Tuesday, September 10.
Since President Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed the Vice-President, pundits and worriers have constantly pointed to “critical” make-or-break moments for the VP. Would the pro-Palestinian demonstrators turn the convention into a version of 1968? Would her first major press interview show she’s not ready for prime time? Would her post-convention bounce get washed down the drain? And most importantly, would former President Trump run roughshod over her in the debate?
Well, in short, no, no, no and no! We’ve already talked about the convention (could one possibly imagine a better week for Democrats?), and in her interview with Dana Bash she looked composed, at ease, entirely Presidential. But before we talk about the debate this evening, I want to talk a bit about the polls.
The New York Times / Siena from Saturday showed Harris trailing Trump by a point or two nationally. The Pew poll on Sunday showed them tied nationally (both down from the Emerson and Morning Consult polls earlier last week showing Harris ahead nationally by 2 – 4 points). Morning Consult shows Harris leading by 3 points in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, tied in North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada. Yet Quinnipiac shows Harris leading in North Carolina but trailing in Georgia.
So what’s going on? Can’t we get a clear answer?
Well, the truth is, probably not. All these polls could be “correct” – that is, this particular set of respondents falls within the 3 – 4% point margin of error, within which you expect to see about 2/3 of the poll results randomly scattered. And, statistically, you would also expect to see a number of poll results outside that margin of error.
So how do you make sense of all this flood of data, which will only get more intense as the election approaches.
First off, I would argue that public opinion typically moves slowly. You would not expect to see a 5% change in the margins in two or three days, absent some relatively remarkable event (like President Biden’s meltdown in his debate). Second, I would look less at the specific results and more at the trend in the results from that individual pollster. The tricky thing about polling is that each pollster “adjusts” or “weights” their results so that the population they poll mirrors the turnout they expect (which is really just a guess – maybe an informed guess, but bottom line, just a guess). Each pollster has their own opinion about how many “hidden” Trump voters there are, how many “low propensity” Democrats might turn out, how many newly registered young women might vote for the first time.
All of those guesses go into their model of what the 2024 electorate will look like, which then leads them to assign different weights to each class of voters they randomly reach. Lastly, some polls show results from all registered voters, but most show results just from “Likely Voters.” Well, who exactly are Likely Voters? How do you make that determination? Each pollster will have their own set of criteria: did they vote in 2020, or 2022; does the voter “self-assess” themselves as a Likely Voter; are there other voters in the household; have they ever made a political donation, or gone to a rally, or to a governmental meeting, or even to a Rotary Club or PTA meeting?
Pollsters still feel stung from underestimating the number of Trump voters in 2016, and few expected the surge of voters, on both sides, in 2020. All are trying not to make those same mistakes again, but undoubtedly finding new ways to make mistakes.
To my mind, I think the reproductive rights issues, and particularly the ballot measures in key states like Arizona, Nevada and Florida, make this “Likely Voter” screen particularly difficult, and one that will tilt in our favor this time. The Harris campaign has just gone up with three different ads on reproductive rights (in the battleground states, so you probably won’t see any of them); you can expect that will be a key focus of the campaign going forward. There have been multiple reports already of surges in voter registration, especially among younger women. These people, who are just now showing up on the voter rolls, are probably not in the universe that pollsters using (because their data is so new that many are not on the lists the pollsters have). My sense is that anyone, especially any young woman, who has registered to vote in the last few months is a rock-solid Likely Voter. So I think there will be systemic undercounting of Likely Voters on our side. That, alongside a nationwide shift among suburban Republican women, will power a sweeping Harris-Walz victory.
Interestingly, all these same pollsters who are showing a razor-tight Presidential race are nearly unanimous that Democratic Senate candidates in these various states are running well ahead of their opponents, with margins significantly outside the polls’ margins of error. Even in the “Blue Wall” states, the Democratic Senate candidates are consistently 6 – 8% points ahead.
One other point of interest, before we get to the debate, is that GOP officials are leaking to the press their worries about former President Trump’s ground game. Or, more precisely, the lack of any ground game by the Presidential ticket. Apparently, the Trump strategy is to leave the traditional GOTV operations to the various PACs and 501(c)(4)
entities in the GOP world. The only problem is that those entities are not really equipped, and apparently are not stepping up, to run the typical ground game one would expect for a Presidential campaign. One could speculate why that is. My guess is that it is a typical Trump grift – get others to pay for things so he can save his campaign money for his legal fees. In contrast, the Biden campaign had already set up over 100 offices around the country, heavily concentrated in battleground states, and the Harris campaign is expanding those efforts (and has beaucoup bucks to finance them). If one wants to be sure that the “occasional” or “hidden” Trump voters actually get out to vote, this doesn’t seem a very good strategy to do so.
So I’m writing this piece just as the debate has finished, so I don’t have access to any of the post-debate analysis or reactions. My favorite line: “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people…and having a very difficult time processing that.” That seemed true all night. VP Harris looked confident, in-charge, tough but not bullying. MSNBC commentators thought it was the best performance they had ever seen, but there’s a little bias there. Fair to say, though, it was truly a kick-ass performance. Look for a flood of donations, perhaps larger than the day Biden withdrew and endorsed her. She validated her candidacy, stature, her credibility to be a leader of the free world. Not bad for an evening’s work.
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