Election Day is still over two weeks away, so this might seem a little premature, but I thought I'd write today about the key races I will be watching as the night of November 5th unfolds. Because while the main event will be the presidential election, as we saw last time around these things can drag on for not just hours but days, and in the meantime there are plenty of other races worth paying attention to.

Since the Earth spins the way it does, the night of the election will be a staggered event, starting on the East Coast and moving slowly westward. How fast all the races will be called will depend on a number of variables -- when the polls close in each state, how fast they count votes, and how close the races are, just to name the biggest ones.

So what follows is a rough timeline of the races I will be watching, as it all unfolds on the evening of Election Day.

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Imagine, if you will, if President Joe Biden -- before he dropped his re-election bid -- had held what was billed as a televised town hall in a battleground state. Imagine further that after answering only five questions, Biden's brain seemed to freeze and he just stood there on stage while music played for the remaining 39 minutes of the scheduled event -- as Biden occasionally (and lethargically) moved his hands to the music a bit, but also occasionally just stood there with his eyes closed gripping the back of a chair. Now imagine what the media reaction would have been.

If you guessed an avalanche of "Biden's Too Old!" and "Biden Loses It At Town Hall!" and "Is It Time To Invoke The 25th Amendment?" stories would have flooded the media zone for at least a full week, you would be correct. That is exactly what would have happened.

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Three weeks out from Election Day, the presidential race seems to be a complete tossup. There was some movement in the past week's polling, but it was so tiny and incremental it all should really be chalked up as nothing more than statistical noise. The battleground races are so close that they're all teetering ever so slightly between the two candidates, but must really be seen as too close to call, or tied.

To put it another way: this is as close as things can get, folks. There's not a lot you can say in any sort of definitive way other than "the race looks tied." Which is going to make for a shorter-than-average Electoral Math column today.

The big winner of the week (if you can call it that) would have to be the "Tied" column. States that were barely leaning one way or another shifted just enough for the polling to be a dead heat, in multiple states. Some of them moved back to leaning one way or another, but all of these states are still incredibly close and could go either way.

Having said that, let's take a look at what the charts tell us (which, admittedly, can be summed up as "not much").

The first chart shows the state-by-state polling added up for both candidates. As always, data is provided by the Electoral-Vote.com site, which tracks current polling in every state. Each state's Electoral College votes are added into the totals for both candidates, to see who has enough states to win.

Donald Trump is represented in red, from the top of the chart downwards. Kamala Harris is in blue, from the bottom up. Whichever color crosses the center 50-percent line should (if all the polling is perfectly accurate) emerge as the winner. But as mentioned, the white areas show states that are Tied, and this week that's where the action was.

[Click on any of theses graphs to see larger-scale versions.]

There was a lot of movement both into and out of the Tied column, as you can see. Tied moved from zero to 45 Electoral Votes (EV) before falling back to 10 EV at the end of the week.

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The Republican Party is now allergic to the truth. This is what comes from the entire party following, with slavish devotion, a man who lies as easily as he breathes. When Donald Trump was president, the Washington Post counted up over 30,000 lies he told -- an average of 21 per day. Since then, Trump has successfully purged the party of pretty much everyone who has ever disagreed with him on any of them. All that are left are those that are willing to buy into the mindset that reality is what Donald Trump says it is, period. Democrats have been wishing for a while that the Republicans would all wake up one day and return to sanity, but now it's more of a wish that they return to some sort of objective reality -- rather than the Trumpian fantasyland they all now inhabit.

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We are entering the homestretch of the presidential election, and who is going to win is anybody's guess. Polling is no real help since it shows many battleground states either perfectly tied or within a point or two. Both candidates are out there campaigning hard, but neither has a clear edge over the other one. It's going to go right down to the wire, that's about the only thing which seems certain at this point.

But that's the sort of thing you've been getting sick of reading, right? Horserace reporting whose only focus is predicting the outcome of the race is rampant at the moment, which seems a little odd after the mainstream media had such a hissy fit over the supposed lack of policy debates between the candidates. Currently, both candidates are announcing new policies (mostly on taxes) almost daily, promising voters things which may or may not ever become reality. Just today Donald Trump promised he'd wave a magic wand and allow hurricane victims to completely write off the purchase of electrical generators, after earlier promising to make interest on car loans deductible as well. Earlier in the week, Kamala Harris promised to make Medicare cover at-home care for seniors, and her campaign put out a fact sheet saying she'd also support Medicare covering vision and hearing benefits -- something Bernie Sanders has been championing for a while.

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America is about to experience a second large hurricane in a short period of time. Florida is battening down in preparation. Hurricane Milton comes on the heels of Hurricane Helene, which devastated communities all across the South. Mountain towns in Georgia and North Carolina were hit particularly hard. But what is absolutely disgraceful in all of this is the storm of lies that has erupted over the recovery and aid efforts.

