Election Day is Finally Here (and Anything Can Still Happen)

0:01Karl Rove: Everyone wants health care to be simpler and easier. That's why UnitedHealth Group is fast-tracking more than 60 % of children's procedures that used to need pre-approval. So more kids get the care they need when they need it. And speeding up procedure approvals and payments for more than 1 ,500 rural hospitals. So they can focus on caring for their communities. And that's just the start. Learn more at uhg.com slash access. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is All Things with Kim Strassel. The midterms are here. Finally, early voting has surged in battleground states. People are heading to the ballot box.

0:44Karl Rove: Media outlets are issuing final polls. Yet there remains a great deal of uncertainty about the outcome. Have Donald Trump campaign rallies helped or hurt? What does it mean that those late deciding voters seem to be cutting toward Republicans? Welcome to All Things with Kim Strassel. And I get the great privilege of having one of my favorite people on to walk us through some of this. Karl Rove, my fellow Wall Street Journal columnist, Fox News contributor, and one-time senior advisor to former President George W. Bush. All right, I'm just going to start with the biggie. How much are you bracing for a bad GOP night?

1:20Karl Rove: And if you are, are we talking a blue splash, a blue wave, a blue tsunami?

1:25Kim Strassel: Yeah, I'm preparing for it. I think it's going to be a blue wave in part because the two parties have sliced and diced the House of Representatives to a thither. And as a result, it's really difficult for, you know, it's not going to be a 1994 or a 2010. It's going to be more, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if the Democrats go from 215 to 235, which would be 20 seats or maybe a few more than that.

1:50Karl Rove: Not like a 60 or a 40 seat difference.

1:53Kim Strassel: No, I don't think so. And if it is, it will be an astonishing result because think about this. To win a majority, to get to 218, all they got to do is win every seat that Kamala Harris carried, that district, and every seat that Donald Trump got less than four-point margin in. That gets them to 218. To get to 230, they got to take all the Harris seats and everybody who is less than 10 points for Donald Trump. To get to 240, they got to take every seat that Kamala Harris won and every seat that Donald Trump got 11 percent or less in. So that's hard. That's that's hard. That's hard.

2:35Karl Rove: And the Senate crapshoot.

2:36Kim Strassel: You know, I'd like to feel like the Republicans are going to end up 50 50, which is what I put in my column last week. But I have no idea. I mean, New York Times polls came out and had them basically with if they're to be to believe, than it is a, you know, 53, 47 Democratic Senate. But then they have Nate Cohn, who's a pretty smart guy, who's the head of the polling operation for the New York Times, do a piece that says basically don't believe what we said. So, look, it's hard to poll in the modern era, and particularly this year, where I think you have a lot of people who are nominal Republicans who say, I'm not going to tell any anonymous person who calls me on the phone how I'm voting.

3:14Kim Strassel: I mean, pollsters are telling me in red states, they're getting Democrats two times or three times or four times responding to the polls. So we're lucky to get a rough approximation when you reweight those polls. So, you know, you got four times as many Democratic respondents and you reweight to another number, which you think represents the Republican turnout in the state. You think. You think. But you're also getting Republicans who were willing to tell you what they were doing, not the Republicans who are not willing to tell you what they're doing. And we don't know which way they're going to break.

3:45Kim Strassel: So we start out at 53. We're not going to carry North Carolina. That gets us to 52. We're not going to pick up Georgia, which keeps us at 52. But, you know, Maine, Michigan, I feel nervous about Ohio. I'm nervous about Kansas. I'm nervous, you know, Texas. This would have been an easy race with John Cornyn, but the president intervened a week before the election. And we have a very challenged candidate in Texas. Now, we have sands or buts.

4:10Karl Rove: So since you brought it up, those New York Times Siena polls, when I looked at them, I was like, wow, because, I mean, they have Abdul El-Sayed winning by 11 points in Michigan. 11 points. Seven points between James Tallarico and Ken Paxton in Texas. Five points in Ohio between Sherrod Brown and John Husted. And then we had also a Washington Post poll come out that has the Republican losing Kansas by 10 points. Also, with an interesting, to your point, this little explanation saying, well, you know, we're not really sure we trust anything in this poll. In fact, it's probably wrong, but we're just going to put it out there anyway in the name of transparency.

