Since President Biden withdrew from the race and handed the baton off to Vice President Harris, things have gone swimmingly for the Democratic ticket. Her stump speeches have gone over well and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, successfully rebranded the Republican ticket as “weird,” which has seemingly been a more impactful message than “they’re a threat to democracy.”
The polls have swung from a race where it seemed like former President Trump couldn’t lose to one in which Harris has multiple paths to victory. The big aggregators show this rather clearly:
And it’s not just the national polls. Given that we elect Presidents through the bizarre Electoral College system, what really matters is a handful of “swing” states. And, while those are all close, they’ve moved blueward, with even Georgia quite competitive.
Yet Silver has gone from projecting a 60 percent likelihood of a Harris win (which coincidentally was my exactly my SWAG) to one in which Trump has a 52 percent likelihood.
Kamala Harris had one of her worst days in some time in our forecast on Thursday despite gaining in our national polling average.
Harris is ahead by 3.8 points in our national poll tracker — up from 2.3 points the day before the Democratic Convention began — which does suggest some sort of convention bounce. However, she’s fallen to a 47.3 percent chance of winning the Electoral College versus 52.4 percent for Donald Trump. (The numbers don’t add to 100 because of the possibility of an Electoral College deadlock.) Some of this is because of the convention bounce adjustment that the model applies to polls that were conducted during or after the DNC. It assumes Harris’s polls are somewhat inflated right now, in other words — just as it assumed Trump’s numbers were inflated after the RNC. While there’s a solid basis for this empirically, you could argue we’re under unusual circumstances because of her late entry into the race. So if you want to treat all of this as a little fuzzier than usual, I don’t really mind that. The good news for Harris is that if she merely holds her current numbers for a couple more weeks, she’ll begin to track up again in our forecast as the model will become more confident that she’s out of the convention bounce period.
There’s another, longer-term concern for Harris, though: it’s been a while since we’ve seen a poll showing her ahead in Pennsylvania, which is the tipping-point state more than a third of time in our model. Today, in fact, we added one post-DNC poll showing Pennsylvania as a tie, and another (conducted during the DNC) showing either a tie or Trump +1, depending on what version you prefer.
The model puts a lot of weight on this recent data because of all the changes in the race. And you can see why it thinks this is a problem for her: if she’s only tied in Pennsylvania now, during what should be one of her stronger polling periods, that implies being a slight underdog in November.
Now, all of this could change quickly with one or two high-quality polls showing Harris ahead in the Keystone State. The model is relying more heavily than I’d prefer on the Emerson College poll as it’s the only fully post-DNC/RFK data point — although note, again, that the immediate pre-DNC polls hadn’t been great for Harris in Pennsylvania either.
But for now, we now show a 17 percent chance that Harris wins the popular vote but not the Electoral College, a big concern for her campaign all along. If she won the popular vote nationally by between 1 and 2 points, for instance, the model estimates that she’d still be a 70/30 underdog in the Electoral College
Until one day before the election, the Silver Bulletin forecast is not a pure polls-based model. Instead, it combines the polls with a “fundamentals” prior based on incumbency and our economic index. Currently, this prior estimates that the national popular vote “should” be roughly a tie — not Harris ahead by 3 or 4 points, as in recent national polls. Although the fundamentals are gradually getting phased out, they still get about 20 percent of the weight for now, which is shaving a net of about four-tenths of a point off of Harris’s projected finish on Election Day.
Furthermore, the model’s convention bounce adjustment explicitly assumes that the numbers for the candidate who just held their convention are likely to be inflated for a few weeks. That’s having a reasonably big impact on Harris’s forecast right now.
The upshot is that for the time being, the model thinks Trump is more likely than not to do better than his current polling. That does not mean it assumes the polls would be predictably biased if you held an election today — but the election isn’t today. It thinks Harris is more likely to face headwinds than tailwinds from here forward.
The model’s interactions between state and national polls are also complicated. As I wrote, the model defaults toward a “polls-only” view of the race by Election Day. Or at least, that’s mostly true: economic data and the fundamentals no longer have any influence, and the convention bounce adjustment will long have worked its way out of the system. But the model somewhat liberally interprets this “polls-only” mandate: it uses state polls to inform its estimates of the national popular vote and national polls to inform its state-by-state polling averages. And it uses information based on demographic data and past voting patterns to smooth out the state-by-state estimates and come up with plausible maps.
