Final 2024 Race Ratings

The state of the race at the end.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

Well. I certainly thought that this was going to be a lot more straightforward last week.

Back then, my plan was simple. Because of the mistakes made and questionable practices implemented by many pollsters since 2020, I decided that it would be best to come to my final conclusions about the race stood by only looking at the cream of the crop of pre-election indicators. These included polls by the few firms that didn’t flinch at projecting Democratic strength at the end of 2022, predictions from historically accurate local commentators, and takes from friends with impressive records of their own in their home states. At the start, this went along about as I expected. Marist put out its set of Rust Belt polls, and they showed roughly what one would expect from prior indicators like the Washington Primary. The final set of swing state surveys from the New York Times told a similar story. Seeing results like these, I was cautiously optimistic that what I had posited at the end of October—that fears of 2016 and 2020 had causing many pollsters to miss real Harris support—could end up actually happening.

And then there was the Selzer poll.

Those of you who weren’t aware of J. Ann’s record and the importance of her surveys prior to this weekend are probably quite well informed right now, so I’ll spare you the exposition. The crux of it is that it put me in a position that I did not expect to be in: willing to say that the race is not, in fact, a pure tossup, or even a tossup that leans one way over the other. Instead, I’m going to stick to what I said after the debate—that, while this is a race that both candidates can very well win, it’s also one where one candidate just has more signs pointing in their direction than the other. As for who that is and what the map looks like, just read below.

Final Official Ettingermentum Electoral College Map. No tossups.