In a rare post that’s completely open to non-subscribers, Nate Silver argues that “Kamala Harris needs weird voters.” It begins with a few paragraphs arguing that, while perhaps “cathartic,” now-VP nominee Tim Walz’s meme that Trump, Vance, and company were “weird” had “no significant impact” on persuading voters to the Democratic side and, indeed, maybe have created a “backlash.” For this, he actually provides very little in the way of evidence.
That’s all by way of setting up a point that I think is only partly true:
Because Kamala Harris has a problem: she needs more voters than she currently has. And she needs more of them than Trump. So she needs some of the weird ones.
His evidence?
What do I mean by that? Harris currently has 49.4 percent of the vote in our national polling average:
Meanwhile, Trump has 46.5 percent. That means about 4 percent of the electorate is undecided or says they plan to vote for a third party. Some will actually vote independent, but our model thinks it’s only likely to be 1 or 1.5 percent of the electorate. So Harris needs her fair share of the roughly 3 percent of the remaining truly undecided voters — or she needs to pick off some voters who are only loosely committed to Trump without losing her weakly committed voters to him.
As a technical matter, I think Silver is wrong on two counts. First, it’s quite possible to win a US presidential election with 49.4 percent of the popular vote. Trump won in 2016 with only 46.1 percent, to Hillary Clinton’s 48.2 percent. Second, even if she needs to get to 51 percent to win, it’s not obvious she needs “weird” voters in the sense of attracting people who really like Trump. Indeed, I think they’re ungettable.
Quibbles with Silver’s setup aside, though, the rest of the article is a really useful look at what we can glean about where the race stands. While there are a number of helpful graphics at the link, I’m going to focus on his text.
So just who are those undecided voters? I’m going to look again at that NYT/Siena poll. I know we’ve talked about this poll a lot recently, but it has some particular advantages for these purposes. The Times survey has a large sample size (3,385 voters) and goes to great lengths to reach marginal voters that other polls miss (who are more likely to be undecided). Plus, the Times uses a probabilistic rather than a deterministic likely voter model. That’s important because some of these marginal voters will vote, even if we can’t be sure exactly which ones. So here are their demographic crosstabs on voters who say they’re undecided -– or that they’re only “probably” rather than “definitely” committed to their candidate:
[chart]
Young voters are much more likely to be not fully committed to their candidate choice than older ones, nonwhite voters more likely than white ones, independents more likely than Democrats or Republicans, and noncollege voters more likely than college grads (though I’d have guessed the gap would be bigger).
For what it’s worth, this does seem slightly favorable to Harris, since these are typically Democratic-leaning groups. But I can also easily imagine some Democratic stategists misinterpreting this data, because the priorities of undecided voters don’t at all match those of highly politically engaged voters. Harris hasn’t locked down the youth vote? It must be because of her position on the Israel-Palestine conflict, right?
[chart showing inflation, healthcare, housing, gun violence, jobs and nine other issues among the top two chosen by the 18-29 demo before getting to Israel/Palestine]
This sort of thing can be a problem for Democrats because the political class that works on campaigns or covers them for high-prestige media outlets is almost entirely plucked from college-educated Americans, often from privileged backgrounds. These people have strong and consistently left-of-center political opinions. Undecided and loosely committed voters, by contrast, are often politically moderate or have a checkerboard of opinions. They don’t like the major party brands and don’t trust the mainstream media.
This all strikes me as right. But it’s worth noting that only 4% of the 18-29 demo polled are undecided with another 25% “probable but not definite” for one of the two candidates. We’re talking about a rather small group.
As to how to reach them, Silver offers this:
Say what you want about Trump, but he’s always been willing to go after voters wherever they might be found — and however weird they are. He secured the endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while Biden and Harris have never seemed to have any plan for attracting Kennedy voters. He went to the South Bronx. In 2019, he attended a massive rally with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He’s gone on podcasts with a variety of crypto-adjacent, bro-ey influencers. And slowly his favorable ratings have crept up — they’re worse than Harris’s, but considerably better than they were four or eight years ago.
