At a time when we’re all deluged with conflicting polls and statistical ties, Donald Trump’s campaign is unusually confident.

The Kamala Harris operation also sees reason for optimism, with news that late deciders are breaking her way by more than 10%. But she still casts herself as the underdog. Her “SNL” appearance doesn’t change that; nor does Trump saying that RFK’s plan to remove fluoride from the water, a major public health advance, “sounds okay to me.”

Most media folks, either publicly or privately, believe Trump will win, even as the anti-Trumpers beg their followers to turn out for the VP – such as MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace asking her ex-boss George W. Bush to publicly back Harris.

The climax of the campaign seems built around a gaping gender gap–with Kamala doing far better among women and Trump much better among men. 

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The view from the Trump camp is that registration figures favor Republicans, based on mail-in voting, in the battleground states that will decide the race. Nearly half the country has already voted.

Take the crucial commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In 2020, Democrats had a 7.5% advantage, and that’s now shrunk to a 3-point edge.

What’s more, just 39% of Democrats who have voted there so far are men, compared to 49% among Republicans.

Democratic strategist Tom Bonier, who appears on MSNBC, says the Pennsylvania electorate is much more Republican, and much more male, than last time.

Harris needs a huge turnout in Philadelphia to carry the state, and numerous news reports say she’s still struggling to win over some Black men.

In Wisconsin, the view from Trump World is that in-person voting (which tends to favor the former president) is outnumbering mail ballots (which lean Democratic). Trump’s strength is among male, white and rural voters. So, as in the case of Philly, Harris must do very well in Milwaukee and Madison to carry the state.

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Michigan, which Rep. Debbie Dingell recently told me is a toss-up, remains an enigma, because it doesn’t track party registration. So the ballgame there may turn on how well Harris does in Detroit. 

The Trump camp sees similar advantages in such swing states as Georgia and North Carolina, where public polling is close but would be a bigger stretch for a Harris win. The election really turns on the three Blue Wall states.

Maybe Harris should have picked Josh Shapiro?

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Lititz, Pa., on Sunday, Nov. 3. The Trump campaign appears confident of a win based on early in-person votes outnumbering mail-in ballots – which skew heavily Democratic – in key areas. (AP/Matt Rourke)

In one key state after another, local Black leaders are quoted on the record as saying they’re worried about warning signs in their community:

Politico: “The city of Milwaukee is trailing the rest of the state by about 7 percent both in its mail-in return rate and in overall registered voter turnout. It’s a warning sign, even some Democrats privately say, for Harris as her campaign looks to run up the score with urban and suburban voters to overcome Wisconsin’s rural counties.”

Capital B, Atlanta: The turnout of Black voters in Georgia “has dropped from more than 29 percent” on the first day of early voting “to about 25 percent…That’s the bad news for Harris…

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“Elected leaders and political observers say Democrats looking for a guaranteed win in statewide office races in Georgia usually need to hit a 30 percent Black turnout rate.”

Charlotte Observer: “As of Wednesday, Black voters had cast 207,000 fewer ballots compared with four years ago — a drop of almost 40 percent.”

“I am worried about turnout in Detroit. I think it’s real,” said Jamal Simmons, a former Harris aide, told ABC.

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to reporters after delivering remarks at a church service at Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ, Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024, in Detroit. Former Harris surrogate Jamal Simmons told ABC that he is “worried about turnout” in the Motor City. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

A sunnier view is offered by this Politico piece, which says that public polls appear to be undercounting Harris’ support.

The story says that “shy Trump voters” – who don’t want to tell pollsters who they’re supporting–are a thing of the past, given the aggressive nature of his campaign. 

Instead, many “forgotten” Harris voters are missed by the polls, especially Republicans frustrated with their own party: Nikki Haley voters.

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Citing a national survey, Politico says 66% of those voting for Haley in the primaries backed Trump in 2016, dropping to 59% four years ago and an estimated 45% this time. “Meanwhile, their support for the Democratic presidential nominee has nearly tripled from only 13 percent supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to 36 percent indicating an intent to vote for Kamala Harris.”

To which I say: Who the hell knows?