Obviously, that’s a whole series of assumptions and I’m not sure I buy all of them. I’m not sure a “convention bounce” is a thing anymore, since media is hyper-fragmented and we don’t all sit around and watch them because there’s nothing else on. It’s also not clear how much the “fundamentals” matter, since Harris seems not to be being treated as the incumbent.
I do, however, tend to agree that “Harris is more likely to face headwinds than tailwinds from here forward.” Mostly, that’s because of what I take as simply a given and so many OTB readers see as an outrage: there’s just very little that Trump can do to change people’s perceptions of him in a negative direction. His flaws, huge though they are, are simply baked in at this point. While ordinary Americans—much less the vaunted “swing voter”—pay a whole lot less attention to politics on a daily basis than those who write or comment on political blogs, Trump has been a major public figure for four decades now and been the leading Republican candidate for President and/or the President for nine years straight. There’s just nobody who doesn’t have a fixed opinion on his character by now.
By contrast, Harris has only been in the spotlight since Biden dropped out on July 21st–exactly six weeks ago this afternoon. Aside from a brief boomlet in 2019 when she was running for the nomination—when “normal” folks weren’t yet paying attention—-she has been a non-entity on the national scene. So, like it or not, everything she says or does—or has said or done—will be hyper-analyzed and impact public perception considerably, as people are still forming their opinion of her.
Thus far, she’s done phenomenally well. Much, much better, frankly, than I’d have predicted. But she’ll need to keep it up.
@wr: It’s not intended as advice but as warning. The momentum has been solidly in her direction for six weeks and there’s no obvious reason it has to break. Trump is pretty much at both the apex and nadir of his support, since they’re damn near at the same place. But, outside of Democratic partisans, her support is soft because she’s essentially the new kid in town.
@Michael Cain: Yeah, they were in full force during the Alabama game last night. Live sports are pretty much the only thing that can make me watch commercials.
I wonder what would happen if the press started focusing on Trump’s mental acuity as tenaciously as they did Biden’s. Trump went on another weird rambling spree about how no one is buying bacon anymore because of wind energy.
He’s not working with a full deck, and hasn’t been for some time. I’m eagerly awaiting all of the articles about his capacity and ability to do the job.
I tuned out when I saw that “Electoral College bias” graphic.
It should be blindingly obvious that an overall national average bias is not going to simply prorate onto the swing states and especially not onto subgroups like the “blue wall” midwest states or the NC/AZ/NV subgroup.
With current polling and the famous joy, I feel like Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own when Geena Davis shows up for the last game of the series and Hanks says, “We’re gonna win!” That thought is tempered by how close this is, that there is still time for things to go wrong, and that in the movie, Hank’s team ended up losing.
Presumably the models also do not factor in the possibility of Trump completely melting down or going demonstrably bat-feces crazy between now and November. I don’t think that’s very likely, but it is distinctly possible given his recent performance, and even a 5% chance of that would change the win % noticeably.
In 2022, Democrats outperformed their poll numbers in every Senate and gubernatorial race in a battleground state, sometimes by wide margins well outside the margin of error. And they’ve continued to do so in elections since then. During the presidential primaries earlier this year, Trump underperformed his poll numbers while Biden outperformed his.
Because of 2016 and 2020, many people make the assumption that Trump has some special tendency to outperform his poll numbers. The most common theory is known as the “shy Trump voter” hypothesis, the idea that respondents are embarrassed to admit they support Trump, and therefore they lie to pollsters (it’s similar to the Bradley Effect–itself a questionable theory). But this theory has problems. For one thing, Trump wasn’t uniquely underestimated in those cycles; Republicans in general were, up and down the ballot. For example, the polls substantially underestimated Susan Collins in her 2020 Senate race. Was that because poll respondents were also embarrassed to admit they supported Collins?
