On Polling and Trolling
Harris appears to be getting a post-convention bounce while Trump and Vance stay classy.
First, some polling.
Via Fox News we find a lot of very close races in some key states (including North Carolina). Clearly, these are all with the MOE.
Via USAT: Exclusive: Kamala Harris surges ahead of Donald Trump in latest poll taken after DNC
Democrat Kamala Harris has surged ahead of Republican Donald Trump,48%-43%, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found.
The findings reflect an eight-point turnaround in the presidential race from late June, when Trump had led President Joe Biden in the survey by nearly four points.
[…]
The vice president’s small lead was fueled by big shifts among some key demographic groups traditionally crucial for Democrats, including Hispanic and Black voters and young people. Among those with annual incomes of less than $20,000, in the biggest change, a three-point Trump edge over Biden in June has become a 23-point Harris advantage over Trump in August.
The poll of 1,000 likely voters, taken by landline and cell phone Sunday through Wednesday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. With the election approaching, the survey is now measuring likely voters; previous polls were of registered voters.
There are some additional positives for Harris in terms of young voters and voters of color detailed in the piece.
Via Reuters: Exclusive: Harris widens lead over Trump, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.
Democrat Kamala Harris leads Republican Donald Trump 45% to 41% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Thursday that showed the vice president sparking new enthusiasm among voters and shaking up the race ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
The 4 percentage point advantage among registered voters was wider than a 1 point lead Harris held over the former president in a late July Reuters/Ipsos poll. The new poll, which was conducted in the eight days ended Wednesday and had a 2 percentage point margin of error, showed Harris picking up support among women and Hispanics.
On the one hand, post-convention bumps often fade a tad. On the other, many pollsters and analysts were wondering if Harris would get a convention bump as they thought it was possible that all the post-Biden dropping out coverage might have taken the place of the convention bump.
In terms of trollish behavior, we have the following.
- Via the AP: Trump campaign was warned not to take photos at Arlington before altercation, defense official says.
“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” the cemetery officials’ statement said. “Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants. We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.”
Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung said the Republican presidential candidate’s team was granted access to have a photographer. He contested the allegation that a campaign staffer pushed a cemetery official.
[…]
Chris LaCivita, a top Trump campaign adviser, noted that Trump was there at the invitation of the families of the service members who were killed in the airport bombing. The Trump campaign posted a message signed by relatives of two of the service members killed in the bombing that said “the president and his team conducted themselves with nothing but the utmost respect and dignity for all of our service members, especially our beloved children.”
The Trump campaign has subsequently released a campaign ad on TikTok using footage from the event.
I will further note, that grinning thumbs-up photos strike me as manifestations of “the utmost respect and dignity for all of our service members.”
In addition, we have:
Trump shared a misogynist post on Truth Social (via HuffPo: CNN Host Says Trump’s Kamala Harris Blowjob Dig Makes Her Stomach ‘Sick’) and Vance told Harris to “go to Hell.”
I don’t mind saying the vile campaign behavior described throughout the last half of this post juxtaposed against polling showing support for Trump remains as high as 49% in the first half makes me sick to my stomach.
“We deserve better leaders than this.”
Alas, 45+% of “us” disagree. 🙁
@Scott F.: @just nutha: There’s clearly a significant subset of Trump voters who relish this boorishness. Mostly, though, it’s just the “team sports” mindset surrounding partisanship we’ve talked about here for a very long time. Fans find a way to justify bad behavior by “their” players. And, even when they don’t, they still can’t bring themselves to root for the other team.
Polling has long shown huge numbers of Republicans who think Trump is awful. But few are going to vote for Harris. Indeed, I suspect most of those who considered themselves Republican in 2012 but who haven’t been able to bring themselves to vote for Trump no longer consider themselves Republicans—thus further skewing the polling.
I’m not putting too much faith based on the polls due to what happened in 2020. They were badly off. I’m not just saying it, but the authors of this book have also plus others.
What am I predicting in November- I don’t want to place any bets. Before he withdrew from the race, I said Biden was going to lose.