Look, I’m not going to vouch for every policy position Harris establishes or every interview she books as tactically brilliant. Still, it’s at least directionally speaking the right idea to expand the universe of voters she’s talking with. Because Harris needs a majority of voters and — I think I can say this as a Weird American myself — weird voters are in the majority.
So, it’s not helpful that Silver is using “weird” in multiple ways in the essay. While Silver and I are certainly WEIRD—and weird, in the sense that any of us who are obsessed with politics outside of the days before presidential elections are—he’s not “weird” in the sense Walz was ridiculing Vance et. al.
Regardless, I think he’s right that Harris’ pivot from a bunker mentality to going on the likes of the Charlamagne Tha God show and other niche programming to reach a broader audience is spot-on.
@TheRyGuy:
I assume you are basing that in the headline versus the actual substance of what was said. From the article:
Harris told Charlamagne that reparations for descendants of enslaved people should be studied, but stopped short of endorsing a reparations plan.
“On the point of reparations, it has to be studied. There’s no question about that. And I’ve been very clear about that position,” said Harris, who as a U.S. senator from California backed legislation that would have created a federal commission to study slavery reparations.
Ooh a study plan! How scary to normies.
Frankly, though I know you are anti-anti-Trump (you never actually tell us your position on the man, just that all of us are going to get ours when he wins), I think most of the headlines he generates are far more off putting (you know like “drink bleach to cure COVID”).
the fuzzy definition of weird is a proper point but on other hand Silver puts his finger on an ongoing myopia on the part of the activist / online Democrats, themselves signficantly overweight to University educated professional / white collar type socio-economic current profile – relative to non-(4yr)Uni degree holders in labouring classes socio-economic tranches for whom the heavily University inflected language and agendas clearly are not good appeals (as data demonstrate in long-term erosion in these areas)
Collapsing Youth to = College attending Youth is an ongoing error (of course also shared in the news media from similar socio-economic myopia, blindness) – ETA the note Silver has that 60% of probable voting electoriate is non-Uni grad is attention on that too.
Trump being old and addled as an attack point as per some recent data seems to show potenital promise.
The Dems’ use of “weird” has never totally sat right with me, maybe in part because of my own biases as a neurodivergent person who associates the insult with bullies. I understand what they’re going for, and I myself have described Trump as weird on occasion, so in a sense I’m not one to speak. It’s really part of a set of tactics Dems have been employing more and more in recent years, where they use mockery against Republicans. It’s something I can see merit to, because it’s Republicans who are the real bullies, and sometimes the most effective way to deflate bullies–who are the most insecure, thin-skinned individuals on the planet–is by turning their tactics back at them. It’s like the “small hands” or “small crowds” attack–the point isn’t trying to endorse the toxically masculine value system Trump espouses, or putting down all men who don’t happen to have massive schlongs. Rather, they’re exposing how much he fails by his own standards and how the entire image he’s built up of himself is fake.
Silver once again makes the mistake of looking at campaigns strictly through the lens of raw numbers. I don’t think there’s any clear way to determine how effective the “weird” attack has been. Probably focus groups can shed more light on its impact than polls, and even then I’d exercise caution, because whenever people offer reasons for why they’re voting a particular way, a lot of it is self-justifying rationalizations–it’s how they want others to see them, or how they want to see themselves. Humans aren’t particularly good at examining their own motivations. That said, if a lot of people in focus groups are saying they find Trump and Vance “weird,” it’s probably safe to say the attack has had an impact. Of course, that isn’t proof in any absolute sense that it was the most effective line of attack; if Dems didn’t come up with “weird,” they’d have come up with something else, and you can’t test the counterfactual.
At the end of the day, the use of mockery by political campaigns is always going to involve layers of subtext in its use of language. It’s like the windsurfing ads used against John Kerry–on the surface they were simply saying he was an unprincipled opportunist, but they were also trying to imply he was weak and effete. The “weird” attack is at bottom an attempt to suggest–correctly, in my view–that Republicans are out of touch with regular Americans’ experience and lacking in basic human feelings, but launching these attacks in a mocking way rather than with a tone of moral scolding, which has tended to backfire in the past when Dems have used it. I usually go for stronger language like “creepy” and “deranged,” but one of the keys to an effective insult is implying more than you’re saying.
