The 12th Amendment provides that “[t]he person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be the majority of the whole number of Electors appointed.” Because the total number of electors that may be appointed (and usually are appointed) by the states is 538, a candidate with 270 or more electoral votes wins the election. But neither the Constitution nor the original ECA made clear what happens to the calculation if either a state fails to appoint some or all of its allotted electors, or Congress rejects electoral votes.

This legislation addresses this ambiguity by providing that in cases in which Congress rejects the appointment of electors as unlawful, the “whole number of electors appointed”—the denominator in the calculation—will be reduced. The provision makes it more difficult to manipulate the process by attempting to deprive a candidate of a majority in order to trigger a “contingent election” of the president by the House of Representatives or the vice president by the Senate (as provided for in the 12th Amendment). Because the ECRA does not explicitly address electoral votes that are rejected by Congress as not lawfully cast by appointed electors (i.e., not regularly given), the denominator presumably would not change in that circumstance.

Red Wave Pollsters Stepped Up Their Work This Week - The red wavers stepped up their activity this past week, releasing at least 20 polls across the battlegrounds. It’s a sign that they are worried about the public polling in both the Presidential and the Senate, and have dramatically escalated their efforts to push the polling averages to the right and make the election look redder than it is. As in 2022, these polls usually between 2 and 4 points more Republican than the independent polling so when there a lot of them they can move the averages rightward.

Here is what was released in the past week:

Emerson - National, AZ, NC, PA
Cygnal - IA
Insider Advantage - AZ, GA, NC, NV
McLaughlin - FL
Mitchell Comms - MI
OnMessage - PA
Patriot Polling - PA
Remington - MI, MT, NV, PA, WI
RMG - National, FL, MI, NC, TX
Texas Gun Rights - TX
Trafalgar - MI, PA, WI
Victory Insights - FL
While they released polls in many states this week the states that have received the most red wave polls few weeks are Montana, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Over the past 10 days, depending on how you characterize the pollsters, they released at least 5 and as many 7 polls in Pennsylvania alone. Their recent flood of polls in NC and PA tipped the Real Clear Politics polling average for each state to Trump, which then in turn got Trump to 281 in their corrupt Electoral College map. Yes, in Real Clear Politics Trump is now winning the election due to their gamesmanship.

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As I wrote in my last look at this rancid project, it is time for those who analyze polls to start acknowledging that there is now a third type of poll - the red wave, right-aligned narrative polling that only exist for a single purpose - to move the polling averages to the right. They are exploiting the “toss it in the averages and everything will work out philosophy” of these sites to once again launder these polls and game the averages - and thus our understanding of the election. Party leaders should expect them to keep these polls coming, and keep working the averages until it looks like Trump is winning in all polling averages. It is what they did in 2022, and it worked. They are doing it again this time, and once again it is working as the averages are moving and everyone is treating this movement like an organic rather than a deeply corrupt process.

In 2016, I experienced the desolation of my candidate for president losing after the most respected polling experts told me she had a 71.4 percent, 85 percent, 98.2 percent, and even 99 percent chance of winning. As a historian, I was studying how Ronald Reagan’s runaway landslide in 1980 was proceeded by every pollster but one supremely confident that the race was just about tied. I’ve just finished a fine book published in 2020 that confirms an intuition I’ve been chewing on since then. It turns out this is practically the historical norm. W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections demonstrates—for the first time, strangely enough, given the robust persuasiveness of its conclusions—that presidential polls are almost always wrong, consistently, in deeply patterned ways.

Many pollsters’ decisions about methodology are by necessity subjective, even arbitrary. Campbell lists a quick half-dozen: how they list a candidate’s job title; the order in which the choices are stated; the gender of the interviewer; whether it’s done by phone, internet, or in person; even the day of the week. The pollsters can likewise be arbitrary once the numbers come in. Lost in a Gallup notes a fascinating experiment carried out by Nate Cohn for The New York Times. He had four pollsters interpret the same raw data from a 2016 poll of Florida. Their choices in how to weight ranged from Clinton winning by four percentage points to Trump winning by one.

Cohn concluded, “Clearly, the reported margin of error due to sampling … doesn’t even come close to capturing total survey error … There really is a lot of flexibility for pollsters to make choices that generate a fundamentally different result.”