My opinion is that, somewhat counterintuitively, the polling errors in 2020 happened for fundamentally different reasons than the ones in 2016. After the 2016 polling miss, most pollsters concluded that it was due to their samples underrepresenting white voters without college degrees. In the years since, they’ve heavily corrected for that error–and over-corrected, in my view. The 2016 polls weren’t as bad as they’ve often been made out to be. For one thing, the national vote was fairly accurate. (Trump did about 1.1 points better than RCP’s average that year. By contrast, Obama in 2012 did 3.2 points better than the average. Yet the myth persists that 2016 represented a unique and unprecedented failure of polls.) It’s true there were some big misses in crucial swing states, but part of the reason is simply that there was very little polling being done in those states, period, in the final two weeks of the campaign, when Trump started surging following the Comey Letter. In other words, a big part of the reason for the polling miss was an absence of polls close to Election Day rather than a large presence of inaccurate polls.
I think the 2020 polling errors had a lot to do with the pandemic, specifically the fact that Dems were taking the pandemic restrictions more seriously than Republicans. Dems practically abandoned much of their traditional ground game and canvassing, leading to an asymmetry in turnout that the pollsters failed to account for. Furthermore, as Dems were likelier to stay home that year, they were likelier to be successfully contacted by polling organizations than Republicans were.
In sum, I don’t think there’s any reason to expect the polls to underestimate Trump this year. I think something shifted in 2022 following the Dobbs ruling that led to a much higher engagement than normal among Democratic voters, which was why the purported red wave never materialized. I think it may also have been due to fears of collapse of democracy, something which I believe was stimulated by Jan. 6. That’s why I believe Dems have been consistently overperforming their polls since then. It was noticeable even before the 2022 midterms, in the high level of voter registration by younger and female voters, and in several special-election upsets, the biggest one being Mary Peltola’s win in Alaska (which Larry Sabato had rated as “Safe Red”).
One thing that’s evident since Harris took over the race is that there’s been a huge surge in enthusiasm on the Democratic side, which has been noticeable in fundraising as well as voter registration (I read a report that there’s been a surge in female voter registration even bigger than what we saw in 2022). Polls have also shown a massive increase in support for Harris among key Democratic constituencies. Enthusiasm is something that was sorely lacking in 2016. And in 2020, while there was a lot of enthusiasm against Trump, there was never much enthusiasm for Biden. That’s very different from what we’re seeing now; the current enthusiasm for Harris is, frankly, bigger than anything I’ve seen on our side since 2008. And that’s something that typically doesn’t get picked up in polls, and is a good reason for optimism beyond any specific poll results.
For example, the polls substantially underestimated Susan Collins in her 2020 Senate race. Was that because poll respondents were also embarrassed to admit they supported Collins?
I don’t see how someone could support her and not be embarrassed.
For all the assumptions in Silver’s model (and there are a lot of them), I see no reference to post-Dobbs effects. The models also don’t seem to factor in how the respective campaigns are positioned/funded for GOTV. I’d rather be the Democrats considering where the potential to outperform the polling lies.
Presumably the models also do not factor in the possibility of Trump completely melting down or going demonstrably bat-feces crazy between now and November.
TFG is teetering. Keep working the eye.
Voter perceptions may be set (to my outrage), so perhaps we have to get Trump to quit.
Indeed, that graph is central to our national dysfunction: that one could win the popular vote, even quite handily, and still lose the EC.
A temporary artifact of which states are currently closely divided and which have large majorities one way or the other.
Looking at the demographic trends, IMO in 2028 TX will be somewhere in the range of bluish purple to light blue, and a blue state by 2032 – which will leave whatever is then left of the old GOP in a world of hurt.
Indeed, that graph is central to our national dysfunction: that one could win the popular vote, even quite handily, and still lose the EC.
A temporary artifact of which states are currently closely divided and which have large majorities one way or the other.
Looking at the demographic trends, IMO in 2028 TX will be somewhere in the range of bluish purple to light blue, and a blue state by 2032 – which will leave whatever is then left of the old GOP in a world of hurt.
@gVOR10: There are other information vectors beyond the big media outlets like NYT, CNN etc. and Trump dementia is becoming increasingly noticed in the alternate media.