Several years ago, in response to Michelle Obama’s line “When they go low, we go high,” Eric Holder said, “When they go low, we kick ’em.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Harris put Holder in charge of vp selection.
People who are truly undecided at this point are obviously detached from politics. They are not going to watch a party convention, sit through a 90 minute debate, watch 60 Minutes, read the NYT or WaPo, and they’re not here reading OTB. They are as likely to stay home as they are to cast a ballot…perhaps even more likely to take a knee. The faux undecided are yanking the chains of the Nate Silvers, who in turn yank the chains of the “elite” media.
First, when you say you and Silver are WEIRD I take it you mean Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. An acronym I believe goes back to psychologists recognizing, fairly recently, that almost all their subjects are WEIRD, and not typical of the world’s population. I don’t know if they also went on to realize most of their experiment subjects are college students who recognize the test setup is artificial, don’t give a damn about the 60 cent or five dollar rewards sometimes used, and may enjoy screwing with the experiment. Also, the majority of American voters may not be well educated, but they are all from an industrialized, rich, democratic culture.
Second, can somebody help me out? I’ve looked for the meme film clip of David Spade laying in bed saying he can’t give his virginity to someone who doesn’t something, something excite him. I never saw the movie in question, so maybe I have the wrong movie, wrong actor, whatever, but I can’t find the clip. It’s my picture of the undecided voter, waiting passively for some candidate to come along and light his fire.
Third, let me say once again, Karl Rove was right. It isn’t about undecideds, it’s about turnout.
People who are truly undecided at this point are obviously detached from politics.
I’m not sure this is right. Coincidentally, I just listened to a short podcast where Tara Palmieri was discussing her mother (educated, an attorney, etc.) who lives in small town North Carolina. What I got from the conversation was something we don’t talk about: family and social pressure. These decisions are not made in isolation. If your social group is for one candidate or your spouse or whatever, there is a quiet (and maybe not so quiet) pressure to conform. If you’re one of those people you are not going to “decide” until you’re in the voting booth. They say the gender gap in this year’s election is the widest ever. And if that voter gender gap is manifested in your marriage, then that can be difficult to navigate. It is the opposite of detachment from reality.
My view of persuadable voters is to classify them into these groupings:
1 – These people might not vote, if they do it will be for Harris.
2- These people might not vote, if they do it will be for Trump.
3a- People unlikely to vote and who have not yet chosen between either.
3b- People likely to vote who have not yet chosen between either.
I am not aware of any good data on the relative size of these groups, but these groups call for a variety of strategies.
To go after Group 1, Harris should try to make herself look better such as going on Call Her Daddy, Joe Rogan etc. Try to connect with them, get them interested.
To go after Group 2, make Trump less attractive to them such as drawing attention cognitive impairment, make him look weak etc. Anything that makes Trump look like a tough guy could be counterproductive with these people, so deemphasize the threat to democracy, the word “fascism” etc. or at least in the venues these people notice.
@Mike in Arlington: Thanks for the link. It was interesting seeing Hayes’s frustration at watching undecideds declaring that while they care about issues, politicians are unlikely to be able to succeed at getting those issues addressed. We (I count myself as an undecided for this argument) watch as assaults on the status quo repeatedly get turned away because, ultimately, politicians have to go along to get along. In the darkness of his private thoughts, Hayes says, “next time.” I reply, “okay, X-er, if you say, so.”
Karl Rove was right. It isn’t about undecideds, it’s about turnout.
Agreed. And while this seems straightforward, it can be more complicated than one thinks.
Horrifically oversimplified:
GOP base: a lot of older people who will build their day around voting. Main task is to make sure they can get to the polls.
Dem base: a lot of working people who may have to squeeze voting in before they go to work or when they get off of work, or, for even more fun, try to vote between their TWO jobs. Main task is to make sure they remember to vote, or don’t skip it because they are exhausted/too busy/over scheduled.