We’re at the point now before tomorrow’s election that pollsters are analyzing the polls to figure out which ones are off. And–here comes the cliché – it all depends on turnout. Despite raising a billion bucks, if some of Harris’ potential supporters stay home, that sinks her candidacy.

The scenarios favored by the Trump team rest largely on party registration, not polls that have missed the mark in the last two cycles.

That explains why the former president is more confident, even as he asks his advisers whether they really believe he’s going to win.

Election day is almost here, and the end of this tumultuous campaign season cannot come soon enough. But it may not come Tuesday night.

Given that the race for president is expected to be close, it’s quite possible that Americans will have to wait days to learn whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Trump will be the next commander in chief. Vote counting may take a while, and — despite what bad-faith actors might suggest — that’s OK. A healthy democracy can afford to be meticulous in counting every vote and patient in waiting for accurate results.

In 2020, Trump cynically and dangerously claimed that legitimate delays to count a record number of mailed ballots were evidence of fraud and asserted that Democrats were “trying to steal the election.” Trump’s lies were debunked and rejected by judges in numerous court cases, but his misinformation campaign persuaded thousands of people to show up to his “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and storm the Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying the election results.

This year, election officials (both Republicans and Democrats among them) have been trying to reset expectations of how quickly votes can be counted in an attempt to tamp down conspiracy theories.

Here are the facts:

• More states, including California, have expanded the use of mail-in ballots and ballot drop boxes, which are more convenient for voters. These ballots take longer to count because election personnel verify signatures on ballot envelopes against state records.
• States have different rules that may affect the speed of their counts. Pennsylvania, for example, does not allow election workers to begin processing mail ballots until election day. North Carolina is requiring a photo ID to vote this year, which is expected to increase the number of provisional ballots that have to be researched to determine eligibility, which takes time.

• In 2020, Trump made the absurd and laughably ignorant assertion that ballots counted after election day aren’t legitimate. Election officials do not — and should not — stop tallying votes after 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday. That would be impractical and unfair. And no election has ever been certified on election day.
• Some politicians, pundits and even media outlets may choose to “call” a race based on early returns, but that’s often irresponsible. The results can shift as ballots are counted. In the 2018 midterm election, early returns had Republican candidates leading in some key California congressional races. That turned out to be a “red mirage”: When all the ballots were counted, Democrats won the seats and control of the House. At the time, some Republicans suggested that the reversal of fortune was an indication of some type of election misconduct. It wasn’t. Election officials were simply doing their jobs and ensuring that every vote was counted.

This is a politically fraught moment. Foreign powers and opportunists have already been spreading disinformation to undermine confidence in the election. Last week, U.S. intelligence agencies blamed Russia for a viral video purporting to show a Haitian immigrant with multiple Georgia IDs claiming to have voted multiple times. Russia is also allegedly responsible for a fake video that purports to show someone destroying ballots marked for Trump in Pennsylvania.

That’s why it’s so important to rely on facts, verifiable information and reliable sources such as the National Assn. of Secretaries of State, whose members run elections, and to be a discerning consumer of social media, where so many false claims circulate.

This year’s election will test Americans and our democratic institutions. Let’s do everything possible to ensure we pass.

There are thousands of golf courses in the United States. You can find them in every state, in nearly every county; there’s probably one near you.

It’s not just golf and brewing: People in America’s reddest neighborhoods see a different landscape of stores, restaurants and venues when they step outside their homes than those in more politically even precincts or the very bluest areas.

We wanted to look at this relationship between politics and the places around us. So, using data from the Overture Maps Foundation, we took the location of millions of different stores, restaurants, churches, parks and more and lined them up with the 2020 election results, down to the precinct.

We don’t know who goes to each place. But we know how the neighborhoods surrounding each locale vote.

The results are sometimes obvious: Yoga studios and cocktail bars skew toward deeply blue spaces, and gun stores and farms toward redder precincts. But they show how our politics, geography and lives intersect, not always in obvious ways.

