It’s Election Day and if you believe the polls both Democrats and democracy itself are heading for a very good night. The final generic ballot averages show Democrats about 9 points ahead, which is the widest margin by which either party has carried a midterm in years.
And while I hope those numbers hold up — or even turn out to be conservative — I’m haunted by the last week of October of 2024 when Kamala Harris had a solid 4-point lead over Trump in the national polls but still lost the election by an average of 2.7 points, a spread of almost 7 percent. Fully sixty percent of the 81 national polls taken in the final two weeks before the election had Harris winning big.
According to the pundits, there are a zillion “reasons” for the big spread between the polling and the final vote (she also lost the popular vote by about 1.5%) but the biggest variable has never been included in the polling and should be: voter purges by Republican secretaries of state in Red states with large Blue cities.
The pollsters blamed the usual suspects: bashful Republicans, people who don’t answer the phone, Hispanic voters were mis-modeled, people who skipped 2020 finally showed up for Trump.
But there’s a much simpler explanation for this “red shift” sitting in plain sight that Greg Palast reported here in January, 2025: “Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.”
Greg used the federal US Election Assistance Commission’s own official numbers and found that 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls in the months ahead of that election. More than 2.1 million mail-in ballots were challenged by Republican poll watchers claiming “irregularities” like mismatched signatures (people forgot to include their middle initial, signed in a hurry, etc.: the GOP trains their poll watchers to look for these mail-in ballot “errors” in Blue cities). And roughly 2.1 million people cast a “provisional” ballot thinking their votes would be counted but they never were.
Based on those official numbers from the US government and the states, he calculated a “suppression factor” of 2.3% of the total 2024 vote, and that hit was almost entirely concentrated among Black, Hispanic, college town, and urban voters; without that voter suppression, Harris would have easily carried Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia and today would be President of the United States.
That 2.3% spread that gave the election to Trump (and to Republicans in the House and Senate) is pretty much identical to what the polling industry is still baffled by today because they’ve never, ever bothered to include voter purges (sanctioned by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) in their math.
This is the new Republican strategy that has exploded since 2000: simply knock out Democratic voters’ ability to vote or have their votes counted while claiming you “must do it to prevent non-citizens from voting.”