I think the only thing that’s likely to noticeably move the polls is a debate between Trump and Harris. The other hope is that people who don’t pay attention to politics actually start paying attention as the election approaches and realize that Trump is unfit for the office and a rancid example of a human.
Obviously, surprising things happen and maybe someone’s holding onto something they think will be a bombshell. I submit that no bombshells about Trump will affect anybody who’s already planning to support a rapist, felon, traitor, tax and draft dodger. So it really is on Harris to survive and even overcome the headwinds. Not advice, just reality. If you can donate time, money, or energy to prevent an autocracy, please do so. *That’s* advice.
@Scott F.: Just for the elephant, I’ll note that I suspect that GOTV efforts are probably something pollsters can’t measure accurately. Particularly in the question of endgame effects.
@charontwo: Alternate media may well only be preaching to their respective choirs, though. Read lots by people like you but not so much by people who haven’t even started thinking about who they’ll vote for.
Still, if a majority of voters are, however slightly, more like you, Harris is golden.
Something to note about Nate Silver, who appears to have a crippling gambling problem: he was forced to admit in his latest book that he used ChatGPT to write it.
Someone who made a caveat in 2016 that “Trump could still win” should not be regarded as brilliant or special or insightful.
I wonder how much disinformation will play into this year’s election.
I mentioned recently that I met two undecided voters, a woman who said that she dislikes Republicans, but she thinks women are too emotional to be president; and a guy who said he leans conservative, but his girlfriend is very liberal, and he’s trying to preserve his relationship with her. I met both of them in the dog park, where you tend to talk to other dog parents while your pets run around, and both of them brought up politics, not me. (Politics is not typically something I would bring up with strangers).
I heard a news segment about disinformation yesterday, and it made me think of things that each of these two people said. The woman said she was also upset about Kamala Harris saying that she would end the student loan forgiveness program. I asked her where she heard that, and she said it was all over the news. I later googled it, and couldn’t find anything about Kamala Harris ending student loan forgiveness.
The guy said he doesn’t like Kamala Harris because she’s a drunk. I asked him why he would say that, and he said he’s a former alcoholic and he knows another one when he sees one. (I think I agree with DeD’s response to my story: both these people are trying to find excuses to vote for Trump).
Anyway, this disinformation segment brought up the video someone made of Nancy Pelosi, where they edited it to make it sound like she was drunk. And it made me wonder if both these people that I met in the dog park had encountered some sort of disinformation online—a false rumor about Harris ending student loan forgiveness, or perhaps a video that made her appear drunk. It also reminded me of a few comments made yesterday on the Tim Walz thread, where people pointed out that the Republicans, with the media’s help, are trying to create a narrative that Walz is untrustworthy by nitpicking small details of his story, and that James is already falling for it.
I live in PA. The amount of Trump ads is incredible. Besides regular TV it’s all over youtube also. Babysat the grandkids (the girls) overnight last night. After playing cooking and baking (finally found a really good, really easy to make chocolate buttercream frosting which the kids and wife ate half of before we could get it on the cupcakes) we watched some funny YouTubes, ones clearly aimed at kids. Many of them had Trump campaign ads. Most of them the especially nasty ones. It seemed very odd to go from watching fluffy bunnies and unicorns, clearly aimed at 3-7 year old kids, mostly girls, to ads claiming that Harris will destroy the country and frees rapists and killers.
Given that the election comes down to 7 or 8 key states, pretty sure thst Harris et al know that she can lose this race. And I think that her supporters know it too.
But, BUT, given where Democrats were just 5 weeks ago, with Biden trailing Trump in those key states some by percentages greater than margins of error, and many down ballot races becoming unwinnable … given all of that … t’s remarkable that Harris has brought Democrats back to viability up and down the ticket.
There is no chance that Harris takes her foot off the gas pedal
@al Ameda: I will agree that Dr. Taylor’s point about margins and outcomes is less pertinent at this point in this race, the fact that on party’s candidate can have a 3% nationwide lead and the opponent still has a one in three chance of winning is a profound dysfunction in our system and may be more pertinent overall. The fact that our unified reaction to this dysfunction is to only care to the extent that our party’s platform* may become derailed is sad. And more dysfunctional than the dysfunction.