4:53Karl Rove: And I guess the question I wanted to ask you on this is quite aside from polling. I mean, I know you understand polling up and down, but quite aside from the polling mechanics and all the sort of best science that maybe is being used. Does it just strike you as right that you could have a state like Reg Kansas, which hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years, that you could have Republicans lose it by 10 points?

5:18Kim Strassel: No, not at all. And look, I'm not a conspiracy nut, so I don't think this is deliberate. But there was an interesting question raised. Is there a systemic bias in polling towards the Democrats? And Patrick Ruffini, whom I think you know from Echelon Insights, terrific data-driven guy, one of the best pollsters on the Republican side. To answer that question, he looked back at 3 ,312 polls that have been run in the last four cycles, and there are three outcomes. They overestimate Republican strength, they overestimate Democrat strength, or they're reasonably on target. So you've got three possibilities.

5:54Kim Strassel: 73 % of those polls overestimated the election day strength of the Democrats. Now, that's not an accident. That's not, you know, one third of the time. You got three options and one third of the time they get it wrong. That is, you know, 73 percent say they overestimate the Democrats, a grand total of 27 percent either overestimate Republicans or get it right. So there's something going on out there. And again, I'm not a conspiracy nut. This, I think, has to do with the increasing reluctance of people on the center right, Republicans and conservatives, to answer truthfully a question asked them by a complete stranger from some organization in all likelihood they've never heard of in their lives.

6:35Karl Rove: Well, you know, I certainly get a lot of those and ignore a lot of those. So, you know, I may be representative.

6:40Kim Strassel: Do you even answer your phone? What a mistake that is. I don't answer my phone if I don't recognize the number.

6:47Karl Rove: I don't for the most part. I was also talking about the text ones you get as well, too. So those are another aspect. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, more with Karl Rove on some things you should be looking for as Election Day plays out. Everyone wants health care to be simpler and easier. That's why UnitedHealth Group is fast tracking more than 60 percent of children's procedures that used to need preapproval. So more kids get the care they need when they need it. and speeding up procedure approvals and payments for more than 1 ,500 rural hospitals so they can focus on caring for their communities.

7:25Karl Rove: And that's just the start. Learn more at uhg.com slash access. This is Matthew Hennessey, the editor of Free Expression. I want to personally invite you to come check out what we're doing. Signing up for the newsletter couldn't be easier. Just go to our homepage. Directly below the Wall Street Journal logo, you'll find the magic words, free expression wedged between opinion and arts. There's an option to sign up for the newsletter right at the top of our section. Just hit that button and you'll start getting the world's hardest working newsletter delivered directly to your inbox Monday through Friday.

8:02Karl Rove: If you aren't a journal subscriber, the newsletter is free, but we are gonna need your email address. There's a lot of fun stuff in the newsletter that you can only read in the newsletter, and I don't want you to miss any of it. Sign up for free expression today. We'll see you in your inbox.

8:20Karl Rove: Welcome back to All Things with Kim Strassel. I am here with Wall Street Journal columnist and Fox News contributor Karl Rove. So also tucked into the latest bit of New York Times polling data was, and it was buried in the middle of the story, was this interesting little data point saying that of the voters who decided just in the past month, they favored Republicans by a nine point margin. If that's actually true, and again, we don't know how good this polling is, but if that is actually true, how much does that matter for the GOP?

8:51Kim Strassel: Well, it matters a lot because typically, you know, look, my view of the electorate is as follows. Donald Trump thinks that he won because he has this huge army of devoted followers who love everything he does. And there is a large army, but it only constitutes about 35 percent of the electorate. It's the part of the population today that approves of his performance as president. But he got 49. And the difference between 35 and 49 is to be found in a group of people who basically said, I'm vaguely center-right or I'm strongly center-right. But I don't like Donald Trump. And I don't consider him a good role model for our country or my kids or grandkids.

9:29Kim Strassel: But things were better when he was president. And I don't want four more years of what we've got, Biden-Harris. She's not going to be any different than Joe Biden. And they voted for Donald Trump and gave him 49 point whatever it was, 8 percent of the vote. I think that's the group that this time around is saying, OK, I'm really not wild about turning out for MAGA or for the president, just for the president. Nobody seems to know what they're doing. But I'm getting an increasing doubt about the Democratic Party. I mean, remember, in the NBC poll, net favorables, the Republican Party minus 13, Donald Trump minus 18, the Democratic Party minus 21.