These lies are not being told by sketchy online characters or your all-too-credulous uncle. They are instead coming from the Republican Party's candidate for president, as well as far too many other Republican politicians. They don't care that hundreds of people have died. They don't care that tens of thousands are in dire straights. They don't care that their lies are making things worse for the survivors of the storm. All they care about is sowing fear and mistrust, in a cynical effort to score some cheap political points.

This is beyond disgraceful, it is downright dangerous. Donald Trump spouting conspiracy theories and outright lies is hampering the ability of FEMA and other disaster responders to do their jobs. Trump and his ilk are exploiting people's distrust of government to make them even more fearful of people who are genuinely just trying to help others.

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Looking at the presidential polling for the past two weeks, I am reminded of a famous line from Western movies (that has now become a total cliché): "It's quiet out there... too quiet."

Normally, by now I would have started writing one of these columns every week, but I decided not to do so last week because... well... nothing much was really happening in the polls. This week is largely the same, but I'm going to start posting these weekly anyway since we're only four weeks away from Election Day.

Things have barely budged in the past two weeks. In these charts, the lines are almost completely flat. There have been a few (very few) minor wiggles, but for the most part the important trendlines haven't budged in either direction. If the polls turn out to be right, this could wind up being yet another extremely close presidential election, hinging on a few tens of thousands of votes in a few key states.

That's if the polling is correct, of course. Which it may not be. In the past two presidential elections, the pollsters have underestimated Donald Trump's support. What were supposed to be blowout elections for both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden turned out instead to be nail-biters.

If the same thing happens this year, what is supposed to be a nail-biter could turn out to be an easy win for Trump. The margins are so close that if the polling is off by even two or three points in the crucial battleground states in his favor, then Trump could emerge victorious.

But the pollsters are keenly aware of what happened in the past two elections, and they've been diligently working to improve their forecasting models. This was made more difficult by the fact that the 2020 election was held in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic, so nobody knows what effect that truly had on voter turnout -- but it's likely it was not insignificant. So none of the pollsters really know if their new-and-improved methodologies really reflect the reality on the ground or not.

In any case, let's look at the state-by-state polling, with data (as always) provided by the fantastic Electoral-Vote.com site. The first of our charts shows the distribution of Electoral College votes based on the current state-level polling. Donald Trump's share of the Electoral Votes (EV) is in red and runs from the top of the graph downwards. Kamala Harris's share of EV is in blue and runs from the bottom up. States that are perfectly tied are shown in white. Whichever color crosses the 50-percent line in the middle will win the election (if all the polling is perfectly correct, of course).

[Click on any of theses graphs to see larger-scale versions.]

This is, you will note, rather static. Nothing much changed.

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The Supreme Court began its new year today. This could wind up being the most consequential term for the high court since they decided Bush v. Gore. Because unless Donald Trump scores a clear win in November -- winning so many of the battleground states that challenging the result would be pointless -- we are likely to see the election results wind up before the Supreme Court in one way or another. Which will give them the power, once again, of determining who will be president for the next four years.

Right now this is all hypothetical, of course. But it could get very real very fast. The last time around, Trump filed over 60 court cases challenging the election results. The effort was led by a clown car full of lawyers, led by the likes of Rudy Giuliani (who has since been disbarred). This time could be different, though -- Trump may actually convince some lawyers with a wee bit more talent and a whole lot less craziness to lead his legal team.

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There were two major events in the presidential race this week, but we are left wondering if either one of them is going to make much of a difference one way or the other. Perhaps we're getting a bit jaded by it all....

The first was the one-and-only vice-presidential debate, held on CBS this Tuesday. Republican JD Vance faced off with Democrat Tim Walz, and it was watched by 43 million people as it aired. The second was the public release of a document prosecutor Jack Smith had previously filed with the court in Donald Trump's January 6th case. It laid out Smith's basic case, in great detail (165 pages' worth).

In a normal campaign season, either one of these would have been impactful, perhaps shifting the polling in significant ways. But in our hunkered-down tribalistic politics, the needle barely quivered. Maybe we're all getting a bit jaded?

There were two other rather large events that could affect politics this week: the massive damage Hurricane Helene did -- especially in the Appalachian Mountain region -- and an East Coast dockworkers' strike. The first shouldn't really have been political, and the second was over almost before anyone was aware it was happening.

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The makeup of next year's incoming Senate is anybody's guess, at this point. Republicans could wind up winning control, Democrats could wind up maintaining their control, and it all might come down to who wins the White House (since the vice president would break a 50-50 tie for control). From the way things look, there are a handful of states which will determine who winds up with a majority.

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