Election Night Update #1: It's Too Early!

...But What We Do Have Looks Good For Harris

We told you that valuable information would come in starting at 6pm, when Kentucky and Indiana were supposed to start reporting actual results. But it took a while for results to trickle in from those two states. Here are our thoughts.

Bottom line: these early numbers are good for Harris, but it’s very early.

KENTUCKY

Results in Kentucky are coming in very, very slowly. What we’re seeing so far basically matches the 2020 results, but again, there’s essentially no data.

INDIANA

Results in Indiana are also coming in slowly, but what we see tends to show exurbs shifting left. Hamilton County — a county Trump won by 19% in 2016 that shrunk to 7% in 2020 — is currently favoring Harris by 1.2% with 65% in. That’s almost certainly just early voting, so we’ll see what the Election Day numbers look like. Hamilton is an Indianapolis exurb.

Meanwhile, Allen County, home to small city Ft. Wayne, is showing a 5% Trump lead with 44% of the vote in. It was a Trump +12 county in 2020.

EXIT POLLS

The first exit polls unambiguously favor Kamala Harris. Exit polls have a huge margin of error, but obviously you’d rather be up than down. None of us place much stock in broad-brush questions like Trump or Harris’s favorability.

However, if you look at the crosstabs, there’s reason for optimism. When asked to name their top issue, voters picked “Harris issues” (the state of democracy (35%) and abortion (14%)) ahead of “Trump issues” (economy (31%) and abortion (11%)) and Harris’s margins on her issues are larger than Trump’s margins on his.

Now, people lie to exit pollsters more than they lie to regular pollsters. I wouldn’t start popping the corks on the champagne on the basis of these numbers, but multiple polls suggest that Trump has a 4% edge or less when voters are asked “who do you trust to handle the economy?”

Stay tuned!