The political stereotype is that Republicans are always publicly confident that they will win, while Democrats are forever convinced that failure is just around the corner. Thats why some of the signs coming out of the Harris campaign in the last week are so interesting. Increasingly, Harris staff believe that they are heading into Election Night in a pretty good place. Meanwhile, Trumps staff is already conducting post-mortems. The polls show the race as essentially a toss-up, so you would think that both sides would be hedging their bets. However, even though the vote counts wont start coming in until tomorrow night, thousands of voters have already cast their ballots. Thats the reason why the Harris team seems to be feeling, in the phrase that staff has adopted, nauseously optimistic. Related Why do Democratic candidates get so defensive about trans issues? In response to attacks, Sherrod Brown and Colin Allred ran ads echoing GOP language instead of reframing the issue. Were confident were going to win, and its not because were running away with it, Harris campaign chair Jen OMalley Dillon said last week. Its because were confident were on path to win a very close election. Dive deeper every day Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues Subscribe to our Newsletter today While no one knows yet who these voters chose, we do know who they are, not by name but by party affiliation and gender. That information has led Democrats to think that the trends are running in their favor. Chief among them is the gender gap. In the battleground states among early voters, women represent about 55% of the vote, while men represent 45% of the vote. While its possible that women are flocking to Trump, that seems very unlikely. Trump won only 42% of women voters in 2020, and that was before the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll found Trump with just 36% support among women, compared to 53% for Harris. (The remaining percentage was undecided.)As a confirmation of just how drastic an impact that might have on the race, just look to the Selzer poll of Iowa voters. That poll, which is respected for calling Trumps closing momentum in 2016 when few others did, found Harris ahead (though within the margin of error) among likely voters 47% to 44%. Iowa is a state where Trump was ahead of Biden by 18 percentage points earlier this year and that no one has ever considered to be possible for Democrats to win. The big reason is women voters. In the poll, independent women voters and women over 65 are heavily tilting toward Harris. The results suggest that not only are women turning out for Harris but that undecided voters are also breaking toward Harris as well. The Trump campaign insists that things are fine, even as Trump himself attacked the polls yesterday as corrupt. Trumps aides say they are seeing more Republicans voting early this cycle than in 2020. But thats in large part because Trump explicitly condemned early voting last time out. This time, hes been begging his followers to vote early. The larger number of GOP voters may simply be people who would have voted anyway, not folks especially fired up to vote. Democrats are also seeing more young women and first-time voters among the early voters. What Democrats say they arent seeing is the bro vote, the younger men who usually sit out elections and whom Trump has been courting. Democrats have a number of other things going for them. For one thing, by every measure, Democrats have a far superior get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation. Trump outsourced his GOTV efforts, first to Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, and then, after Kirk failed to live up to his own hype, to Elon Musk. Musk has been throwing money at the effort, but there are plenty of signs that the whole project is in shambles, with missed goals and even allegations of fraud.Harris has also been rolling in money in the final stretch, letting her run ads ad infinitum in key states. She has also far outspent Trump on social media, reaching younger audiences that dont always vote. The final reason why Democrats are in a good mood is Trumps campaign. The disciplined campaign that Trump was running early this year evaporated, and now Trump is talking about a golfers privates, threatening to protect women whether the women like it or not, and swaying to music in a trance. On top of that, Trump has gone all in on the MAGA message, which led to disasters like last months rally at Madison Square Garden, which was all too reminiscent of a 1930s pro-Nazi rally and where Puerto Rico was called floating garbage.None of this is to say that the race isnt close. Harris team is reportedly expecting that the margin of victory in battleground states would be just tens of thousands of votes, not a blowout by any means. However, as Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obamas re-election campaign, has said, I would rather be Kamala Harris than I would Donald Trump. We will know all too soon just how well-placed the optimism was. Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.