In many cases, these graphs look the way they do largely because of the urban-rural divide. Certain activities, like golf, need space, and the more rural parts of the country tend to vote for Republicans. Meanwhile, a small, Democratic-leaning urban area might be a commercial hub for a redder county, with a brewery, coffee shop and bookstore; those businesses would look blue in our data set even if they were frequented equally by Republicans and Democrats.

“The placement of businesses is probably motivated primarily by income level and population density,” said Nick Rogers, a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “It just so happens that an area’s political ideology is highly correlated with these things.”

Some places, of course, are just everywhere:

And some kinds of places don’t fit easily into one bucket or the other.

Consider Baptist churches: A majority of the tens of thousands of these churches in the U.S. are in the South. That means they’re heavily concentrated in both Republican neighborhoods and largely Black, heavily Democratic areas. The resulting distribution looks like this:

Wineries, too, show a double hump. You can see that in California alone — with wine production clustered along both its bluer coastline and the redder Central Valley.

For many brands, the partisan map emerges from the regional footprint of the business. Piggly Wiggly mostly serves redder states in the South, while Food Lion is spread across a more politically varied area in the Southeast.

But the maps cut across people and places in different ways. A liberal voter in Los Angeles may have never heard of Piggly Wiggly. But it’s also possible that person has never heard of Stop & Shop, a supermarket in the bluer Northeast.

Other brands that aren’t so regionally clustered have expanded in pursuit of the clientele they already know. For example, Whole Foods, Peet’s Coffee and the upscale sportswear brand Lululemon have a high-earning urban customer base.

The Overture data in this analysis reflects businesses and places that have logged their locations on either Meta or Microsoft platforms; the data is imperfect and includes mislabeled locations and closed stores. But this is the best publicly available data set of its kind, and it lets us see patterns in the data that aren’t captured by surveys of consumer preference.

Here’s a roundup of them.

Fast food

One fast food chain in many deep blue precincts is Popeyes. The chicken purveyor is found in many Southern cities but also across the West Coast and up and down I-95.

Its competitor Chick-fil-A — despite an early 2010s controversy over gay rights — is also in many blue areas.

Among the chains found in redder places are Tennessee-based Hardee’s and Oklahoma-based Sonic.

And Burger King, like McDonald’s, is everywhere.

Coffee shops

Starbucks is by far the nation’s largest coffee chain, and while it might feel as if it’s everywhere, it hews toward slightly denser locations.

Some smaller coffee chains have a more significant skew. West Coast chains like Blue Bottle and Peet’s Coffee are common in some of the bluest areas; the largest chain in our data with a strong presence in redder areas is Scooter’s Coffee.

Breakfast spots

IHOP neighborhoods are bluer than those around the largely Midwestern restaurant Bob Evans. Huddle House is the major breakfast chain with the highest frequency in red areas in our data.

Convenience stores

7-Eleven started in Texas, but it has since spread across many blue places.

Regional convenience store chains in redder areas include Casey’s General Store and Allsup’s.

Religious institutions

The headquarters of the Mormon Church are in blue Salt Lake City. But it has many temples in rural parts of the Mountain West.

First Congregational Church, on the other hand, is a common name for a church in the United Church of Christ, a socially liberal Protestant denomination common in New England.

First United Methodist churches are in redder areas:

Hindu and Buddhist temples are both typically in more liberal areas.

Professionals

Occupations also have recognizable patterns in our data, probably in large part because of the rural-urban political divide.

Some professions lend themselves to cities:

Others, to the countryside:

And yet others can find business just about anywhere:

Leisure

A lot of the activities we do for fun also map across politics.

Services

Even basic services follow similar patterns. Fire departments skew red because they have to be everywhere, regardless of how many people live there. Even a small, rural area needs a fire department. When you consider population density, you get this:

Elementary schools, meanwhile, are more population dependent.

Train stations, including those with subway stops, tend to be in more urban areas.

And propane suppliers, though everywhere, typically have more business in rural areas, farther from natural gas pipelines.

Taken together, the patterns are a reminder of how big and varied the country is — in its places and its politics.

You can explore the distribution of 100 large coffee chains, grocery stores, shops and other places below.

See More: Political Geography of 100 Large American Businesses