicans should be expected to pick up as many as a net 10 seats.
The real losers
This close election has stirred already-hot political passions to the boiling point. It’s now commonplace to speculate whether we’ll see politically motivated violence from the losing side’s supporters, musings I have not seen in my three-score-plus years’ lifetime. That should give us pause.
Benjamin Franklin is reported to have told someone asking him what sort of government the Constitution’s authors had provided, “a republic, if you can keep it.” That is our task after this vote.
American national identity is uniquely and inexorably tied to our form of government. Take that away, and we dissolve into a messy and toxic brew of peoples divided by race, religion and ethnicity.
This essay provides my best estimate of what will happen on election night. I might be wrong, as I have acknowledged. But there is one thing I know: Whatever happens, we must rededicate ourselves to our democratic republican ideals sooner rather than later if we want to keep our nation whole and sound.
If your party loses, ask yourself the next morning whether the person who voted for the winner is a fellow citizen or an implacable enemy. If you think the latter, you have decided victory rather than democracy is your lodestar. And if that’s the case with most Americans, our system cannot long endure.
Losing that, more than losing any election, is a tragedy we should strive to prevent.
Henry Olsen, a political analyst and commentator, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
