U.S. midterm elections

Marquee races in swing states could help determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential contest. Here is what we're watching on Election Day.

A study by three British political scientists that examined three presidential elections found that those who cast early ballots are the voters who have determined that they will participate in the election, and they tend to be Republicans. And if the surge of voters is heavily female, then all bets are off and all precedents meaningless. Trump was in the White House and two-thirds of Republicans and Republican leaners wanted him to be renominated. Hassan in a poll for the first time last week, though his 1 percentage point advantage is within the margin of error of the Saint Anselm College Poll. A group of Harvard, Northeastern and Northwestern University scholars examined the so-called “abortion bump” and concluded that it was a momentary phenomenon that has vanished in recent weeks. In Kansas, where a referendum to tighten abortion restrictions was defeated this summer, nearly three-quarters of the new registrants in the week after the decision were women. The peculiar, cynical obverse of this is that Mr. Biden himself (who will face calls for investigations into the activities of his son Hunter Biden and who may have to fend off calls for his impeachment). One indicator that is especially intriguing shows that, according to the latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, about one in nine voters remain undecided about whom to support Tuesday – and 83 per cent of them believe the country is on the wrong track. The Democrats and their leaners are concentrated in states like California and New York and in various urban areas. The two Democrats who followed did even worse; Bill Clinton’s Democrats lost 54 seats in the House in 1994 and Barack Obama’s Democrats lost 63 House seats in 2010. And like that optical instrument, which operates through repeated reflection, all the elements of this vital contest are reflections of deeper tensions and fissures in American political culture.