*And this comment is not even considering that one party seems to have no platform to speak of except the derail the system at large. We’re really in a syndrome of dysfunctions situation. Good to be old.
JJ: good point – I was thinking the same thing. In the old days, people did not pay as much attention to politics as today, thus conventions represented an introduction or reintroduction to the candidates and the inevitable bump. But in these hyper-partisan times, where everything is reported, nobody needs an introduction. Also, Trump.
I’ve been following Silver though not subscribing so I can’t see all the detailed analysis. However… something seems off. He had a whole post about how PA has been trending against her, but even looking at his own numbers seemed to indicate otherwise. Or at least that the trend he was claiming wasn’t as pronounced as he was making it out to be. Ultimately, I trust his numbers but his subjective analysis just seems tinged with some bitterness over how things have gone for him personally/professionally over the last couple of years. It makes it a little hard to know what to make of his project as a whole. I don’t think hes goosing the numbers or intending to be bias — and I’d bet dollars to doughnuts his personal preference would be a Harris win — but he just seems a little to motivated to dunk on Democrats and that seems to infiltrate his writing.
Ultimately, what the polls say now don’t matter much… there is a lot that can and will happen between now and election day and what the voters do on that day (and in the early voting days) is what matters.
@Kazzy: I’ll just note that in this day and age, betting dollars to donuts is a sucker bet unless you really want the donut. The last donut I bought at Safeway was $1.29 and the last good one I bought was almost $3. I don’t bet dollars to donuts anymore. Can’t make it pay. 😉
The only elections that affect the 2024 outcome will happen in those states that are in play, in each state, state by state, independently of any regional or national average vote tally.
The national average vote is mostly just a mildly interesting curiosity that some people (not including me) choose to get really worked up over.
The WaPo front page always shows the current polling in each of seven particular states, because of their unique relevance.
If the Dems were to win CA 55 to 45 instead of the expected 2 to 1, that would affect the national average vote but not the E. C. outcome, the state would still be reliably blue.
You always need to fight the enemy you have, not the enemy you would prefer to have. I recall Adlai Stevenson had a famous quote about actual voters and their thought processes.
@Monala: I’d give three to one odds that the people you talked to had received their disinformation via Facebook. It is an ideal vector for it, since it knows so much about each user, and will only show the crazy lies to people likely to believe it. It won’t show the questionable things to people who aren’t likely to believe it, making rebuttal impossible.
“But she’ll need to keep it up.”
Great insight. Do you think this has occurred to them? Maybe you should get in touch…
I saw my first anti-Harris commercials on TV yesterday. All the same “She’s a liberal AG from San Francisco who let criminals go early.”
Any excuse to do a post about polls, eh? (Sorry, Canadian Wife influence there.)
@wr: It’s not intended as advice but as warning. The momentum has been solidly in her direction for six weeks and there’s no obvious reason it has to break. Trump is pretty much at both the apex and nadir of his support, since they’re damn near at the same place. But, outside of Democratic partisans, her support is soft because she’s essentially the new kid in town.
@Michael Cain: I mean, it’s a politics blog.
@Michael Cain: Yeah, they were in full force during the Alabama game last night. Live sports are pretty much the only thing that can make me watch commercials.
I wonder what would happen if the press started focusing on Trump’s mental acuity as tenaciously as they did Biden’s. Trump went on another weird rambling spree about how no one is buying bacon anymore because of wind energy.
He’s not working with a full deck, and hasn’t been for some time. I’m eagerly awaiting all of the articles about his capacity and ability to do the job.
I tuned out when I saw that “Electoral College bias” graphic.
It should be blindingly obvious that an overall national average bias is not going to simply prorate onto the swing states and especially not onto subgroups like the “blue wall” midwest states or the NC/AZ/NV subgroup.
I call bullshit on the whole pointless analysis.
@charontwo: I think you are misreading what the graphic means.
Indeed, that graph is central to our national dysfunction: that one could win the popular vote, even quite handily, and still lose the EC.
With current polling and the famous joy, I feel like Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own when Geena Davis shows up for the last game of the series and Hanks says, “We’re gonna win!” That thought is tempered by how close this is, that there is still time for things to go wrong, and that in the movie, Hank’s team ended up losing.
