How To Watch the Six O'Clock Hour Of Election Night
And not lose your mind.
Ed. Note: This post is a companion to Ep. 75: How Kentucky and Indiana Can Tell Us If Kamala Harris Has Won on Election Night.
At 6pm on Tuesday night, every network on earth will make the first call. Donald Trump will have won Indiana and Kentucky, giving the former president 19 electoral votes. The networks will spend the next two hours toggling back and forth between live footage of voters standing in line and anchors trying to make predictions based on data trickling out of the precincts and the unreliable exit polls they’ve had for hours.
But as real numbers start coming in from Kentucky and Indiana, we’ll be able to draw some inferences about how the rest of the night will go. There is high correlation in voting patters between regions with similar demographics across various states, allowing us to extrapolate from early returns in the “NO DUH” states about how the rest of the night is likely to shake out.
Simply put: Kentucky and Indiana can give us some real clues about the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where this election is likely to be decided.
Louisville and Indianapolis Stand In For Detroit and Philly
For months, the media has hyped Trump’s supposed gains among Black and Latino voters. In June, one poll showed him getting as much as 30 percent of the Black vote, albeit against President Biden. But more recent polling shows Harris with support from nine out of ten Black voters, more or less exactly where Biden was in 2020. And so the majority Black neighborhoods in Louisville and Indianapolis will be an early barometer of whether Trump’s boasts about his support in the Black community was just bluster.
In 2020, Biden took about 90 percent in Louisville's core Black neighborhoods, where approximately 75 percent of residents are African American. In Indianapolis, the story was roughly the same. Early returns from those two cities will be a harbinger of the vote in Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee, where maintaining a similar margin to 2020 is critical to Harris’s victory. If Trump makes gains there, he may have the upper hand in the Midwest.
The Rest of Jefferson and Marion Counties Give Us An Early Peek at the Suburbs
In 2020, Biden made major gains with white, suburban voters in urban counties, including Jefferson County, Kentucky (which contains the city of Louisville) and Marion County, Indiana, where Indianapolis is located. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the non-Louisville portion of Jefferson County by 6 points (50-44); in 2020, Biden won it by 14 (56-42). Outside of Indianapolis, Hillary won Marion County by just 12 percent, but Biden was able to run up the margin to 21 just four years later.
These areas are majority white, highly educated, and home to some of the wealthiest zip codes in the state, just like Philadelphia’s collar counties, the metro Detroit area, and parts of Milwaukee County. Harris will likely need to improve on Biden’s margins there to feel confident about her chances in the upper Midwest.
The Exurbs Are Key
Republican branding, saturated with amber waves of grain and voiceovers about “real Americans,” promotes the idea that the GOP is primarily a rural party. In reality, it’s an exurban one: Most major metropolitan areas in the US are home to a big, Democratic county, bordered by an equally Republican county right next to it. And part of the reason Trump lost in 2020 was that his vote share in those exurbs eroded from four years earlier.
Indeed, Michigan’s Republican House Leader Mike Shirkey told Trump as much when he was summoned to the White House on November 20, 2020, for a round of arm-twisting by the then-president, RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, and Rudy Giuliani. As Special Counsel Jack Smith wrote in a recent brief: “Shirkey corrected the defendant and told him that he had lost primarily because in two routinely Republican counties, the defendant had underperformed with educated females, and if he had received the same number of votes there as the two winning local sheriffs, he likely would have won Michigan.”
The reason exurbs are key is straightforward: Trump will win by large margins in rural areas, but those counties just aren’t home to that many people. To bank a significant number of votes, Trump will also need to win big in swing state exurbs.
This year, we’ll get an early signal as to how the exurbs are trending from Hamilton County, Indiana which borders Marion County to the north. In 2016, Trump won the county by 19 percent, netting 30,000 votes. In 2020, Trump’s margin shrank to 7 percent, netting him just 13,000 votes. If Hamilton County, Indiana flips blue this cycle, or if Trump wins it narrowly, we can infer that Harris is also likely to do better in swing-state exurbs like Macomb County, Michigan; Cumberland County, Pennsylvania; and Ozaukee County, Wisconsin — all places Trump needs to maintain high margins in if he hopes to emerge victorious in the all-important upper Midwest.
We can also derive useful information from Kentucky, although the counties surrounding Cincinnati that make up Kentucky’s exurbs are smaller and redder than those surrounding Indianapolis. In 2020, Trump won Kentucky’s Campbell, Boone and Kenton Counties by an average of 25 percent, netting almost 50,000 raw votes. This was a massive margin, but still represented a decline from 2016, when his raw vote margin was 54,000. These Kentucky counties correlate strongly with places like Livingston County, Michigan, Washington County, Wisconsin and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Additionally, these Kentucky exurbs will provide key clues as to how the Republican counties north of Cincinnati will vote in the Ohio Senate race, where Republican Bernie Moreno is aiming to unseat longtime incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown.
College Counties
Over the past four years, much has been made of Democrats’ erosion among Gen Z and younger Millennials. Most polls show Democrats regressing with this age cohort after Biden’s relatively strong performance with young voters in 2020. The question is whether the reported growth for Republicans with young men will be enough to offset Harris’s gains with young women, particularly post-Dobbs.
Indiana is home to several large college towns: Indiana University-Bloomington is located in Monroe County; Purdue is in Tippecanoe County; and Notre Dame is in St. Joseph County. All three counties went more strongly for Biden in 2020 than Clinton in 2016 thanks to young voters. If on election night Democratic margins and turnout in those three counties are similar to 2020, it’s going to get late early for Donald Trump. But if Trump makes gains there, he could be in the driver's seat.
Similarly, Fayette County, Kentucky is home to both the city of Lexington and the University of Kentucky, and it will likely predict how Democrats hold up in similar college towns in the blue wall states, such as those areas surrounding the University of Wisconsin, Penn State, University of Michigan, and Michigan State.
Small Cities Matter
Trump’s surprise win in 2016 was partially built on unforeseen support in smaller cities throughout the upper Midwest. Where Obama was just nine points behind Romney in the four Indiana counties surrounding Fort Wayne, Muncie, Anderson and Terre Haute in 2012, Clinton lost that region by a whopping 19 points. These smaller cities provide us a preview of what’s likely to take place hours later in places like Green Bay and Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
In 2020, Biden closed the gap in these small cities to just 12 points, solidifying his gains across the Rust Belt and flipping back the blue wall. This year Trump will need to hold serve and potentially improve his margins a bit from 2020 in order to claw those blue wall states back into his own column.
The Rurals: Trump’s Margins Will Be Huge, But What About Turnout?
The backbone of Trump’s coalition is his strength with white, rural voters. In 2020, he cleaned Biden’s clock in rural counties, besting him by 43 points in rural Indiana and 48 points in rural Kentucky. Those margins weren’t so different from 2016 by percentage, but in 2020 the much higher rural turnout kept Trump competitive despite his losses in cities and suburbs.
Unless Trump really does improve his numbers in urban areas, he will need to reprise his 2020 performance in rural areas. And so on election night, we should be mindful of both margin and turnout as Kentucky and Indiana begin to report county-specific data. Luckily, rural counties tend to count votes quickly, ensuring an early data set to examine. If Trump is holding his margins with rural voters, but turnout is lower than 2020, he may well come up short in the all-important upper Midwest, all but dooming his third run for office.
It’s going to be a long night. But at least we can start reading the tea leaves early.
The Electoral College needs to go away. Far, far away.
this is a stunningly helpful article. it makes every man/woman their own steve kornacki! extrapolation is my friend.