Much has been made about what’s at stake in the upcoming 2024 election, and rightfully so. The last three and a half years have seen wars emerge on almost every continent, a dramatically weakened dollar with persistently high inflation and declining standard of living, the deterioration of military readiness, a wide-open southern border, the politicization of our legal system, an unprecedented all-out assault on the unborn and those standing up for life, attacks on religious freedom, a disconcerting rise in political violence, and more. As a result, just 28% of Americans say the country is on the right track, and they are primed to make their voice heard.

Presidential Election

The presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump has generated most of the attention and campaign spending and will be the main driver of turnout among voters. Every day, there are several new national and battleground polls released to the public, and in general they show a race within the margin of error (give or take 2-4 points depending on the specific poll) at the national level. Harris currently enjoys a two-point edge in the head-to-head polling average at RealClearPolitics. However, this lead is not enough to allow the vice president to rest on her laurels. During this time in 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden led then-President Trump by 10 points, and Hillary Clinton led Trump by 5.8 points. The former would go on to win (thanks in large part to relaxed mail-in voting rules) by less than 85,000 votes and the latter would go on to lose by less than 45,000 votes. Harris is polling significantly behind the other Democratic candidates to have faced off against Donald Trump at this point in the election.

The Democratic candidate has traditionally won the national popular vote, but because of the wisdom of our Founding Fathers, the Electoral College is determinative. If you live in a state like Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin, you are no doubt tired of the ads and text messages. Both campaigns know your vote will be important for their candidate to prevail in your state, which could likely determine the outcome of the election. The two-point lead Harris enjoys in the national popular vote translates, at this moment, to an Electoral College loss. At the time this was written, the RealClearPolitics average for the battleground states would give Trump a win in the electoral college 296-242, with the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in the Republican’s column. Among the battleground states Harris is currently projected to carry, Wisconsin and Nevada, she is trailing Biden’s 2020 performance in the polling by five points in each state — again, not where the Harris campaign wants to be.

Control of the U.S. Senate

Sixty-one percent of Americans agree the country is on the wrong track, and while this portends trouble ahead for the Harris campaign in persuading voters to continue the Biden-Harris policies in a Kamala Harris administration, it does translate to some anti-incumbent sentiment among voters, which plays to the benefit of Senate Republicans hoping to take the majority in the upper chamber in Congress. With a slim 51-49 seat majority, the Senate Democrats stand severely disadvantaged this election. Of the 34 Senate seats up for a vote this cycle, 23 are held by Democrats, many of which are in states that are also highly competitive at the presidential level. Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin all have Senate Democrats running for reelection in tough matchups — in particular, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are incredibly tight at the moment with incumbents Sen. Bob Casey, Jr., (D-Pa.) and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) leading their Republican challengers by a mere three points.

In other states, like West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio, Democratic candidates for Senate are running at a disadvantage because their states are expected to vote for Trump by more than 10 points, endangering Democratic incumbents Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mt.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Tester, for example, is trailing his Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy, by seven points. Brown, on the other hand, is doing better in the public polling, leading Republican Bernie Moreno by just two points. West Virginia will not be competitive, as former Governor Jim Justice is favored to win this race comfortably.

In Michigan, incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow (D) announced she would not run for reelection, which has pitted Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin against former Republican Representative Mike Rogers, and in Arizona, Democrat-turned-Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced she would also not run for reelection, creating a match-up between Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake. The Michigan race is a toss-up, with Slotkin leading in the public polling average by less than two points. In Arizona, Gallego leads by just under seven points. Both states feature prominently in the Electoral College calculus of the Harris and Trump campaigns, so it’s possible the coattails of whichever presidential candidate wins the state will play an outsized role in who wins these races; this is true more so for Michigan than Arizona, because Lake is trailing outside the margin of error.

Republican Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) are also running this year and are facing well-financed challengers, but both are the favorites in their respective races. If the GOP doesn’t lose in either Texas or Florida and wins the Senate races they are expected to win in West Virginia and Montana they will take overcontrol of the Senate with 51 seats. Bernie Moreno in Ohio is likely to benefit from Trump’s coattails in that state, which would bring the GOP to 52 seats. With few exceptions, ticket-splitting is all but gone these days. So, if Trump were to carry Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin, and carry Republican Senate candidates over the finish line with him the GOP would have 57 seats in the Senate. Some GOP candidates in a few of these states are polling far enough behind Trump that were he to win some of these states his coattails might not be enough to deliver for them, however.

Control of the U.S. House of Representatives

After redistricting in 2020, the number of competitive races in the House of Representatives dipped. Gone are the days of 40-60 seat swings like we saw in the Tea Party era. This year, Cook Political Report has identified just 26 toss-up races in the U.S. House of Representatives. Of these 26, Republicans are defending 14, and Democrats are defending 12. For the current razor-thin, three-seat Republican majority , winning every one of these toss-up races is a must. With just 23% of voters approving of the job Congress is doing, the GOP is swimming against the tide to keep their majority.

