The 0.0027 Factor

A mere smidge of the active electorate will decide who's President.

We’ve all heard that this election is going to be very, very close and that “every vote matters.” To explore just how small a slice of the electorate will determine the outcome, I decided to do a little math.

First I took the voting totals from 2020 in the six swing states as a proxy for this year’s turnout and then multiplied those numbers by the percentage lead either Harris or Trump had as of Friday, according to 538.

This should yield the margin in votes the winning candidate would get state-by-state if the election were held today.

The results were as follows: Harris wins Michigan by 128,000 votes, Pennsylvania by 89,000, Wisconsin by 68,000 and Nevada by 14,000. She also wins the “blue dot” district in Nebraska by a comfortable margin — the latest poll has her up by 11 points there.

Meanwhile, Trump wins Georgia by 44,000 votes, Arizona by 43,000 and North Carolina by 22,000.

Harris would win the popular vote by 4.7 million votes and the all-important Electoral College, 276-262. An interesting facet of the current state of the race is that even if the state with the smallest vote margin, Nevada, should flip to Trump, Harris would still win the Presidency by two electoral votes, 270-268.

Assuming my calculations are correct, 538’s polls are accurate, and the present trends hold over the next 38 days, approximately one-quarter of one percent of the anticipated 162 million voters are going to determine the outcome of this election.

Of course, these estimates are based on the 2020 turnout and one huge variable is whether turnout increases or decreases this year. So with that and many other caveats, it goes without saying that all of this is well within that good old margin of error.

HEADLINES:

• Israel kills Hezbollah leader Nasrallah in airstrike (Reuters)

• Harris heads to the US southern border, looking to close a polling gap with Trump (CNN)

• Harris multiplied Biden’s lead among young voters (WP)

• Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College — More than six-in-ten Americans (63%) would instead prefer to see the winner of the presidential election be the person who wins the most votes nationally. (Pew)

• Jack Smith lays out Jan. 6 case against Trump. Will filing be public? (WP)

• Revealed: the US government-funded ‘private social network’ attacking pesticide critics (Guardian)

• Scenes From Florida as Hurricane Helene Roared Through (NYT)

• Historic and deadly Hurricane Helene slams Florida to the Carolinas (Axios)

• JD Vance harshly criticized Donald Trump’s record in private 2020 messages. (WP)

• An independent journalist was banned from X, formerly Twitter, after he published a dossier on Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) via his newsletter and promoted the link on the app. [HuffPost]

• Eric Adams pleads not guilty to federal charges in New York (The Hill)

• Tucker Carlson is on a nationwide tour, but he doesn’t seem to know why. (WP)

• Israel keeps bombing Lebanon, with Hezbollah and civilian deaths rising, as Netanyahu shifts tone on cease-fire (CBS)

• Netanyahu Defiant as World Leaders Press for Israeli-Hezbollah Truce (NYT)

• Russia rattles the nuclear sabre again, as Ukraine devastates its munitions (Al Jazeera)

• China's newest nuclear-powered attack submarine sank earlier this year, a senior US defense official said, a potential embarrassment for Beijing as it seeks to expand its military capabilities. (Reuters)

• If the Universe Is a Hologram, This Long-Forgotten Math Could Decode It (Quanta)

• ‘Deep sadness and frustration’: The end comes for the A’s in Oakland (WP)

• OpenAI as we knew it is dead (Vox)

• OpenAI execs were reportedly worried the company could collapse when Ilya Sutsveker left — and tried to woo him back (Business Insider)

• Sam Altman tells OpenAI staff there’s no plan for him to receive a ‘giant equity stake’ in company (CNBC)

• ChatGPT is changing the way we write. Here’s how – and why it’s a problem (The Conversation)

• Archangel Hangs Around After Delivering Message Hoping For Tip (The Onion)