Join Francis Fukuyama and me on election night!

Plus, five surprising electoral maps you may see on your TV screen on Tuesday.

Need good company to get you through election night?

This Tuesday, Francis Fukuyama, the Persuasion team, and I will be hanging out with subscribers on a Substack chat for camaraderie, analysis, and (hopefully) a bit of levity. Please join us!

From 6:30pm Eastern you’ll find the thread in the chat bar of your web browser; if you’re using a mobile you’ll need to download the Substack app. I’ll also email you a link once things get going. Hope to see you there!

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Everybody has been asking me in the past weeks who is going to win, and I have absolutely no predictions. As best I can tell, it’s a genuine toss-up, and anyone who pretends that they have a sure answer is probably a charlatan.

But though it’s impossible to know the outcome, it is possible to think through the kinds of scenarios that are likely to materialize. So, for the past days, I’ve been playing around with some electoral maps—and decided this morning to share my thoughts on the kind of electoral landscapes we might see, both if there isn’t really a big surprise, and if the polls turn out to be systematically wrong in some direction.

1. The No-Surprise Map (Or: It All Comes Down to Pennsylvania)

This is the map we’re likely to see if the polls prove to be broadly accurate. On this map, Donald Trump wins the southern states in which he has been lightly favored to win throughout the electoral cycle. Kamala Harris holds onto the Blue Wall states in the midwest and the Sun Belt states in the southwest in which she has lightly been favored. While this gives Democrats a decent head start in the electoral college, it all comes down to Pennsylvania. So we spend the night of the election—and possibly the days or even weeks after it—staring at vote counts in Erie County, Alleghany County, and so on.

But: While something resembling this map may be the most likely single outcome, I actually think that it’s at least as likely that the final map will in some significant way be surprising. So here’s a few more unexpected maps we may get, in rough order of increasing funkiness.

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2. The Racial Realignment Map (Or: Kamala’s White Strategy)

This is the kind of map we’re likely to see if polls indicating that the American electorate is depolarizing by race prove to be accurate. In that world, Donald Trump outperforms in racially diverse states with many Latino voters, such as Nevada and Arizona, and holds on in racially diverse states with many African-American voters, like Georgia. But Kamala Harris ekes out a victory by holding on in the predominantly white states in the Northwest, and winning a decisive vote in the electoral college in Nebraska’s second district. Call it her “white strategy.” (Of course, a systematic error underestimating Trump’s strength among Latinos could also result in a winning map for him; on this scenario, he might, for example, unexpectedly add New Mexico to his column.)

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