Now, you push your Party ID’ed folks through a bunch of different filters (do they vote in every election, or just November, or just presidential years? What are the numbers in the voting precinct? How many voters in the household, and is there a difference in their voting patterns?) From there, you end up with lists of “these people will probably vote unless there’s a major disaster” and “these people will need reminding.” Those on the first list get a reminder. Those on the second get (a lot) more reminders.
It’s an intensive process that usually doesn’t stop until you tell them you’ve voted.
It’s only a good tactic if Harris can avoid alienating more voters than she attracts.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/10/15/5-key-moments-kamala-harris-charlamagne-tha-god/75691868007/
@TheRyGuy:
I assume you are basing that in the headline versus the actual substance of what was said. From the article:
Ooh a study plan! How scary to normies.
Frankly, though I know you are anti-anti-Trump (you never actually tell us your position on the man, just that all of us are going to get ours when he wins), I think most of the headlines he generates are far more off putting (you know like “drink bleach to cure COVID”).
the fuzzy definition of weird is a proper point but on other hand Silver puts his finger on an ongoing myopia on the part of the activist / online Democrats, themselves signficantly overweight to University educated professional / white collar type socio-economic current profile – relative to non-(4yr)Uni degree holders in labouring classes socio-economic tranches for whom the heavily University inflected language and agendas clearly are not good appeals (as data demonstrate in long-term erosion in these areas)
Collapsing Youth to = College attending Youth is an ongoing error (of course also shared in the news media from similar socio-economic myopia, blindness) – ETA the note Silver has that 60% of probable voting electoriate is non-Uni grad is attention on that too.
Trump being old and addled as an attack point as per some recent data seems to show potenital promise.
The Dems’ use of “weird” has never totally sat right with me, maybe in part because of my own biases as a neurodivergent person who associates the insult with bullies. I understand what they’re going for, and I myself have described Trump as weird on occasion, so in a sense I’m not one to speak. It’s really part of a set of tactics Dems have been employing more and more in recent years, where they use mockery against Republicans. It’s something I can see merit to, because it’s Republicans who are the real bullies, and sometimes the most effective way to deflate bullies–who are the most insecure, thin-skinned individuals on the planet–is by turning their tactics back at them. It’s like the “small hands” or “small crowds” attack–the point isn’t trying to endorse the toxically masculine value system Trump espouses, or putting down all men who don’t happen to have massive schlongs. Rather, they’re exposing how much he fails by his own standards and how the entire image he’s built up of himself is fake.
Silver once again makes the mistake of looking at campaigns strictly through the lens of raw numbers. I don’t think there’s any clear way to determine how effective the “weird” attack has been. Probably focus groups can shed more light on its impact than polls, and even then I’d exercise caution, because whenever people offer reasons for why they’re voting a particular way, a lot of it is self-justifying rationalizations–it’s how they want others to see them, or how they want to see themselves. Humans aren’t particularly good at examining their own motivations. That said, if a lot of people in focus groups are saying they find Trump and Vance “weird,” it’s probably safe to say the attack has had an impact. Of course, that isn’t proof in any absolute sense that it was the most effective line of attack; if Dems didn’t come up with “weird,” they’d have come up with something else, and you can’t test the counterfactual.
At the end of the day, the use of mockery by political campaigns is always going to involve layers of subtext in its use of language. It’s like the windsurfing ads used against John Kerry–on the surface they were simply saying he was an unprincipled opportunist, but they were also trying to imply he was weak and effete. The “weird” attack is at bottom an attempt to suggest–correctly, in my view–that Republicans are out of touch with regular Americans’ experience and lacking in basic human feelings, but launching these attacks in a mocking way rather than with a tone of moral scolding, which has tended to backfire in the past when Dems have used it. I usually go for stronger language like “creepy” and “deranged,” but one of the keys to an effective insult is implying more than you’re saying.
Several years ago, in response to Michelle Obama’s line “When they go low, we go high,” Eric Holder said, “When they go low, we kick ’em.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Harris put Holder in charge of vp selection.
People who are truly undecided at this point are obviously detached from politics. They are not going to watch a party convention, sit through a 90 minute debate, watch 60 Minutes, read the NYT or WaPo, and they’re not here reading OTB. They are as likely to stay home as they are to cast a ballot…perhaps even more likely to take a knee. The faux undecided are yanking the chains of the Nate Silvers, who in turn yank the chains of the “elite” media.