@James Joyner: Apologize for Republicans anyway you want to, Dr. Joyner. I just don’t care. If Republicans want to be thought better of, they should be better, not simply less odious.
So, Trump and his campaign have broken a *federal law* about photography at Arlington.
We had what felt like hundreds of think pieces about Walz’s retirement rank. I eagerly await the grand chastisement of the Trump campaign for YET AGAIN breaking the law, with this undignified and crass display.
He and his campaign seem to think that the law does not apply if they are invited to a service. That’s not how laws work.
@James Joyner:
As someone who wants to maintain my belief in basic human decency, I find absolutely no comfort in this rationalization. Lines have been crossed that strip the “fan” of any cover that might be found in team loyalty. Fans who justify such disrespect at Arlington and sexual innuendo of a VP can, as JD might say, “go to hell.”
You may be able to construct some normalization of what is clearly abnormal for a functional civil society, but I can’t. 49% acceptance of the Daily Doses of Depravity on display by the Trump/Vance campaign is sickening.
@just nutha: On fairness, it is not an apology. It is an empirically verifiable human behavior.
As a general observer of it all, it makes me a combination of mad, sad, and bewildered.
As a social scientist, however, I understand that it is a direct manifestation of polarized bipartism and the way in which partisan identity affects people’s choices.
(And there is some rationality, used here as a neutral term to describe behavior, if you value certain policy outcomes, or wish to avoid others, by voting Trump).
And it is why the structural conditions of the system matter, even if many of us think that people should just “do the right thing” as we see it.
Indeed, as long as we all stick to “people should behave the way that I want them to” instead of “our system needs reform” the longer we are going to be stuck with this kind of situation.
@Bill Jempty:
Skepticism is warranted, to be sure.
But, I would note that while 2020 had a definite polling error, it was 3.9%. I note this not because that isn’t a concerning number (because it is!). But just to put into provide the actual error.
I don’t know or care what the context of the “go to hell” statement was, but I’m not particularly concerned about referencing a fictional place. If anything, hell is what Project 2025 describes.
The more amusing thing is that I’m imagining Vance’s speechwriters are trying to make him seem charismatic or passionate or maybe even non-weird. Best of luck, guys!
The lead up didn’t match the final tally, but it wasn’t so much that the polls were badly off–things broke for Trump by very narrow margins in a few key states.
This distinction matters a lot. State level polling can have slightly higher MOE than national polling, and this, combined with our winner-takes-all electoral college system makes things look like they were “way off,” when in actuality we should all remember that Clinton won the popular vote.
The Fox polls above are of registered voters, not likely voters. That matters too.
Significantly, the Fox polling shows that down-ballot Democrats are over-performing Harris, leading by double digits.
@Steven L. Taylor: I would suggest that a precondition for “our system needs reform” is broader agreement that there are some behaviors and character traits that go beyond the acceptable bounds of partisan loyalty. As long as “decent” Republicans are allowed to be comfortable with no level of criminality, corruption, indecency, and authoritarianism being too high a price to pay for their loyalty, Republicanism will never accept any reform work on a system that lets them keep power despite all that.
In other words, I can’t imagine a scenario that would bring the minority party to the electoral reform negotiating table that doesn’t require a profound electoral loss despite the advantages in the system the Republicans presently succeed by. I believe we first need to get to that place we were 30 years ago when electoral loss led to moderation before we can get to electoral reform toward a more representative government. Base reinforcement has to fail bigly before there is any incentive for the minority to switch their approach.
@Jen:
A factoid that suggests the GOP will be in trouble once it no longer has Trump coattails to ride.
This is consistent with the 2016 phenomenon of people who usually do not bother to vote turning out to vote for Trump.
@Scott F.: My point remains that it is a question of proper diagnosis first, even if practical politics have to be taken into account at some point.
@Steven L. Taylor: And perhaps more the point: it is not an infrequent response when someone (James in this case) makes an observation about how human beings behave in a polarized two-party system that they are accused of making excuses for Trump voters.
But if a meteorologist notes that hurricanes are now stronger than they used to be, no one accuses them of making excuses for global warming.