10:05Kim Strassel: They achieved the difficulty very difficult. They're less popular than Donald Trump. And so I think at the end here, we're likely to see, particularly in red states like Nebraska, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, we're likely to see some movement back to the Republicans just because people are saying, you know what? I keep hearing that other side saying they're for affordability, but I can't make heads or tail of what they're talking about. And they just seem to hate Trump. And I really don't want to have that kind of, you know, if I hear specifics, it's like Medicare for all and, you know, abolish aid to Israel and, you know, defund ICE and open borders and, you know, blah, blah, blah.

10:44Kim Strassel: And I think that they tend to sort of say, OK, well, maybe I don't want a Democratic Senate. I want a Republican Senate. And I think that's probably helping here as we come down the final stretch.

10:53Karl Rove: So kind of to that point, something you wrote, one of your columns, it was about a month ago, and I love all your columns, but this one, you were talking about some of the surprises there might be in this midterm. And one thing you noted, and I just wanted to ask you if your thoughts have changed on this over the past month, but you noted that there's the generic ballot, right? You know, who would you prefer to be in power right now in the House, Democrats or Republicans? And by some recent polling, that number across the board is like 10 percent in favor of Democrats. But you noted at the time that you actually need to look at what the spread is in the battleground districts.

11:30Karl Rove: You know, the 40 to 60 that are in play. And at least back a month ago, you found the spread there was more like two points. Do you know if that's changed or is that still like are some of these things just very dependent on the district that you are looking at?

11:45Kim Strassel: Yeah, this is a poll done by the Cook Political Report where they took the I think at the time there were 37 districts that were lean Democrat, lean Republican or toss up. And the generic ballot in those districts was two points. I don't think there's anything that would have changed that dramatically since they ran it. I think that was three or four weeks ago. So, yes, I mean, look, you go to San Francisco, you know, whatever it is, Congressional District 12. It's anti-Trump. You go to Texas 13, and it's overwhelmingly pro-Republican. But you go to these battlegrounds, and for the battlegrounds to be only a two-point gap says something to me.

12:23Kim Strassel: The Democratic advantage in those two points, I mean, that means that a bunch of these are close. And the quality of a candidate, a Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania 1, could bring home a victory for the Republicans. Whereas if his district were nine points or ten points for the Democrats, it would be unlikely that he would survive. So, no, I haven't changed my opinion on that.

12:43Karl Rove: OK, interesting. We'll have to take a look at that after the results are in. You just mentioned another couple of words I love, which is candidate quality. And I wonder your thoughts. Does this election tell us something about how money obviously matters in elections, right? Money is a proxy for speech. It's always good to have more money, not less money. But what we do know is that the GOP has massively outraised and outspent Democrats, at least at the sort of party function. level, the party organization level. And I wonder, though, it doesn't necessarily seem to be sealing the deal for them in some of these places.

13:19Karl Rove: And it does strike me that a bunch of this is about candidate quality. Also, how long it took Republicans to spend some of this money?

13:28Kim Strassel: Well, that's a very good point. Let me take it up first. I think you're absolutely right. Look, there's a lot of money being spent here in September and October. There wasn't as much being spent in June, July and August. And I think that was a mistake. I think people's opinions about some of these candidates and more importantly, the issue agenda solidified in the summer. And so getting movement after Labor Day was a lot harder than getting movement in July or August. So yes, I think that's an issue. And B, candidate quality matters a lot. I mean, look, I like Michael Wadley. He's a nice guy in North Carolina.

14:02Kim Strassel: But if Tom Tillis was running for reelection, if he had not been forced out by the opposition of the president. I'm not even certain that Roy Cooper would have gotten into the race. Tom Tillis, in my opinion, would be fielding a challenge from a member of Congress or a state official, not from the very popular two-time attorney general and two-time governor of the state. Because Tillis, he would have said, I got better things at the age of 70. I got better things to do than to run against Tom Tillis and get my ass kicked. So yeah, Yeah, it matters a lot. I mean, Mike Collins in Georgia, look, Ossoff is a talent.

14:35Kim Strassel: But to beat a talent, you got to have something unusual. And Trump stepped into the race and backed a sort of run-of-the-mill, ordinary Republican member of Congress. You know, I'm not certain that Coach Dooley would have been a better candidate, but I think he would have had a chance to have been a better candidate because he was an outsider. And my one meeting left a very strong impression that this guy was authentic and empathetic and trying to do the right thing. And I think he would have come across as sort of Jimmy Stewart, every man with a football plan. And then Texas, of course, I mean, Cornyn, the race would have been over.

