Are individual campaign donations a better guide to the election than polls? I'm David Brancaccio,

Nato, a professional forecaster and what she's telling her clients about tomorrow's election.

It's a frequent voice on this program, economist Julia Cornato, founder and president of macro policy

perspectives. Morning, Julia. Good morning. So how are you thinking

about the election? I mean, your firm has been doing it in an organized way. Give me a sense.

Well, so we have to think through the scenarios. It's going to be a close election for sure,

but we do think that some of the information that we have in the public

sphere is a bit skewed. In particular, if voting behavior is changing, that is the people who are

likely to turn out and who they're likely to vote for is shifting relative to prior elections,

the polls aren't going to be that close, and we need to look for other metrics

that can help us gauge what might happen on Election Day.

All right.

So what are you going to use?

Well, one thing that we looked at that's concrete data, and you know, David, we love

data, is individual contributions to campaigns.

That correctly predicted a Democratic outperformance

in 2022 and a very even election in 2020. And right now it's favoring Democrats. There's a lot

of enthusiasm, a lot of individual contributions to Democratic campaigns right now.

From who? I mean, in terms of demographics, I assume younger people, for instance?

Well, these are independent donations. So this is not the big mega billionaire donations.

And yeah, I think it's a pretty broad base of demographics. I haven't dug into the demographics all that much,

but the amounts and the number of donations is really quite impressive.

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