The Truth with Lisa Boothe: Election Night Chaos? Jessica Anderson Warns of Recounts and Senate Surprises

Lisa Boothe (0:04)

Welcome to The Truth with Lisa Boothe, where we get to the heart of the issues that matter to you. Today, we're talking about the midterms. We are already seeing record-breaking early voting happening in parts of the country ahead of Tuesday.

So what does it all mean? Is that a good sign for Republicans? Is it a bad sign for Republicans? We're also seeing some mixed messages that voters are sending, at least when you look at the polls. Where typically red states like Kansas or Iowa or Texas are very close, but then you have Republicans doing well in some of the Senate races in states like Michigan or Minnesota.

So what does that mean? What can we take away from all of this? We're gonna try to read the tea leaves to the best of our ability with Jessica Anderson. She is the president of the Sentinel Action Fund. They are a get out the vote operation. They operate year around. She is looking at real time data on a daily basis. A lot of these critical states that will determine the balance of power in Washington, DC. They're also trying to model and figure out what it means for Republicans. So she is the person to talk to right now as we try to get a sense of what some of these early numbers mean for election night and how we are potentially gonna feel when we all wake up on Wednesday, November 4th. So stay tuned for this important conversation as we dig into the numbers and try to decipher what it means for you, the voter at home. Stay tuned for Jessica Anderson with the Sentinel Action Fund.

Well, Jessica, it's great to have you back on the show. Well, I think it's great to have you back on this show. We'll find out what you're saying to the numbers and then, and then we'll reconsider maybe.

Jessica Anderson (1:53)

Hopefully, I get invited back again.

Lisa Boothe (1:54)

Oh, you're very good at breaking this stuff down and the numbers don't lie, which can be good and can be bad sometimes. All right. Starting big picture, we all wake up on Wednesday, November 4th.

How are we feeling that morning?

Jessica Anderson (2:17)

I wish I had a fast forward button so we could get to Wednesday morning, because I do think for all of us paying close attention to these Senate races, they're brutal. I think there's a couple of things that I'm at a very high level reminding myself of today. One is that the traditional Republican voter breaks late. As much as we have put a premium and tried really hard, including my organization, Sentinel Action Fund, to get as many voters to vote early and vote absentee, the habitual long-term Republican voter loves to vote on election day. It feels like a holiday.

You take your kids, you plan your day around it, and traditional midterm voters and presidential, but especially midterm, locked in, committed Republican voters vote on election day. That puts a cloud over the early vote returns as we start looking at them day by day. Then you have to dig a little bit deeper and say, okay, where are the trend lines? The things I'm looking at now that we are into the early vote period in Ohio, Michigan, Maine, Iowa, Alaska, all those states early vote has begun. Texas, of course, we want to look at these trend lines over, are we having enough GOP turnout or expected turnout that Republicans won't get slaughtered on election day? Are we chipping into the Democratic traditional early vote lead? Enough. That's the question that we're sorting through.

Second to that is if there's not enough Republican momentum in the early vote to stave off a Democratic early vote landslide, are you backfilling it with independence? And that's where it gets really interesting because every state actually has a different answer for that.

And that's what's made this midterm, I think, a little bit more muddy because it's not a clear-cut wave. And so when we wake up on Wednesday, I think we're going to be looking at a lot of states that are breaking differently than they might traditionally and certainly they may break differently than they broke in 2024 And I think that that would be good for Republicans like in the case of Michigan.

But the Michigan Senate race lost in 2024, massive potential to win now in 2026 And then the inverse of a red state like a Kansas that could actually flip, which is crazy to think about winning a Michigan but losing a Kansas. And I just use those as examples of like, they couldn't be more different states in terms of how the voting population looks. So those are kind of my overall like goalposts that are governing how we look at this data. And then the last kind of big thing that you wake up in the morning and you do affirmations in the mirror. The last thing I'm doing in the mornings is reminding myself that the election isn't today. We have five more days of early voting in many of these states. Maine is the only state where early voting actually ends today. But most of these states are voting through the weekend. Michigan's voting through Monday. And so there's a lot of time left for voters to get out, make their voices heard. The president is barnstorming the country, getting his people out. So the election is not over. All of these big Senate battleground races are still winnable by Republicans. And I think that is really important. And that speaks to how tight these races actually are from a numbers standpoint.