Hello and happy Saturday. At long last, we’re just three days out from the 2024 election. At Dispatch HQ, we spent the last week tying up loose ends for the last bits of our election preview and planning our coverage for Tuesday and the days (weeks?) after. Our Dispatch Politics team (as I noted last week) has been racking up the frequent flyer miles covering rallies and talking to voters, and The Morning Dispatch crew has looked at Elon Musk’s efforts to influence the election, warned against reading too much into the polling, and reported on the candidates’ closing statements. Meanwhile, here is a live look at Dispatch Fact Check crew knocking down disinformation about election fraud:
So what should we expect on Tuesday and when might we find out results? We’ve got you covered. Last week, Chris Stirewalt identified seven counties—one in each of the swing states—that will tell us a great deal about the potential outcome of the contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Today we published his handy guide to election night: when the polls close in each state, what times to expect certain states to be called, and how we can understand what even partial results say about the direction of the contest.
This week Stirewalt also pointed to signs from indicators like polling and approval ratings that explain why Trump is sure to win. But he also lays out all the signs that show why Harris is sure to win. Get your popcorn ready.
But the election is not all about Trump and Harris. Whoever wins will have to work with Congress. While the GOP is expected to gain control of the Senate, the House is up for grabs. In a preview of the House races, Philip Wallach writes that while the Republicans have a structural advantage—they hold more seats to start with and off-year redistricting should give them three seats in North Carolina but only two to Democrats (in Alabama and Louisiana)—the Democrats have more cash.
What if Harris defeats Trump? We would have plenty about that historic moment were it to happen, but in the meantime, we can predict that Trump would claim fraud. After all, as TMD noted, his campaign is already laying the groundwork to do so.
We have a few more things in store. On Tuesday, we will have a primer that will tell you everything you need to know about election law and policy in the seven swing states that will decide the race, our reporters will be on the ground with both the Trump and Harris camps, and we’ll be doing a special Dispatch Live on Tuesday night. We’ll kick off at 10 p.m. and stay on for three hours, a bunch of guests will stop by, and—best of all—it’s open to everyone.
The old saying about the light at the end of the tunnel being an oncoming train has never felt more apt. Thank you for being with us on this journey, and have a good weekend.
In a powerful Monday Essay, John Aziz makes a hopeful case for the future of Gaza. He details Yahya Sinwar’s rise through the ranks of Hamas and the violent acts that “solidified his image as a merciless enforcer.” He argues that Gazans are weary of life under Hamas and eager to coexist peacefully with their Israeli neighbors, and that Sinwar’s death last month provides an opportunity for that to happen. While acknowledging that Hamas has not yet been defeated, Aziz lays out a way forward to a post-Hamas Gaza. He calls on countries who want a more peaceful Middle East to support the effort. “Palestinian political parties and political movements that reject Hamas’ ideology and instead wish for coexistence and peaceful self-determination alongside Israel need to receive substantial support, legitimization, and victories,” he writes. “And Palestinian moderates need to be the ones in a position of strength, able to capitalize on the disaffection with Hamas and to marginalize those professing the attendant narratives of jihadism, antisemitism, and the demonization of Israel.”
The real problem with the election isn’t Donald Trump—though Kevin notes how it’s a little weird the man can’t legally own a firearm but we might just give him the nuclear codes again—but with the presidency itself. It’s just too big. He applauds the framers of the Constitution for setting “the organs of government in opposition to one another” so that the rivalries that would emerge would keep any one branch from assuming too much power. He writes that “it worked for a time—until another vice, one even deadlier than ambition, took root: sloth. In short, Congress—intended to be the most powerful branch of government—has ceded far too much power to the executive branch. He notes that presidents carry out acts of war without formal declarations and enter international agreements without calling them treaties. They use executive orders to get around the legislative and appropriations processes. He writes, “The American presidency is the most dangerous job in the world—not to the president, but to us.”
The 2024 election isn’t the repeat of 2020 we thought we were getting until President Biden stepped aside and Kamala Harris took over, but one thing hasn’t changed: the disinformation. Most states offer some form of early voting, and that has prompted a number of claims the Dispatch Fact Check team tackles this week. We addressed claims from Pennsylvania after someone tweeted a video (6 million views and counting) questioning why a man delivered an “obscene amount of ballots” to a courthouse (the man was a postal worker) and shot down a story about an Indiana woman arrested for sending ballots to voters with the “Democratic candidate” pre-selected (the arrest happened in 2020 and was about absentee-ballot applications and not general election ballots). A voter in Kentucky posted a TikTok video allegedly showing a voting machine that highlighted Harris’ name while the voter was trying to select Trump—but it was an isolated case and might have been user error. Out in Washington state, a voter claimed to be able to print a ballot off a county government website using a fake name and a real address, but county officials explained that such votes would not be counted and in fact voters who tried to do could face jail time. And we reported on a claim out of Wisconsin that a Republican official stole ballots and threw away votes for Harris (false).
And here’s the best of the rest:
- Instead of a candy bar, our Halloween treat to you is this dive into the history of witches and witch trials in Colonial America. Daniel N. Gullotta explores why so many more women than men were accused of practicing witchcraft, and what kind of people were targeted most often.
- Scott Lincicome has had it with economic doomerism. In Capitolism, he lists the many ways the U.S. economy is beating the pants off the competition: economic output, worker productivity, and the stock market.
- Former world chess champion and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov, who has lived in the United States since 2017, explains why he’s endorsing Kamala Harris. “I never thought I would need to warn Americans about the dangers of dictatorship,” he writes.
- We haven’t heard a lot about cutting spending or shrinking government this election, but some electoral outcomes are better for fiscal conservatism than others. Brian Riedl looks back at the last few decades and notes that a Democratic president with a GOP-controlled Congress has offered the best chance to restrain spending.
- And the pods: Having invited David Frum to The Dispatch Podcast to discuss his support for Kamala Harris, Jamie welcomed Hugh Hewitt on Monday to explain why he’s voting for Donald Trump. Why is Virginia purging its voter roles? Why is RFK Jr. still on the ballot in some states? What’s going on in Pennsylvania with provisional ballots? David and Sarah have an election-law roundup on Advisory Opinions. If you know how Jonah feels about Woodrow Wilson, you’ll be eager to hear his Remnant conversation with Christopher Cox, author of a new Wilson biography.
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