Look, and to be clear: I have a very, very hard time understanding how a lot of people that I know will vote for Trump on a visceral level. But from a dispassionate POV, I can explain it.
@Steven L. Taylor: My observations pull me in a different direction: We cannot reform systems. Systems will change to reflect changes in people. It’s one of the difficulties evangelicalism faces. It wants people who believe they are “basically good” to “repent” of their “not really that bad to begin with”ness.
Reforming the systems by which we elect our leaders will do little to change conditions in which people will accept the oppression of their enemies or of people they hold as deserving victim status. And that’s where America is now. And may well be where it’s always been. Aspirations are like faith. To paraphrase, show me your aspirations apart from your actions and I will let my actions show mine.
I met two honest-to-God undecided voters yesterday: a woman who hates a lot of what Republicans stand for, but who also hates inflation and thinks women are “too emotional” to be president. And a man who leans conservative, but whose girlfriend hates Trump, and he wants to preserve his relationship with her.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’m all for proper diagnosis first and I really appreciate your analytics. That’s what I frequently visit OTB for.
And I would say “stronger hurricanes are to global warming” as “Trump acceptance is to hyper-polarization” is an apt analogy to use to derive a proper diagnosis. So I would ask you to consider this:
Global warming is the direct cause of stronger hurricanes, as hyper-polarization is the direct cause of Trump acceptance, but neither are root cause of their respective problems. By this train of thought, justifying/excusing/normalizing the forfeiture of decency and integrity in service of team loyalty is analogous to claiming climate change is a hoax. We don’t want to deal with properly diagnosed root of the problem (either because we don’t want to face hard truths or we think the underlying conditions are intractable), so we allow ourselves to get comfortable with things as they are.
Lots of good stuff upthread, but I would like to pause a moment to express how utterly fucking sick and tired I am of the phrase “battleground states.” A country with a proper election system would not have elections that come down to five or seven states that will get 99% of the attention while the votes of tens of millions of voters in the rest of the country are essentially irrelevant.
I know I am far from alone in this opinion here at OTB, but I am just extra pissed off about it today.
Thanks for listening to my rant…
@Scott F.:
QFT. A national disgrace. This is Nate Silver’s forecast model, today:
This is the 538 forecast model, today:
It’s a sad commentary on our culture’s ethics and politics that this race remains so volatile and unpredictable. In a sane and serious world, Trump’s main opponent would be the runaway favorite in every poll and model, predicted to win 350+ electoral votes. At least.
@Steven L. Taylor:
But is “they are acting like fans of a sports team” a diagnosis, or a symptom? Why are they treating political identity as if it were Yankees versus Red Sox, or Lakers vs. Celtics? Are Democrats and Republicans doing this equally, or is there an asymmetry? Has this always been the case? If not, what has changed? Is it an immutable fact, or a contingent one? If contingent, then it isn’t an analysis — it’s an observation that requires explanation.
The best description I’ve read today of why veterans treat Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery as a sacred place:
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-arlington-national-cemetery-section-60-politicized
@DK:
In a sane and serious world, Hillary Clinton would be finishing her second term*, and El Weirdo would have been convicted for falsifying business records before the trump pandemic hit.
*Possibly
@DrDaveT: I think it’s because we’ve turned ourselves into a population that is perfectly willing to amuse ourselves to death. We’re having less and less of an identity as productive people who are respected for what we do, and more and more with identities as consumers. So as long as it’ll be entertaining, we’re perfectly fine with it. Hence our present tendencies to treat our politics as sports teams and not caring how crazy a certain politician is or how much of the economy he might crash. Tons of Americans think that Mad Max would be a fine world to live in.
A couple of additional notes on the Arlington issue (I’ve been collecting them for a post on the topic that I don’t think I’ll end up doing). First, as recently as the 2000 presidential election cycle, Candidates were forced to take down footage using Arlington for political purposes. In that case it was a primary ad for John McCain.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-nov-12-mn-32733-story.html
Trump supporters have attempted to justify this with images from the White House feed of Obama and Biden laying wreaths at Arlington. What those folks seem to miss is the dates on both posts are clearly NOT from election years.
