Jen O’Malley Dillon just said it best
Back in 2020, I knew before sunrise on election night that Joe Biden had likely won Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. How? It was a simple matter of math. When you looked at how many votes had yet to be counted, and the leanings of the regions that those votes were coming from, it just added up. I later read that Biden’s 2020 campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon had figured the same thing out a few hours before I did. How did she know so quickly? She had access to the publicly available data plus the campaign’s and party’s internal data about voting demographics. Also she’s really, really smart at parsing this kind of stuff.
Jen O’Malley Dillon is now running Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign. So when she posted a video about the state of the election today, I naturally tuned in with great interest. She said that she loves what she’s seeing from the early vote, because while Republican early voting is up over 2020, most of the Republican early vote is coming from what she calls “high propensity” voters. In other words, these are the people who were definitely going to vote anyway, and just happen to be voting early instead of on election day.
In contrast, she said that she’s seeing huge early voting numbers from “low propensity” voters on the Democratic side. These are the kind of people who can’t always be counted on to vote, and yet they’re indeed voting. She went on to say that while this is a margin of error election, if we keep working the way we’ve been working to get out the vote, we will win. Remember, she’s data-driven. This isn’t “optimism” or cheerleading on her part. It’s evidence based analysis.
If Jen O’Malley Dillon’s take on the race sounds a bit familiar, it’s because it’s pretty much the same take I’ve been giving you for weeks. She’s not someone I’ve ever communicated with, so this is simply a matter of she and I each looking at the available evidence and data and coming to similar conclusions about this election. The stage is set such that if we keep working to get out the vote, we will win.
This is not a time for panic, it’s not a time for fretting, it’s not a time for staring at your screen in fear. Now is a time for us to go out and seal our victory. If you can each identify three or four like-minded people in your personal circle and make sure they actually go out and vote, that’s a few million votes for Kamala Harris right there, and that’s how we win. So let’s do it.