Since there are 435 members in the U.S. House of Representatives, pollsters ask respondents to state whether they prefer a “generic Republican” or “generic Democrat” to represent them in Congress to get a sense of how the race for the majority House will play out. Now, the RealClearPolitics generic congressional vote average shows Democrats leading by just one point. In 2022, when the GOP won back control of the House of Representatives after the Democrats held the House since the 2018 midterm elections, the GOP had a three-point lead in the generic congressional polling at this time in the 2022 midterm elections. This victory for the GOP in wresting the speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi was earned by winning just a four-seat majority by a mere 4,500 votes. It doesn’t get much closer than that. I think we’re likely to see a similarly paper-thin result decide which party controls the House this November.

Unlike the Senate, where a presidential candidate’s coattails can be decisive, most of the toss-up races in the House are in states that are not particularly competitive at the statewide or presidential level. Each individual candidate will have to win or lose in their own foxhole. Alaska, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington account for 16 of the 24 most competitive House races and will not see a competitive result at the presidential or Senate level, or do not have a competitive Senate race. GOP incumbents in these states will have to win in an environment of supercharged Democrat turnout, and vice versa for Democrat incumbents in toss-up races in Republican states. If you’re the GOP, of particular concern are GOP incumbents in California and New York. There are eight GOP incumbents between these two states alone, and both states are likely to go for Kamala Harris by as much as 20 points, or more. Combine anti-incumbent sentiment with deep blue states and you have a strong headwind for GOP incumbents in these states.

Conclusion

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans, have updated their voter registration or registered to vote for the first time this year. All this data is important and tells us some early signs of how the election will go. Florida, for example, once the preeminent swing state, is now firmly in the grip of the GOP, as Florida Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than a million voters. Pennsylvania, a state that as recently as 2008 had 1.2 million more Democrats than Republicans and was once firmly within the Democrats’ Rust Belt “blue wall” has replaced Florida as the preeminent swing state, and Democrats have the lowest voter registration edge they have ever held in the Keystone State: 343,000 voters. Republicans have been winning the voter registration battle elsewhere as well.

Similarly, early vote data shows a dramatic decline in the number of mail-in ballots requested compared to 2020. Using Pennsylvania again as an example, the 2020 election saw a total of 2.7 million mail-in ballots requested, or 39% of the total vote came from mail. So far this cycle, just 1.4 million mail-in ballots have been requested (mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania can be requested until October 29th, so this number will go up. But it will likely not be anywhere close to the 2.7 million number from 2020). Mail-in voting is likely to play a smaller role in the 2024 election than it did in the 2020 election when so many were still dealing with COVID-19.

Then there’s the campaign spending. Kamala Harris’s campaign has raised $678 million to Donald Trump’s $313 million. The Democratic National Committee similarly enjoys a fundraising advantage over its Republican counterparts, raking in $385 million to the Republican National Committee’s $331 million. The Republicans enjoy a slight campaign finance edge in the Senate contests, outraising their Democrat counterparts $200 million to $173 million. In the House, the National Republican Congressional Committee raised $183 million to the Democrats’ $250 million. This all amounts to billions of dollars flooding the airways and cell phone towers with campaign messaging.

All of this to say, the respective candidates and political parties have their own advantages and disadvantages. It’s incredibly difficult to say which advantages will determine outcomes, whether it’s a campaign cash advantage or public polling, voter registration or mail-in ballot requests, we will not know for sure until election night. Right now, the presidential race looks like it’s trending toward Donald Trump, the Senate is securely within reach of the Republicans, and the speaker’s gavel is at risk of being handed back over to the Democrats. If that’s the case, then we’ll look back and say 2024 was clearly an anti-incumbent election, and the country is asking for change. If Harris wins, the Democrats retain control of the Senate, and win back the House, then we can say campaign funding is the decisive factor in elections. If Trump wins, the GOP wins the Senate, and retains control of the House, we can say it was a repudiation of the Biden-era with its excessive social engineering, abortion extremism, runaway spending, foreign policy blunders, and all.

As followers of Christ, we know God is sovereign. This is not an excuse for inaction, but an acknowledgement that no election outcome surprises Him. The best day of the republic still falls short of the glory of the New Heaven and New Earth to come. We should pray for righteous leaders to prevail in November and pray that our nation would once again humble itself before the Lord acknowledging how far we have fallen from His righteous standard. The 2024 elections are incredibly important because of the stark differences in worldview represented by the major parties, but their importance pales in comparison to the work needed to repair our nation’s spiritual walls.