@DrDaveT: In my view, the short answer to your question is “oxytocin”. Many experiments involving oxytocin have been performed, and they are described really well in Behave, a book by Robert Sapolsky.
The oxytocin levels affect behavior toward other human beings in some pretty powerful ways, but the effect is very different based on whether the subject considers that other human beings one of “Us” or one of “Them”.
Sapolsky concludes, very reasonably in my opinion, that classification of other humans in to Us and Them is very deeply rooted in the biology of humans, (and probably chimpanzees, and maybe other apes, too).
However, just how one creates those categories is fairly malleable in humans. There’s always going to be an Us, but who belongs to your “Us” at any particular time is kind of up for grabs.
This is at the core of all this highly partisan, not to say tribal, behavior. In my opinion. The tribal behavior is so easy to observe, it seems a fundamental characteristic of humans. This explanation for it is probably not as well established, but it seems pretty good to me. I await further refinements and discoveries.
Hmmm…
Trump has often run up to the edge, skirted the edge, but this time his team made a mistake of just flat running over it. And I’m sure he had been counting on the military continuing to support him, especially in a “questionable” election… but:
US Army rebukes Trump campaign for incident at Arlington National Cemetery
The line has been crossed.
Let’s see if he decides to call the US Army liars, cowards and communists.
@Monala:
I hope you had the presence of mind and generosity to suggest this man ditch his girlfriend and meet this woman.
Does this mean that when Trump and Vance, following the assassination attempt, implored us to dial down the rhetoric, that they were being disingenuous lying greaseballs?
Also, I have to admit, JD Vance is a lot more sleazy than I expected.
@Jay L Gischer: Yabbut… Explanations of the form “people are just like that” can only explain things that are always true — the existence of religion, people forming into tribes, the eternal quest for alcoholic beverages, extramarital sex, etc. They can’t explain things that weren’t true 50 years ago, or that are only true of some groups but not others, or that used to be true but aren’t any more.
I remember when political party allegiance behaviors looked very different, at least for large segments of the American population. Something has changed, and it isn’t oxytocin. I would love to see an actual analysis of the specific mechanisms that have led us to this point and are holding us there.
@DrDaveT:
Don’t forget-
White bread v Rye Bread
Coke v Pepsi
Mary Ann v Ginger
Cats v Dogs
The list can go on……..
@DrDaveT: Read more Rick Perlstein. This goes back to Nixon. Quite specifically, actually.
Before Nixon, presidential candidates were usually conciliatory, and aimed for the middle, wanting to build broad coalitions.
Nixon, however employed a strategy of “divide the country, because I’ll have the larger share”. This was not rejected by Reagan, who could do this work with a smile and a song. And it was advanced most strongly by Newt Gingrich.
Changing to mostly primary elections rather than smoke-filled rooms had an impact, too.
But Nixon. He’s long dead, and we still aren’t rid of him.
@Liberal Capitalist:
No just another outrage of the day…outrage of the week. At election time who’s going to factor this in when we have Trump being four times and that’s barely a blip?
@Monala:
“. . . hates a lot of what Republicans stand for, but. . .”
“. . . a man who leans conservative, but . . .”
Nope. At the end, they’ll vote for Trump. No doubt about it. Anyone looking at steak and potatoes hot off the grill and says “but” to a shyt sandwich filled with glass shards and strychnine is gonna eat the shyt sandwich filled with glass shards and strychnine.
@Scott F.:
Had covid not killed a whole lot of elderly white people, that support might be a little higher.
@Matt Bernius:
What those folks also seem to miss is that Trump bloody isn’t, despite his whiny protestations to the contrary, the sitting President of the United States.
Even in an election year, there is a chasm of difference between performing symbolic acts as POTUS at a ceremonial tomb and exploiting a grieving (albeit angry) family for a photo-op. I bring your attention back to the picture in the OP. The family is standing practically on top of the grave of a different deceased service member who died in Iraq when Trump was president.
As the link Kingdaddy shared above makes clear, for people with loved ones buried there Section 60 is hallowed ground, yet Trump is standing in this sacred place with a grin on his face and his thumb up, his supporters are defending the behavior, and those supporters are going to be let off the hook for their deplorable team loyalty because it’s just normal politics.