15:09Kim Strassel: And in House races, we've got a whole bunch of these where Don Bacon would be running for reelection in Nebraska had Trump not made it completely clear that he didn't want Bacon in the Congress and would do anything necessary to drive him out of the Republican caucus. So candidate quality matters a lot. Sometimes the best way to find qualities, to let people have a primary and make the decision, not have the president put his thumb on it. Does South Carolina another key example?

15:36Karl Rove: I want to just get your thoughts about some of these October, November surprises we've been getting here in Michigan. Obviously, Democratic Rep Haley Stevens certainly shocked the Democratic world by endorsing Mike Rogers on Sunday. You know, the press is all over the juicy part of that story about the backlash and the Democratic fury at her. But my question to you is, does it make a difference, though? Does it resonate with some Michigan voters that she endorsed Mike Rogers? Do you think it changes the vote there at all?

16:07Kim Strassel: I do. I mean, if you're a Democrat, particularly a Jewish Democrat or a black Democrat, and a prominent figure like that comes and you're not really set on Al Saeed, there's, you know, there's just something about him that irks you and you're just, you're moving to vote for him reluctantly. Along comes her. And particularly if you voted for her in the primary. Look, most Democrats will say, shame on you for breaking with the party. But the people are up still for grabs, impossible to move. Some of them are going to be moved by it. So, yes, that's a much more of a plus. I don't think anybody's going to say, by God, I'm not going to vote for Rogers because Stevens voting for him.

16:41Kim Strassel: Nor do I think somebody is going to say, by God, I wasn't going to vote. But Stevens voting for Rogers causes me to go out and vote. I think there's only an upside for Rogers out of it. Question is how big.

16:52Karl Rove: There's not a ton of Jewish American voters in Michigan. 70 or 80 ,000, yeah. The African-American community there is much better. And El-Sayed also has a problem with them. Do you think this plays at all among that community? Or does it matter more that El-Sayed had Jim Clyburn up doing a rally with him on the last weekend?

17:12Kim Strassel: Well, I think Michigan voters know more about Stevens than they know about Jim Clyburn, with all due respect to the venerable member from South Carolina. And again, it's the principle. It's like she's a Democrat. I'm a Democrat. She says that it's OK to vote for Rogers. And look, Mike was doing pretty good in the black community, in part because of the antipathy that some of them in the black community feel about Al Saeed. But also, look, Mike's an approachable guy. I get the sense Saeed is like a performance artist. You know, I got to I got to muscle up. I got to have the cool clothes. I got to be surrounded by chicks who are like making funny.

17:48Kim Strassel: He put out this really weird thing where he's got a couple of women who are like dancing around him. And his views are not necessarily – I mean the most conservative element of the Democratic Party are older black Democrats, including particularly older black women. That's why the Democratic National Committee picked South Carolina to be the first state in their selection process for their 2028 nominee because they wanted to make certain they didn't start off in a state that was going to set a lefty tone. The second state has a large population of Hispanics, namely Nevada, because they recognize there it's a more moderate kind of a Democrat.

18:25Kim Strassel: It's only when they finally get to Michigan that you start to have both this huge college population of younger voters and the Arab American vote, which is for weird reasons tended to be out there on the left.

18:37Karl Rove: We're going to take one more break. When we come back, what to make of that Alaska Senate decoy race? everyone wants health care to be simpler and easier that's why united health group is fast tracking more than 60 of children's procedures that used to need pre-approval so more kids get the care they need when they need it and speeding up procedure approvals and payments for more than 1500 rural hospitals so they can focus on caring for their communities and that's just the start Learn more at uhg.com slash access.

19:16Karl Rove: From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is All Things with Kim Strassel. Welcome back. Well, obviously, one of my favorite stories right now is everything that's going on up in Alaska. Obviously, the New York Times put this story out and made it very clear that the Mary Peltola, the Democratic Senate campaign, was front and center in recruiting this decoy candidate up in Alaska. He's now disappeared. This decoy Dan guy has gone off the face of the planet. By the way, I note that it's pretty easy to lose yourself in Alaska, so I'll be curious to know when anybody actually tracks him down.

19:52Karl Rove: But subpoenas have gone out. Now, a federal judge just dismissed the DOJ effort to step in to try to, you know, maybe halt certification. Where do you actually see this going? Because you've done a lot of these races. Is any litigation a non-starter or Alaskans just going to have to live with the results of this, even if it turns out that this dirty trick might be enough to just narrowly swing it to Mary Peltola's campaign?