Presumably the models also do not factor in the possibility of Trump completely melting down or going demonstrably bat-feces crazy between now and November. I don’t think that’s very likely, but it is distinctly possible given his recent performance, and even a 5% chance of that would change the win % noticeably.
@DrDaveT: The odds of Trump melting down are about the same as the odds of the supposedly liberal MSM honestly covering his current state.
In 2022, Democrats outperformed their poll numbers in every Senate and gubernatorial race in a battleground state, sometimes by wide margins well outside the margin of error. And they’ve continued to do so in elections since then. During the presidential primaries earlier this year, Trump underperformed his poll numbers while Biden outperformed his.
Because of 2016 and 2020, many people make the assumption that Trump has some special tendency to outperform his poll numbers. The most common theory is known as the “shy Trump voter” hypothesis, the idea that respondents are embarrassed to admit they support Trump, and therefore they lie to pollsters (it’s similar to the Bradley Effect–itself a questionable theory). But this theory has problems. For one thing, Trump wasn’t uniquely underestimated in those cycles; Republicans in general were, up and down the ballot. For example, the polls substantially underestimated Susan Collins in her 2020 Senate race. Was that because poll respondents were also embarrassed to admit they supported Collins?
My opinion is that, somewhat counterintuitively, the polling errors in 2020 happened for fundamentally different reasons than the ones in 2016. After the 2016 polling miss, most pollsters concluded that it was due to their samples underrepresenting white voters without college degrees. In the years since, they’ve heavily corrected for that error–and over-corrected, in my view. The 2016 polls weren’t as bad as they’ve often been made out to be. For one thing, the national vote was fairly accurate. (Trump did about 1.1 points better than RCP’s average that year. By contrast, Obama in 2012 did 3.2 points better than the average. Yet the myth persists that 2016 represented a unique and unprecedented failure of polls.) It’s true there were some big misses in crucial swing states, but part of the reason is simply that there was very little polling being done in those states, period, in the final two weeks of the campaign, when Trump started surging following the Comey Letter. In other words, a big part of the reason for the polling miss was an absence of polls close to Election Day rather than a large presence of inaccurate polls.
I think the 2020 polling errors had a lot to do with the pandemic, specifically the fact that Dems were taking the pandemic restrictions more seriously than Republicans. Dems practically abandoned much of their traditional ground game and canvassing, leading to an asymmetry in turnout that the pollsters failed to account for. Furthermore, as Dems were likelier to stay home that year, they were likelier to be successfully contacted by polling organizations than Republicans were.
In sum, I don’t think there’s any reason to expect the polls to underestimate Trump this year. I think something shifted in 2022 following the Dobbs ruling that led to a much higher engagement than normal among Democratic voters, which was why the purported red wave never materialized. I think it may also have been due to fears of collapse of democracy, something which I believe was stimulated by Jan. 6. That’s why I believe Dems have been consistently overperforming their polls since then. It was noticeable even before the 2022 midterms, in the high level of voter registration by younger and female voters, and in several special-election upsets, the biggest one being Mary Peltola’s win in Alaska (which Larry Sabato had rated as “Safe Red”).
One thing that’s evident since Harris took over the race is that there’s been a huge surge in enthusiasm on the Democratic side, which has been noticeable in fundraising as well as voter registration (I read a report that there’s been a surge in female voter registration even bigger than what we saw in 2022). Polls have also shown a massive increase in support for Harris among key Democratic constituencies. Enthusiasm is something that was sorely lacking in 2016. And in 2020, while there was a lot of enthusiasm against Trump, there was never much enthusiasm for Biden. That’s very different from what we’re seeing now; the current enthusiasm for Harris is, frankly, bigger than anything I’ve seen on our side since 2008. And that’s something that typically doesn’t get picked up in polls, and is a good reason for optimism beyond any specific poll results.
@Kylopod:
I don’t see how someone could support her and not be embarrassed.
For all the assumptions in Silver’s model (and there are a lot of them), I see no reference to post-Dobbs effects. The models also don’t seem to factor in how the respective campaigns are positioned/funded for GOTV. I’d rather be the Democrats considering where the potential to outperform the polling lies.
