How Elon Musk Won The US Election
America PAC, Google Trends and the issues
So why did Harris lose/how did Trump win the US election? It was all in the data, folks:
Harris didn't campaign heavily enough on jobs and the economy
She was too close to Biden, whose government ranked poorly with voters
Harris’ team also got the ground-game wrong, including overcommitting in North Carolina
What's extraordinary is that Trump effectively outsourced his canvassing to America PAC and Elon Musk, whilst having an extremely low social media campaign spend compared to Harris. Here’s what Bellingcat (link) said:
By summing up the average spending for all ads by each presidential candidate’s campaigns, we found that Harris’ campaign has spent about US$113 million – more than a small country’s GDP – advertising on Facebook and Instagram between July 21 and Oct. 30, while Trump’s campaign spent about US$17 million in total.
America PAC’s impact
It was reported that America PAC-sponsored canvassers knocked on at least 10 million doors and Musk urged Trump to encourage early voting. It paid off, big time. And it looks like Musk is going to be a lot more involved in US and global politics for the next decade.
Here’s what The New York Times wrote (link) about America PAC leading into the vote:
This election, the Trump campaign has seized on new guidance from the Federal Election Commission that allows it to coordinate canvassing operations with super PACs…
…The PAC, primarily though four different companies, is paying for what donors have been told is an operation of more than 2,500 canvassers, largely targeting rural voters in battleground states.
Many wear a uniform of white polo shirts embroidered with an American flag as they try to hit about 150 doors a day. Armies of paid door knockers have been deployed before, but seldom on such a short timeline with such a large budget. Mr. Musk himself has poured nearly $120 million into America PAC and recruited other donors.
The super PAC has recently increased resources in North Carolina and Wisconsin, said two people with knowledge of the operations, with about 750,000 knocks so far in Wisconsin. Knocks are just under 1 million in Nevada.
Google Trends
'Unemployment' was a top trending topic on Google in Pennsylvania, whilst 'wages' scored highly in Georgia. It's the same for North Carolina as well, where the issue oscillated with 'health care' for the top spot throughout the campaign.
On the issues, the economy, the state of the government and immigration were the big three across America leading into the final months of the election. But immigration cooled, while Harris was able to move abortion massively up the rankings of concerns. It just wasn't enough.
How the markets are reacting
US Dollar
Bitcoin
TMTG Media (pre-market open)
Tesla
Here’s what I wrote yesterday.
So can Google Trends predict the election? No, but it can certainly help gauge the mood of US voters.
One of the big takeaways on the eve of the final vote is that crime and wages, two big topics for Trump, have cooled over the past few days. Harris’ campaign and celebrity endorsements have put abortion near the top of the agenda (more on gender splits below).
But if you zoom in and look at some of the battleground states heading into the election, the issues are favourable for Trump. Wages and crime dominate in Arizona and Michigan, while health care and crime are top in Georgia and crime and unemployment rank highest in Pennsylvania.
In North Carolina, its crime, health care and wages. The five most searched issues of this election according to Google Trends (link) are:
Health care
Wages
Abortion
Crime
Immigration
Top concerns
Abortion wasn’t even on the polling radar heading in the US election, with Gallup ranking (link) the below issues as the most important for American voters in April:
Economy (36%)
Immigration (27%)
The government/poor leadership (18%)
Poverty/hunger (4%)
Abortion (3%)
A more recent poll from Gallup published on 1 November (link) delivered the below results:
Economy (21%)
Immigration (13%)
Abortion (10%)
Preservation of democracy (10%)
Opinion polls and forecasts
Remember, opinion polls are snapshots of past sentiments, not predictions. RealClearPolitics’ (link) mass aggregator now has Harris and Trump tied in the national poll, with Trump ahead by just 0.9 points in the top battleground states.
Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral college votes, is basically a toss-up. Trump is ahead by 0.3 points, a lead which is well within a typical margin of error for a poll. It should be noted that Harris’ vote has strengthened heading into 5 November.
Nate Silver is also calling the election a toss-up (link), with Trump holding small leads in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, with Harris ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin.
But Professor Allan Lichtman and his ‘Thirteen Keys to the Presidency’ method has Harris heading into the White House (link).
Elsewhere, The Hill/Decision Desk is giving Trump a 53% chance of victory (link).
Gender divide
If any White House contest has been the ‘girls versus boys election’, it’s been this one. Some facts below on why female voters are so important via the Brookings Institute (link):
In the last presidential election, women accounted for 54.7% of the electorate and men accounted for 44%. And of course, there are simply more adult women than men in the population, especially among the elderly.
In the seven swing states we looked at for this analysis, women composed a larger share of the electorate in 2020 than men, with one exception, Wisconsin, where, according to exit polls, 50% were men and 50% were women.
Last-ditch rallies
These campaign events give us a good indication of what the campaigns are thinking in the final days of the election. Harris’ team is bombarding Pennsylvania, while Trump is showing up at PA, North Carolina and Michigan, according to data pulled by Axios (link).
These movements, alongside Trump’s warnings of legal action in Pennsylvania (link), indicate that his team could be very worried about the state (Biden took the state by 50% to 48.8% in 2020). More below on Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
The Latino vote and Pennsylvania
There are more than 580,000 Latino voters in PA (link), some of which are likely to be angered by a now infamous joke at a recent Trump rally in New York, where comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called the island “garbage”.
The Trump campaign tried to distance itself from the comments, but it has fired up the Democrats. The end result is that both the Harris and Trump campaigns have headed to Reading, PA, which has a large Latin-American population.
Here’s what NPR found on the ground (link):
Sitting in El Mofongo Restaurant, Joseph Nuñez hunches over a table, his chin resting in his hands, reflecting on the joke from a comedian a week earlier that had undermined months of his work trying to persuade Latino voters to support former President Donald Trump.
“The timing of that joke… could not have been worse,” said Nuñez, who represents Reading on the Berks County Republican Committee.
More than 70% of people in Reading are Latino, most of them Puerto Rican.
“We are fighting tooth and nail — I mean literally tooth and nail — every day. We're on the ground, we're on the streets,” said Nuñez.”
Hurricane Helene
Though Trump took North Carolina in 2020, it was another knife edge battle with Biden. The Republican won 49.9% of the vote against Biden’s 48.8%.
Early voting is looking positive for Trump, but local reporter Bryan Anderson has spotted a curious trend – the counties hit hardest by September’s Hurricane Helene aren’t turning out for the GOP (link).
Trump’s final rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, looked thinned out. But he has been campaigning in the state endlessly.
Early voting
One third of American voters have already cast their ballot in the Presidential race thanks to early voting systems. Amid the noise Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, told MSNBC that those numbers were a “little scary” for Harris:
“Republicans didn’t do what they did last time. Last time, Trump said, ‘Don’t early vote.’ And so they didn’t. Republicans do have an advantage in early vote numbers. When the early vote come in, it’s going to look a little bit different than 2020, and that’s scary.
“But when you kind of dig into the numbers, the numbers that I care the most about are two blocs: women voters and young voters, and those two voting blocs are coming up big.
“Women voters make up 55 percent of the early voters, and in the past 10 days, young voters in these battleground states are coming out — in what looks to be, for early vote, historic numbers — and that makes the Harris campaign very, very happy.”
What to watch and Florida 2000
Georgia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina are currently the most interesting states and could well decide the White House. But given that the polls are so tight, Michigan and Wisconsin may come into play for the Presidency.
A fuller picture of the US election result is likely to emerge on Saturday. However, a Florida 2000 situation is likely if the race is tight, with lawyers contesting counts.
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