Official Election Poll Thread: Part 4

And so it begins.....Part 4.

Nate Silver, 10/10

D+3. 49.2 vs 46.2

Today's numbers. This is the key chart. The race has moved by 0.3 points toward Trump over the past week, slightly more in states than others (possibly noise).

Should Trump feel a little better about the race? Sure.

Has there been a major change? No.

Bumped, so people can find.

Thanks OP and R3.

I was more confident last week -- I'm really not liking the most recent Quinnipiac and Emerson data.

Simon Rosenberg with his Hopium Chronicles substack is making a persuasive case for Harris still winning, and for the polling aggregates being a bit wrong in Trump's favor. But we slide into belief rather than evidence, there.

It's all starting to feel closer to a 50/50 shot, to me. Not great. That said, if it were still Biden, we'd have thrown in the towel by now.

I’ll be playing the role of R1 here.

Thanks, OP.

Bump

Just speaking anecdotally as someone who answers a lot of poll calls I’ve stopped picking up the phone for unknown numbers the last few weeks

[quote] Simon Rosenberg with his Hopium Chronicles substack is making a persuasive case for Harris still winning, and for the polling aggregates being a bit wrong in Trump's favor.

I've given up following Simon. He didn't miss a beat spinning between Biden & Harris. Just too much of a party apparatchik to be credible to me.

Not that Harris has any chance of winning Florida, but the Marist poll is so different than the NYT/Siena College poll showing a Trump blowout.

well, this guy me feel better anyway.

He explains why some recent polls showing the race tightening (or Trump ahead) are flawed. He breaks some of them down - who was polled, whether the leaked "internal" poll had a hidden agenda, etc.

He's convinced Harris will win decisively and at least he's shows his work.

* he shows his work

Random you tube clips do not instill greater confidence 🤷🏻‍♂️

But he says WHY some of the polls are wrong, and I think he makes a lot of sense.

You instill no added confidence —but thanks.

R15, did you actually watch the video? The analyst says that polls count likely voters as those who voted in the recent past, which he concedes they should. But that doesn’t take into account all of the new voters—and why it matters is that recent elections are showing that likely voters has become less and less of a predictor. Hence the recent Dem wins where polls showed Repukes leading, and the good Dem showing in 2022.

Yes—it’s not his original idea. He is just repeating stuff on You Tube. That gives no greater confidence. That is all.

Ok r17, I guess you have a problem with data and analysis. And who cares whether it’s his original idea. He was able to sum up the situation very clearly.

Btw, here’s some more perspectives based on the same data as explained in R11’s video. These are political analysts and historians who are coming to the same conclusion.

I see someone with bad hair sitting in a parked car.🤷🏻‍♂️

…which does not inspire confidence anymore than some guy on YouTube. The argument raised has been well-covered in the press—we understand the point. These videos do nothing, truly. Tik Tok?!

She summed up the perspective of two experts in one video.so instead of listening to two long ass videos you got the Cliff Notes.

Or just scroll through the prior related thread, where this is amply covered? Just a suggestion.

Generally, I find the “the polls are wrong” arguments unconvincing.

R24 the polls are pretty much always wrong. What happened to the huge red wave predicted 2 years ago? Obama was trailing Romney for months before the 2012 election. Did Romney win? No. When have the polls actually been right?

The polls may be wrong, but that doesn’t mean they are wrong in the direction you want.

I’m waiting for his soeech in Miami. He will definitely screw everything up with Latinos. He is not too bright and his mental health is declining. I bet he will blunder and say that Latino and immigrants are thieves etc something racist and xenophobic.Most of the audience are probably Cubans that look white and he will forget that his audience is Latino because he won’t see Mexican faces. He will fuck it big time.

WSJ’s latest

^ The Nevada poll is the most surprising. I had understood of late that that was the battleground state the campaign was most confident of winning.

R29, WSJ is a Murdoch publication. It is like a Fox that hasn't had to pay $787M in lying fines. It is not like Fox Analytics. It has not been able to poll Nevada since 2015. The other polls gauge NV better.

Polling is not part of Op-Ed. Their polling operation is respected.

[quote] The Nevada poll is the most surprising. I had understood of late that that was the battleground state the campaign was most confident of winning.

I assume you mean the Harris campaign, and I agree that NV should show Harris ahead. The set of polls also shows Harris ahead in Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona, so other than the Nevada poll, their polling methodology appears to favor the Democrats, so don’t know what happened with NV.

We keep forgetting about margin of error. Most reputable polls have a MOE of 4-5%. That means one poll could show Harris ahead in NV by 2% and the next poll by the same agency could show that Trump was ahead by 1%, and in reality Harris could be FURTHER ahead....

Aggregated polls, movement, the actual actions by the campaign, the hallowed , leaked, "internal polls", external events.... all can give a picture better than any single poll.

"When have the polls actually been right?"