@DrDaveT:
TFG is teetering. Keep working the eye.
Voter perceptions may be set (to my outrage), so perhaps we have to get Trump to quit.
@Steven L. Taylor:
A temporary artifact of which states are currently closely divided and which have large majorities one way or the other.
Looking at the demographic trends, IMO in 2028 TX will be somewhere in the range of bluish purple to light blue, and a blue state by 2032 – which will leave whatever is then left of the old GOP in a world of hurt.
@Steven L. Taylor:
A temporary artifact of which states are currently closely divided and which have large majorities one way or the other.
Looking at the demographic trends, IMO in 2028 TX will be somewhere in the range of bluish purple to light blue, and a blue state by 2032 – which will leave whatever is then left of the old GOP in a world of hurt.
@gVOR10: There are other information vectors beyond the big media outlets like NYT, CNN etc. and Trump dementia is becoming increasingly noticed in the alternate media.
I think the only thing that’s likely to noticeably move the polls is a debate between Trump and Harris. The other hope is that people who don’t pay attention to politics actually start paying attention as the election approaches and realize that Trump is unfit for the office and a rancid example of a human.
Obviously, surprising things happen and maybe someone’s holding onto something they think will be a bombshell. I submit that no bombshells about Trump will affect anybody who’s already planning to support a rapist, felon, traitor, tax and draft dodger. So it really is on Harris to survive and even overcome the headwinds. Not advice, just reality. If you can donate time, money, or energy to prevent an autocracy, please do so. *That’s* advice.
@Scott F.: Just for the elephant, I’ll note that I suspect that GOTV efforts are probably something pollsters can’t measure accurately. Particularly in the question of endgame effects.
@charontwo: Alternate media may well only be preaching to their respective choirs, though. Read lots by people like you but not so much by people who haven’t even started thinking about who they’ll vote for.
Still, if a majority of voters are, however slightly, more like you, Harris is golden.
Something to note about Nate Silver, who appears to have a crippling gambling problem: he was forced to admit in his latest book that he used ChatGPT to write it.
Someone who made a caveat in 2016 that “Trump could still win” should not be regarded as brilliant or special or insightful.
I wonder how much disinformation will play into this year’s election.
I mentioned recently that I met two undecided voters, a woman who said that she dislikes Republicans, but she thinks women are too emotional to be president; and a guy who said he leans conservative, but his girlfriend is very liberal, and he’s trying to preserve his relationship with her. I met both of them in the dog park, where you tend to talk to other dog parents while your pets run around, and both of them brought up politics, not me. (Politics is not typically something I would bring up with strangers).
I heard a news segment about disinformation yesterday, and it made me think of things that each of these two people said. The woman said she was also upset about Kamala Harris saying that she would end the student loan forgiveness program. I asked her where she heard that, and she said it was all over the news. I later googled it, and couldn’t find anything about Kamala Harris ending student loan forgiveness.
The guy said he doesn’t like Kamala Harris because she’s a drunk. I asked him why he would say that, and he said he’s a former alcoholic and he knows another one when he sees one. (I think I agree with DeD’s response to my story: both these people are trying to find excuses to vote for Trump).
Anyway, this disinformation segment brought up the video someone made of Nancy Pelosi, where they edited it to make it sound like she was drunk. And it made me wonder if both these people that I met in the dog park had encountered some sort of disinformation online—a false rumor about Harris ending student loan forgiveness, or perhaps a video that made her appear drunk. It also reminded me of a few comments made yesterday on the Tim Walz thread, where people pointed out that the Republicans, with the media’s help, are trying to create a narrative that Walz is untrustworthy by nitpicking small details of his story, and that James is already falling for it.
I live in PA. The amount of Trump ads is incredible. Besides regular TV it’s all over youtube also. Babysat the grandkids (the girls) overnight last night. After playing cooking and baking (finally found a really good, really easy to make chocolate buttercream frosting which the kids and wife ate half of before we could get it on the cupcakes) we watched some funny YouTubes, ones clearly aimed at kids. Many of them had Trump campaign ads. Most of them the especially nasty ones. It seemed very odd to go from watching fluffy bunnies and unicorns, clearly aimed at 3-7 year old kids, mostly girls, to ads claiming that Harris will destroy the country and frees rapists and killers.
