Voting begins in 5 days

Most people have been only passively paying attention to this race, but that changes this month.

Ads will begin flooding the airwaves, and your presidential candidates and local congressmen will be inescapable. And people will begin voting.

Actually, in just five short days, people begin voting in North Carolina -- a state where the RFK campaign has an active lawsuit against the state's election board to get him removed from the ballot. The board made a ruling earlier last week following his withdrawal from the battlegrounds that RFK Jr. would remain listed on the ballot but any votes that were cast for him would not count. That was the compromise they offered.

Pennsylvania is another state where early voting begins in the coming days. There, RFK Jr. successfully withdrew his name. But, there was still some disappointing election integrity news from a court in Pennsylvania. The court overturned the will of the legislature and a lower court when it rejected a rule that forbid mail-in ballots from being counted if they did not have a date listed or a correct date listed. The reason the date matters is that dates have to be marked as having been mailed by a certain date to be counted for the state's elections. This rule arose from concerns that people were casting ballots past election day in 2020. The court said the rule violated the state constitution's free and equal elections clause. It said that the rule would prevent ballots that arrived on time but lacked a date or a proper one from being counted.

Trump has retaken his long-held majority in the electoral college odds by a slim roughly 1.8%. The reversal comes following rosy polling emerging out of the Sun Belt states of North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada. The Georgia poll had Harris and Trump at a virtual tie, when going to the tenths it actually had Harris up by 0.04%. That just so happens to the be the amount Trump is up in the current average as well. The odds to win the state are now 50.1% Trump to 49.9% Harris.

Congressional Forecast... coming soon

While the race for the White House is closing in, so is the race for Congress. Both chambers are in play... theoretically. So, with the race entering its penultimate month¹, it is time this website got congressional forecasts. Those will be coming this week, with the Senate arriving first.

As foreshadowed earlier, odds for Democrats to hold onto the Senate look bleak. With Joe Manchin retiring, Republicans have an automatic flip in West Virginia and only need to capture one more seat to grab a VP-proof majority. That seat looks to be coming to them in Montana, where incumbent John Tester has been routlinely trailing political upstart Tim Sheehy. Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL Officer, appears poised to boot the controversial three-term senator from the Hill. Things look so grim for Tester that he announced last week that he will not endorse Harris. Ouch.

The GOP also has strong prospects in Ohio despite Bernie Moreno consistently trailing incumbent Sherrod Brown. Republicans have spent comparatively little money so far in the race -- $60 million vs. $1 million. The GOP probably starts to reverse that dynamic starting this month. That change plus the fact that very few voters split their tickets in recent years suggest that Moreno may just pull off the upset. Republicans also remain hopeful in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan where polls have looked close at times. They're relying on similar dynamics being true here as they are in Ohio. Lastly, Nevada and Arizona have shown very scattered results, none of which with a Republican lead. At times Democrats Rosen and Gallego have led by upwards of 18 and 15 percent, respectively, in the past month. This stands in stark contrast to Trump's relatively bullish numbers in those two states, following RFK Jr.'s endorsement.

I do not have much insight on the House just yet. I did hear that House Democrats are spending 80% of their funds defending incumbents while House Republicans are spending 80% of their funds on unseating House Democrats. That doesn't bode well for the Dems. In other good news for conservatives, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (R) dropped out of the race for the sole House seat in Alaska. This is significant for a couple reasons. (1) A Democrat currently holds the seat. (2) Alaska currently uses ranked choice voting to decide its election, which allowed the Democrat to win in 2022 despite winning less votes than the two Republicans running against her. Now, there is only one Republican in a race that the Cook Political Report says should advantage Republicans by 9%.

Next Tuesday's Debate & Trump's "Team of Rivals"

We are a little over a week out from perhaps our only presidential debate between these two this cycle. Trump proposed this debate along with two additional debates to Harris, one on Fox on September 4th and one later in September with NBC. She declined the former and has stayed mum on the latter. Following a brief 18-minute interview with CNN that was not met with praise, Harris once again took to X over the weekend to contest the debate rules, but ABC has stayed firm in its committment to the original debate rules agreed to by the Biden and Trump camps earlier this year.

