Four days out, MeidasTouch’s chief Washington correspondent told Narativ Live to read the money and the plane, not the polls.
Scott MacFarlane came back from Michigan with a measure of this election that no poll prints. He told Zev Shalev on Friday to watch “where the surrogates and the money are going,” because that is “a much better read than polls ever will be.”
MacFarlane reads the plane first. Trump has flown to South Carolina twice in two weeks, to Kansas and Iowa, and on Monday, MacFarlane said, he lands in Louisiana, where Sen. Bill Cassidy finished third in May’s primary and nobody polls the seat. Democrats send their money the other way: their Senate Majority PAC put $1.2 million behind Scott Colom against Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi, and the Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund answered with seven figures. “If they’re putting money into Mississippi, they’re seeing something polls can’t show,” MacFarlane said.
The Democrats he talks to feel “optimism and nausea,” and trust the polls “about as much as they trust thin ice on a warm winter day.”
MacFarlane called the Republicans Trump is flying to save “endangered Republicans”; Shalev said they are becoming an endangered species. One, by MacFarlane’s count, has put daylight between herself and Trump: Rep. Ashley Hinson in Iowa, and even her criticism is “muted” and “mushy.”
Michigan, where he spent the week: tariffs are the issue, MacFarlane said, and in the Lansing district the Iran war is too. Rep. Tom Barrett, a Republican, voted twice this summer to pull U.S. forces out of Iran and told MacFarlane he “caught all kinds of hell” for it. Michigan’s 10th, 7th and 4th districts are, in his count, “the margin Democrats need to pull even.” Shalev’s read: the House most likely flips; the Senate is “still very much too hard to call.”
The Senate race there has, MacFarlane said, “naked Islamophobia being uncorked in” it; Republican Mike Rogers is betting on a divide between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Detroit’s voters, and MacFarlane is “not seeing that work.” Shalev said the Islamophobia is backfiring.
MacFarlane saved Alaska for last. Trump had Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Justice Department sue to stop the state certifying the result if Sen. Dan Sullivan loses; Alaska’s own election officials asked the federal judge to throw it out. Shalev called the suit a first. MacFarlane called it “ballot stacking crap” and said the administration “is quickly losing credibility with all of the courts.”
MacFarlane anchors the MeidasTouch Network’s election night on YouTube from the first poll closings in Indiana and Kentucky. His Substack, MacFarlane Reports, runs daily until then.