Chris Hayes wrote an article about undecided voters back in 2004 that I think really hits the nail on the head. I thought some people in this forum may find it interesting.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186709/decision-makers-chris-hayes
First, when you say you and Silver are WEIRD I take it you mean Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. An acronym I believe goes back to psychologists recognizing, fairly recently, that almost all their subjects are WEIRD, and not typical of the world’s population. I don’t know if they also went on to realize most of their experiment subjects are college students who recognize the test setup is artificial, don’t give a damn about the 60 cent or five dollar rewards sometimes used, and may enjoy screwing with the experiment. Also, the majority of American voters may not be well educated, but they are all from an industrialized, rich, democratic culture.
Second, can somebody help me out? I’ve looked for the meme film clip of David Spade laying in bed saying he can’t give his virginity to someone who doesn’t something, something excite him. I never saw the movie in question, so maybe I have the wrong movie, wrong actor, whatever, but I can’t find the clip. It’s my picture of the undecided voter, waiting passively for some candidate to come along and light his fire.
Third, let me say once again, Karl Rove was right. It isn’t about undecideds, it’s about turnout.
@Charley in Cleveland:
I’m not sure this is right. Coincidentally, I just listened to a short podcast where Tara Palmieri was discussing her mother (educated, an attorney, etc.) who lives in small town North Carolina. What I got from the conversation was something we don’t talk about: family and social pressure. These decisions are not made in isolation. If your social group is for one candidate or your spouse or whatever, there is a quiet (and maybe not so quiet) pressure to conform. If you’re one of those people you are not going to “decide” until you’re in the voting booth. They say the gender gap in this year’s election is the widest ever. And if that voter gender gap is manifested in your marriage, then that can be difficult to navigate. It is the opposite of detachment from reality.
@gVOR10:
My view of persuadable voters is to classify them into these groupings:
1 – These people might not vote, if they do it will be for Harris.
2- These people might not vote, if they do it will be for Trump.
3a- People unlikely to vote and who have not yet chosen between either.
3b- People likely to vote who have not yet chosen between either.
I am not aware of any good data on the relative size of these groups, but these groups call for a variety of strategies.
To go after Group 1, Harris should try to make herself look better such as going on Call Her Daddy, Joe Rogan etc. Try to connect with them, get them interested.
To go after Group 2, make Trump less attractive to them such as drawing attention cognitive impairment, make him look weak etc. Anything that makes Trump look like a tough guy could be counterproductive with these people, so deemphasize the threat to democracy, the word “fascism” etc. or at least in the venues these people notice.
I skip any words of wisdom re Groups 3a, 3b.
@Mike in Arlington: Thanks for the link. It was interesting seeing Hayes’s frustration at watching undecideds declaring that while they care about issues, politicians are unlikely to be able to succeed at getting those issues addressed. We (I count myself as an undecided for this argument) watch as assaults on the status quo repeatedly get turned away because, ultimately, politicians have to go along to get along. In the darkness of his private thoughts, Hayes says, “next time.” I reply, “okay, X-er, if you say, so.”
@gVOR10:
Agreed. And while this seems straightforward, it can be more complicated than one thinks.
Horrifically oversimplified:
GOP base: a lot of older people who will build their day around voting. Main task is to make sure they can get to the polls.
Dem base: a lot of working people who may have to squeeze voting in before they go to work or when they get off of work, or, for even more fun, try to vote between their TWO jobs. Main task is to make sure they remember to vote, or don’t skip it because they are exhausted/too busy/over scheduled.
Now, you push your Party ID’ed folks through a bunch of different filters (do they vote in every election, or just November, or just presidential years? What are the numbers in the voting precinct? How many voters in the household, and is there a difference in their voting patterns?) From there, you end up with lists of “these people will probably vote unless there’s a major disaster” and “these people will need reminding.” Those on the first list get a reminder. Those on the second get (a lot) more reminders.
It’s an intensive process that usually doesn’t stop until you tell them you’ve voted.