20:19Kim Strassel: Yeah, well, I think, you know, Alaska, the North Slope people, the Alaskans are going to have to live with it. But there's going to be consequences because, in my opinion, they may have violated the law. This may not just be a stinky political trick, but federal law is very explicit. You cannot have what's called coordination between a campaign, federal campaign, and a super PAC. And so you had the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic candidate in Alaska, their people talking about how to pull this scheme off. And as part of it, they hire this guy named Kurtz from Ohio, and he is paid$87 ,000 by one of two super PACs that are focused only on the Alaska campaign.

21:05Kim Strassel: So who called up that super PAC and said, pay the bill for Kurtz to come up here and create a phony candidate? Not only the other Dan, the fake Dan Sullivan, but also apparently the third Republican in the race who already said he was leaning towards running anyway, because God had told him to run. Gerald Heikas, yes. I had no idea that God had such a personal interest in the politics of Alaska primaries, but that was a problem. And I mean, who at the Senate committee and who in the campaign reached out to the super PAC and said, we're sending you a bill for$87 ,000. And was that all that was paid?

21:42Kim Strassel: Were there other ways that he was paid under the table by the campaign or a super PAC with monies? And what was Mark Elias' firm doing consulting on all of this and not saying, for God's sake, do not coordinate with this guy? They recruited him. They told him what to do. They gave him the list. The campaign gave him the list of the Dan Sullivan registered voters. They tracked what he did. He reported to them on a regular basis. And he got a paycheck from a super PAC, which is coordination. And so, yeah, somebody may end up going to jail on this or at least be fined. But, yeah, it's a sleazy tactic and it speaks volumes that Patola thinks that somehow or another all she's got to say is, well, I didn't know anything about it.

22:24Kim Strassel: I was focused on her entire goddamn campaign was involved into it up to their necks. I mean, it's just simply not plausible to believe that somehow or another she was so dumb about everything going on that this is the first she's heard of it.

22:38Karl Rove: Yeah, no, it is. It is actually a wild story. And, you know, you and I both been doing this a long time and I've never seen anything quite so gross. going on out there. You wrote about this last week, but if it does turn out that Republicans end up having a pretty bad night, how much of that comes down to the White House's decision that it was going to roll the president out or the president's decision? Let's just be clear, it was probably the president's decision that he was going to go out and do these rallies, but very much focus this campaign on speaking to people who already love him.

23:11Kim Strassel: Yeah, a big problem. They were going to turn out to vote anyway, and he could have gotten them to go out to vote, any of them that were sitting on the sidelines, by being the president of the United States, not being the campaigner in chief, but being the president. I mean, it's not like we wanted him to go find a hole and jump into it for four or five or six months, but he would have been better served his own cause and better served his party's cause if he had gone out there and said, things are starting to get better. Here's some good news, but we got a lot more to do. And here's what it is that I'm going to be doing.

23:43Kim Strassel: And if he had gone more to explain what he was doing in the Middle East than the occasional, you know, I'm going to bomb the hell out of him. I mean, the president of the United States has the biggest megaphone and the inability of the president to use that megaphone as the president, as opposed to the commander in chief. It was the biggest single problem with the Republican campaign. And he closed it on Monday with, you know, an astonishing performance. And it started with and devoted more than half of it to the reflection pool and the fact that it might be named after him and his other construction projects in Washington.

24:15Kim Strassel: The ordinary American is saying to themselves, what is he going to do to make our life better? What's he going to do to make my family's life better? What is he going to do to make our country more secure? And he's out there talking about his redecoration projects.

24:27Karl Rove: That's going to be a lot of lessons, I think, for people to absorb when this is all over. Carl, I look forward to watching you tot up all of the results, explain to them what they mean over the coming hours and days. We want to thank our listeners for tuning in. We are here every week. If you like the show, please do hit the subscribe button. And if you'd like to write to us, you can at atkim at wsj.com.

24:56Karl Rove: Everyone wants health care to be simpler and easier. That's why UnitedHealth Group is fast tracking more than 60 % of children's procedures that used to need pre-approval. So more kids get the care they need when they need it. And speeding up procedure approvals and payments for more than 1 ,500 rural hospitals. so they can focus on caring for their communities. And that's just the start. Learn more at uhg.com slash access.