Steve
Given that the election comes down to 7 or 8 key states, pretty sure thst Harris et al know that she can lose this race. And I think that her supporters know it too.
But, BUT, given where Democrats were just 5 weeks ago, with Biden trailing Trump in those key states some by percentages greater than margins of error, and many down ballot races becoming unwinnable … given all of that … t’s remarkable that Harris has brought Democrats back to viability up and down the ticket.
There is no chance that Harris takes her foot off the gas pedal
Kylopod wrote:
In 2022, Democrats outperformed their poll numbers in every Senate and gubernatorial race in a battleground state….
Really excellent post!!!!! Another example of the truly exceptional posters we have here commenting informatively and provocatively on a daily basis.
@al Ameda: I will agree that Dr. Taylor’s point about margins and outcomes is less pertinent at this point in this race, the fact that on party’s candidate can have a 3% nationwide lead and the opponent still has a one in three chance of winning is a profound dysfunction in our system and may be more pertinent overall. The fact that our unified reaction to this dysfunction is to only care to the extent that our party’s platform* may become derailed is sad. And more dysfunctional than the dysfunction.
*And this comment is not even considering that one party seems to have no platform to speak of except the derail the system at large. We’re really in a syndrome of dysfunctions situation. Good to be old.
JJ: good point – I was thinking the same thing. In the old days, people did not pay as much attention to politics as today, thus conventions represented an introduction or reintroduction to the candidates and the inevitable bump. But in these hyper-partisan times, where everything is reported, nobody needs an introduction. Also, Trump.
@charontwo: It may be temporary, but it’s longevity is irrelevant to it’s significance for 2024.
I’ve been following Silver though not subscribing so I can’t see all the detailed analysis. However… something seems off. He had a whole post about how PA has been trending against her, but even looking at his own numbers seemed to indicate otherwise. Or at least that the trend he was claiming wasn’t as pronounced as he was making it out to be. Ultimately, I trust his numbers but his subjective analysis just seems tinged with some bitterness over how things have gone for him personally/professionally over the last couple of years. It makes it a little hard to know what to make of his project as a whole. I don’t think hes goosing the numbers or intending to be bias — and I’d bet dollars to doughnuts his personal preference would be a Harris win — but he just seems a little to motivated to dunk on Democrats and that seems to infiltrate his writing.
Ultimately, what the polls say now don’t matter much… there is a lot that can and will happen between now and election day and what the voters do on that day (and in the early voting days) is what matters.
The only issue with the phrase “if it scares it leads,” is that it doesn’t rhyme like “if it bleeds it leads.”
@Kazzy: I’ll just note that in this day and age, betting dollars to donuts is a sucker bet unless you really want the donut. The last donut I bought at Safeway was $1.29 and the last good one I bought was almost $3. I don’t bet dollars to donuts anymore. Can’t make it pay. 😉
@Steven L. Taylor:
Significance in regard to what, though?
The only elections that affect the 2024 outcome will happen in those states that are in play, in each state, state by state, independently of any regional or national average vote tally.
The national average vote is mostly just a mildly interesting curiosity that some people (not including me) choose to get really worked up over.
The WaPo front page always shows the current polling in each of seven particular states, because of their unique relevance.
If the Dems were to win CA 55 to 45 instead of the expected 2 to 1, that would affect the national average vote but not the E. C. outcome, the state would still be reliably blue.
You always need to fight the enemy you have, not the enemy you would prefer to have. I recall Adlai Stevenson had a famous quote about actual voters and their thought processes.
@Lit3Bolt: A fine pot pourri of the Ad hominem logical fallacy…
Of course shooting the messanger is an ancient human reaction.
@Monala: I’d give three to one odds that the people you talked to had received their disinformation via Facebook. It is an ideal vector for it, since it knows so much about each user, and will only show the crazy lies to people likely to believe it. It won’t show the questionable things to people who aren’t likely to believe it, making rebuttal impossible.