Harris has been sycophantically seeking to change the debate's rules, seemingly in hopes of repeating her obnoxious "I'm speaking" moments from the 2020 vice presidential debate with former Vice President Mike Pence. Alas, to no avail.

Gabbard, who officially joined Trump's Lincoln-esque "team of rivals" last Monday, has allegedly been helping Trump prepare for the debate. She gained national renown that year for effectively taking a sledgehammer to Kamala Harris' once promising 2020 presidential campaign. Now, having left her former party, Tulsi now fights against it, citing the corruption and anti-democratic tendencies of today's DNC. She calls the Democratic Party the "party of war" and a party opposed to true democracy and free speech.

Gabbard alongside RFK Jr. have begun to create a former Democrat coalition against their longtime party. They both hope to propel Donald Trump into the White House, where he may be able to go after the engines in D.C. that they see driving much of the corruption, violence, and destruction that are harming this country and, resultantly, the world.

Short-term Outlook: Debate and Sentencing

Only a fool would try to predict what's going to happen next in this whirlwind of a race. So here's what I'm predicting...

August has -- for whatever reason -- always been a horrible month for Republicans in polls. Going all the way back to 1988, Republicans have trailed in every single polling average in the month of August. This month was no different. Trump has actually not led in the polling average since July 31st. Considering that, Trump may soon find himself in the lead by mid-September, barring a disastrous debate performance on his part. Harris has already shown slippage in the polls, with liberal-biased polls like Quinnipiac showing her ahead by a single percentage point. Last week was supposed to be her triumphant polling week following the DNC. But whether it was the Trump-RFK alliance taking the air out of the room and/or some other factors, it cannot be said for sure. What we know is that it didn't happen.

A 1.5% lead for her today does not project a strong finish for her two months from now, especially if she is the one that has a bad debate performance. The debate, for that matter, will likely not move the needle that much anyway. There are certainly some independents and the rare partisan who have not yet made up their mind who could be swayed; we currently estimate that undecideds comprise between 3 and 4% of the electorate -- a not unsubstantial amount in a race like this! But with the debate so far removed from most early voting and especially from election day, the effects of the debate may be de minimis. But even a performance half as bad as Biden's June debate could doom her campaign.

In my estimation, a bad performance on her part makes a second debate more likely while a good performance on her part makes it less likely. She and her team are already apprehensive about exposing her to the media and voters, so they will do as little as they need to in order to feel like they are in a place where they can win.

Trump's legal team has a hearing on the 16th for whether or not the May 30th conviction will be tossed, in accordance with the Supreme Court's June ruling on the particularities of presidential immunity. Trump's actions -- communicating with staff -- were used by the prosecution to substantiate their criminal claims against the former president. That action is inconsistent with the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision. Communicating with staff would fall under a president's "official acts" and, thus, would be incapable of being used as evidence for court action against him.

His legal team filed a motion in federal court on Friday in an attempt to remove the New York case to federal court. The alleged crime, afterall, was predicated on a federal crime that federal officials had declined to prosecute. Earlier this month District Attorney Alvin Bragg (and his partner-in-crime former Biden-DOJ Matthew Colangelo) said they would defer to Judge Merchan as to whether sentencing should be delayed until after the election. It remains to be seen what Merchan will do in this case.

Trump receiving a sentence from New York's Soros-funded prosecutor may be the very thing that gets him re-elected. While Republicans certainly abhor the political proceedings, many independents and some Democrats have also publicly detested the move, including media pundits, elected officials, Trump's "team of rivals," and poll respondents...

It's that last point that has led me to discuss this. If Trump does receive a jail sentence, whether it is deferred on appeal or not, enthusiasm to vote for Trump will reach its zenith. It will be so close to the election that even the enthusiasm to vote for him following the bogus conviction or the attempted assassination in Pennsylvania will be eclipsed by it.

Last I recall, some 60% of Americans see the prosecution as politically-motivated. A bad debate performance from Harris and a jail sentence for Trump could reopen Trump's lead to post-June-debate levels.

Closing

Check back in either tomorrow or Tuesday for the Senate forecast. The House forecast should come by the weekend.

-- Pollstradamus