Twas the day before Election Day and nothing was stirring in the house, not even a mouse. Which is good, because my cat wouldn’t mind a snack at this hour.
So, let’s get to it. We have a lot of ground to cover and I know you’re all dying to get a handle on this critically important race. If you’ve been following me long enough, I first wrote about this back in May shortly after the primary concluded. If you haven’t read it, here’s the link. I covered a lot of points there that aren’t worth rehashing, especially since most of them have borne fruit over the last few months. Keep them in mind as we move along.
Overview
I’ll be blunt. From a numbers point of view, the situation we have going into Election Day is a little different than it was in 2021. Namely, the difference isn’t what you would call fantastic if you’re Carolyn Carluccio.
As to why, let’s start with the biggest point. If you’ve been following my frequent updates on Twitter in the last few months, you’ll know that I said that for McCaffery to have greater than 50% odds of winning and be in a good spot to win, he needs a mail-in ballot firewall of 400,000+ on Election Day. With today’s update, he has almost 370,000, which is more than sufficient and guarantees that he’ll get there on Election Night. In fact, he’ll exceed that number by a comfortable margin. With one update tomorrow morning and a continuous one as Election Night goes on, a final firewall in the range of 410-420K is likely where it’ll end up. It’ll technically be higher after nonpartisan ballots are added in, which heavily break Democratic by 30-35 points, but that’s a separate number already factored in when it comes to the overall picture.
And what bears reminding is that the last Supreme Court election was decided by 1 point, or roughly 25,000 votes. Even setting the mail-in firewall aside, there are a lot of statistical points that would be enough to tip the election in the other direction. Culumative mail-in margins, return rates, and what have you. Those of which are currently better for Democrats than in 2021 and 2022. That could change, but it’s not a good look if they’re ahead of pace on those points than they were at the same time in years past.
And mind you, this is all under the static assumption that turnout and the statewide environment are the same as in 2021, which they won’t be. We already know from mail-in returns that overall turnout will be higher than in 2021 thanks to Pennsylvania’s fairly predictable early vote/election day splits after they implemented mail-in voting. Tack that onto an environment highly likely to be bluer than in 2021, which we have many strong indicators of based on special elections throughout the year, last year’s performances, and a slew of polling. Things have changed post-Dobbs and PA is no exception.
Numbers
I briefly touched on the firewall, which I’m sure bears the question of what it was in the last Supreme Court election. The Democratic candidate at the time, Maria McLaughlin, finished with a firewall of ~377,000 votes after all returned ballots were counted. This followed her going into Election Day with roughly ~338,000.
And right now? As mentioned earlier, McCaffery already has ~368,000 with one more update to go before Election Day, a fair bit ahead of where McLaughlin was at a further point in time. We still have Tuesday’s turnout to factor in, but the gap between those two firewalls was more than enough to determine the last election. And it’s still inching higher.
To summarize, just from the numbers we have, Carluccio is operating from a weaker position compared to 2021. Especially given that…
The Democratic raw vote firewall will be larger.
The return rate will likely be a bit bigger.
Likely a higher margin share of the mail-in vote.
One of Carluccio’s biggest problems is that 2021’s Supreme Court race was extremely close to the minutiae that the Democratic advantage in one of the above points would be enough to be lights out for her if everything else remained the same. And as we know, Dems are likely to do better with all three points and probably have a better Election Day. Her only hope is to offset the early Dem advantage with a better ED than 2021, which, in my assessment, is extremely unlikely. It would fly in the face of what we’ve dealt with in PA since Dobbs. More specifically, the disposition of Democrats to bring in high propensity and persuadable voters into their coalition has helped them significantly, even if Republicans have a turnout advantage. This has often been the case.
And for what it’s worth, the breakdowns of ancestral Democrats and Republicans are accounted for when it comes to calculating the firewall and possible vote shares as we see those returns. When I tried this for the 2022 race between Fetterman and Oz, it worked very well. This is helped by the fact that mail-in voting in PA tends to be highly partisan and thus relatively predictable in the appropriate contexts.
Anyway, let’s take a step back for a second. You know the numbers, but how exactly did we get there? I wanted to take a quick second to cover the campaigns that both candidates have been running. It’s no accident that Republicans find themselves in this situation, which comes down to a few key factors.
Offense v. Defense
If you’ve been following both campaigns, you’ll notice that Carluccio has steadily ramped up her bipartisan rhetoric and appeals to Democrats to vote for her, a subtle shift from what she was doing earlier in the campaign when it comes to red-meat issues. Here’s one example.
But perhaps more notably, she felt the need to cut a few ads. Namely, one like this intended as a rebuttal to claims regarding how she would rule on abortion. Then you also have others like the one below doubling down on how Democrats should support her campaign.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of PA-based campaigns and plenty of victories and defeats in this battleground state and I’ll just say this - those moves are not a sign of a campaign that thinks Republican turnout is going to get them over the finish line on Tuesday. That bears out in the data I’ve seen thus far.
And much like the Fetterman v. Oz race last year, there is tremendous power in being able to set the narrative. The McCaffery campaign clearly has the edge here, going on offense and forcing Carluccio to operate mostly on the defensive. This has the effect of boxing her into a corner and trying to straddle a line that doesn’t necessarily appeal to several segments of the electorate she might need. Had she been able to exercise a successful line of attack against McCaffery, the calculus might be more balanced, but alas. That did not come to pass. The best they could do was to try and associate him with his brother, a disgraced judge from years past.