The ONLY defendable response to what happened at Arlington from the Trump campaign would be a profound, heartfelt apology followed by whoever pushed the ANC official being fired from the campaign staff. Anything less should result in Trump supporters and enablers be forced to confront who they are in bed with by the press and their colleagues.
@Jay L Gischer:
Chimps commonly attack members of other troops if they come across them, often violently. Sometimes an outsider male will mate with a female, and viceversa.
Speaking of apes, a long time ago the Bronx zoo acquired a rare pair of gorillas with the intention of breeding them. Unfortunately the male died before he could impregnate the female.
It occurred to their keeper that gorillas are close enough to humans that they could get a human alpha male to impregnate her. He sold the zoo officials on the notion, and propose that Donald trump be the alpha. Not because he was particularly well suited, but because he was in one of his many bouts of financial trouble, and would certainly jump at the chance of getting the half million dollar fee the zoo would offer.
“Mr. Felon,” the keeper said when he got an appointment, “we would like you to mate with our fine gorilla in order to impregnate her, in exchange for $500,000.”
“Not a chance!” El Weirdo replied. “I won’t pay you more than $1,000!”
@Monala:
We have a theme for this election! The Lysistrata election.
@Bill Jempty: Good list! And good to see that your current health distractions don’t seem to be impacting your ability to interact with your selected communities.
Three swing states have said that it is too late for pro-Republican Rat-Fucker RFK Jr to be removed from the ballot.
Despite being a Kennedy, his “regular” supporters favor Trump by a 2-1 margin. All his big money supporters do (as of March, Timothy Mellon had donated $20M to support Kennedy and $16M to support Trump, and was the biggest known backer to each campaign)
I’m sure that at some point in the past I have said “those rats ain’t gonna fuck themselves” and I was wrong.
Ha ha.
It never ceases to amaze me how willing people are to be a prop in one of DJT’s obvious photo ops. Even if you were MAGA through and through is this really how you want your loved one’s grave to be treated? He can pay his respects without a camera present. He can listen to the family without a camera present. It’s just such a crass move yet people are willing to play along. It’s gross.
A lot of the defenses of Trump voters come from people raised by parents who supported segregation, the Klan, and murder but did so in the same way that Trump voters vote for Trump. Honestly, I have some respect for white people in the south in 1962. Their entire world was racist bullshit. What else could they do?
If you vote for Trump in 2024 because you ‘can’t help it’ you should be sterilized. It’s a private vote in a booth which nobody has to know about. This isn’t like calling out your dad or your uncle because they were in a lynching party, and then living with the consequences with the people you love. If you can’t move a vote from one row to another, you are beyond any kind of sympathy.
I really think Trump is losing his political touch. This was just a stupid stunt that is predictably backfiring. As someone replied to my comment on another site, “The immovable object of the media’s apathy to Trump scandals is going up against the irresistible force of their military veneration.” It’s become a major event, Speaker Johnson has been drawn in, and it’s hard to see how it’s anything but damaging to Trump. It’s equally hard to imagine how Trump thought it would be otherwise.
The “family members” involved are long-time hardcore MAGA supporters – remember the guy who yelled out about Abbey Gate during Biden’s State of the Union speech? They attended that as Johnson’s guests. One spoke at the RNC national convention. The Hoovers have created quite a business doing sponsored events and selling merchandise commemorating? Celebrating? Memorialising? Not sure what the right word is – but centred on the death of their son. The idea this was a moving little private ceremony to which the families thought it would be nice to invite Trump is an insult to our intelligence.
Trump clearly intended to create the impression this was an official event which Democrats had chosen to ignore. MAGA websites are replete with comments to the effect that neither Biden nor Harris “bothered to show up”, which of course contradicts the line that Trump was there at the families’ invitation. The whole affair was amateurish and pointless, including the clumsy video of Trump trampling over graves as he criticises Joe Biden. The families involved – only two of the 13 who lost members at Abbey Gate, as far as I can tell – ought to be ashamed of themselves for turning the anniversary into a circus.