And as far as I know, it hasn’t been a particularly effective tactic based on polling, what’s happening on the ground, media responses, etc. If you’re Pennsylvanian and have been keeping track of the ads, you’ll notice the difficulty of painting McCaffery on anything of substance and the gradual focus of the Carluccio campaign to target his personal life. Which, frankly, is about all they got given his stellar legal background and highly rated qualifications from the bar association. Topics such as, say, abortion, have been far more of a sticking point in this battleground state. Which brings me to my next point.
Spending
The power of the American dollar continues to grow in every election, much to the chagrin of most people. But for many a candidate and campaign, those dollars represent opportunities to be able to conduct the moves they want to make. Driving the offense v. defense situation with the McCaffery and the Carluccio camps is spending, which allows them to make choices on what they’d like to do campaign-wise. And from the beginning, you can see how and why things are currently panning out the way they are.
Courtesy of the wonderful folks over at @AdImpact, here’s spending on November 1, a week before Election Day.
And if we zoom a little further back, here was spending two weeks before Election Day. Spending clearly ratcheted up since then, but the larger point is clear. McCaffery has the luxury of being able to conduct a more offensive carpet-bombing campaign and hit Carluccio on topics that have more salience in a judicial race as opposed to say, a Senate campaign. We’re talking about abortion, gun control, voting rights, and so on.
As has been the case for some time now, Democrats enjoy significant spending advantages in high-profile elections, driven by their edge in grassroots and small-dollar donations. You can see that McCaffery does quite a bit better on that front, forcing Carluccio to rely on Yass-backed PACs and associated entities just to be able to raise a decent amount of money. Never mind the fact that outside groups are still outspending on behalf of McCaffery anyway.
If you were wondering why McCaffery has been able to do so well on the offensive, this is one of the biggest reasons why. Neither candidate has a litany of skeletons in the closet, but magnified spending allows candidates to hone in and define issues of their choosing. However, one would hope that the chosen issues are of relative importance to the electorate. Which, for the ones in PA, is a fair bet.
Final Thoughts
This is tough. The nature of off-year elections and PA’s relative infancy when it comes to mail-in ballots can make things a little fuzzy. One reason why I’m very excited about Tuesday’s election is the ability to make forecasting within PA clearer in a wide variety of years. 2020 notwithstanding, we’ll now have data for 2021, 2022, and 2023. And already, some patterns are consistently clear throughout the years. We’ll see if this bears out accordingly. Frankly, I’m still floored as to how close I got in last year’s Senate race, so we’ll see what happens here. All roads lead to a more precise model.
Which, I guess, is a roundabout way of saying that, as predictive as mail-ins and early voting in PA can be, there’s still quite a bit of variability to consider. Namely, Election Day turnout. It should go as expected like it did the last few times, but keep in mind the possibility that it can get weird. And of note: don’t be shocked to see a PA map that might be unusual on Tuesday thanks to certain coalitional conditions. Lackawanna County, for instance, is likely to see more ancestral Democrats break for McCaffery than they usually do in presidential years. We’ll see. There’s a reason off-year elections can be notoriously finicky to dial into.
But most of all - I want to make clear that on the part of Democrats, I prefer to be on the conservative side when it comes to making my analyses and breaking down returns as they come in. This builds in some redundancy should Republicans do better than expected. For instance, I didn’t think Fetterman would win independents by 20 points (thought it’d be closer to 15), hence undershooting him by a bit. The same logic is applied here to the final margin, so keep that in mind. And if you want to use it to assume that the winner is going to do better than expected, then by all means, but I’m not taking that chance.
Forecast
Now, onto the main event. What are the current returns telling us? Before I move forward, let me make this caveat - does Carluccio have a path to victory? Sure. I said the same thing when I covered the Fetterman v. Oz race. But like Oz, the situation for Carluccio isn’t what you would call being in a favorable position to win. To her credit, however, she doesn’t have as big of a lift as Oz did. Still a decent lift all the same. Bundling the need to dig yourself out of a bigger hole than Brobson in 2021 with an environment likelier to be bluer, even if by a fraction, remains the most stubbornly persistent issue.
Don’t expect a far rosier turnout picture for Democrats, however. It’s still an off-year election and there are a lot of regional variabilities that may dampen anything akin to a Shapiro-style blowout, especially with a candidate nothing like Mastriano in presentation. High propensity voters help, but things like inner-city turnout and county loyalties matter. Brobson won Dauphin County of all places in 2021 assisted by the former and Philadelphia didn’t help matters much either.
Therefore, the current forecast is…
McCaffery: 51.9%
Carluccio: 48.1%
Right now, McCaffery by 3.8 is the median outcome. Depending on how hard Election Day ballots break, a win in the range of 2-6 is possible. Outside of that would require either a massive surge in Democratic or Republican turnout beyond what’s being reasonably forecast.
I’ve made it clear in the past that I’m not a fan of predicting a margin down to the decimal point. Ranges, yes. It’s pretty easy to be able to dial in a narrow range based on the numbers we have. But, as of today, this is what the election looks like. The final returns we get tomorrow and across the course of Election Day could change this. But this is where things stand right now, in my assessment.
And one last note: it’s more likely that McCaffery does better than the median margin versus Carluccio winning. Let me be very clear - I’d much rather take the over on him doing that than the under. And for Carluccio, she has a path, but it’s not a large one.
Onwards to Election Day….
One thing I'm also looking at is that Democrats may be more energized in the Philadelphia suburbs, especially Bucks - and how that may effect the race. I know there's some culture war drama going on these that may increase turnout, but we will see. Thank you for this great write-up!
nice