Well.... if we're expecting early October polls to state what will happen weeks later, that is not how it works. The final polls were fairly accurate in 2004 (very close contest, Bush won narrowly) and very accurate in 2008 (Obama beating McCain by 7 pts). But yeah, not so accurate since then.

The final average of national polls in 2016 were almost spot-on. Giving Hillary another .5% win in the popular vote.

Polls are only showing the trend lines and the trend lines are trending to another 6% win to Democrats.

Don’t be greedy^. Take 3.5-4% and run with it. A squeaker: 276 electoral votes

Has the polls ever been so nuts?

I just got a text, my ballot’s on the way.

I’d like some of what r36 is smoking.

I got mine the other day, r39. Followed by my Dem sample ballot. I’ll fill it out tonight, after work.

Young Voters Have Moved Solidly to Kamala Harris

The problem with that argument, R43, is that the tightening has been seen in the non-partisan polls, including Emerson and Quinnipiac.

Isn't the argument the tightening is potentially exacerbated by the volume of partisan polls?

That might apply to poll averages, R45, but how could it affect the polls of reputable pollsters!

What makes a polling organization "non-partisan"? Do they just have to claim they are?

No one was arguing that, R46.

What, then, was the import of R45? That all these partisan polls are negatively shaping the views of voters?

[quote] Isn't the argument the tightening is potentially exacerbated by the volume of partisan polls?

Yes, but Harris has also seen her numbers tighten in the polls by the nonpartisan pollsters. Nonpartisan pollsters that had her up by 2 or 3 points a month ago now have her tied or slightly behind Trump in the battleground states. Her numbers are tightening not only among all polls collectively but also within individual polls.

I have never heard of anyone of my acquaintances that has ever been contacted to participate in any one of these polls.

A lot of shoot the messenger & blame the refs.

The contention was the number of partisan polls potentially skewed the extent of the tightening, R49. Jesus. It's not that hard.

Let’s try this one more time. Exactly how does the number of partisan polls impact the findings of the reputable, nonpartisan ones that are showing a tightening of the race?

No one said that. Fuck off.

Blocking you, R54. Don't bother. Imbecile.

Are people tracking the early voting numbers? Some incredible signals are coming in across states.

In PA, the percentage of black women voting so far is up 248% compared to 2020. For women overall, it’s 146%.

Women are coming in strong in Michigan as well.

Why is Harris losing Pennsylvania? Fuck this shit. I'm starting to lose hope now. The 4 last polls have had Trump in the lead. This fucking sucks.

Harris is ahead in Pennsylvania. Polls aren’t votes. Votes are votes.

R59 Look at this. Trump is in the lead in the 4 last polls.

[quote]In PA, the percentage of black women voting so far is up 248% compared to 2020. For women overall, it’s 146%.

So if Harris loses Pennsylvania, are these being presented as the silver lining?

R60, those polls are all within the margin of error. Some of them are Republican leaning polls. And every poll is guessing on turn out. One recent poll that has Trump up in likely voters had crosstabs that Philadelphia only contributing a twelfth of their 2020 numbers. Ridiculous guesswork.

I’m more focused on what’s happening right now with real voters. How people are early voting? Who’s winning the registration game. And who has the ground game to turn out votes?

Based on those factors, Harris is winning so far and if she keeps building her lead, Trump won’t be able to catch up.

Simon Rosenberg, yt, 2 days ago, "We Are Winning the Election..."

Minute 15 – his 2 favorite "quality" weekly polls are Economist/Yougov and Morning Consult. The latter had her up 6 pts this past week, up 1 and her biggest lead yet in that poll; and Econ/Yougov had her up 4 (also gaining 1 point over the previous week). The NYT poll which has been Trump-leaning has her up 4 (when she’s never been up before) and gaining 4 pts over the last poll.

Credible serious pollsters are showing her up 4 in PA and up 3 in MI, both Republican pollsters. He gave reasons to be optimistic about Arizona and even North Carolina… he said 50 to 55% of people will vote early. Dems are running ahead about 7 points ahea of where our early vote was this time in 2020, nationally.

It’s amazing that in just 1 month Trump might be elected president again. Americans are like battered wives.

Just six of 12 Pennsylvania swing voters who backed Donald Trump in 2016 but switched to Joe Biden in 2020 said they're all-in for Vice President Kamala Harris in our latest Engagious/Sago focus group.

Two others said they're going back to Trump, while the remaining four lean toward Harris but reserve the right to change their minds, as they grapple with uncertainty or mixed emotion.

"The idea that this close out, four Biden voters the last time around are not locked in for Harris is a sign of vulnerability," said Engagious president Rich Thau, who moderated the focus groups.

"That only half of them are locked in for Harris, that to me is consequential," Thau said. "It's not apathy. These are folks that will vote. The question is, for whom?"

The online panels, conducted Tuesday night, were comprised of four Republicans, three Democrats and five independents. While a focus group is not a statistically significant sample like a poll, the responses show how some voters are thinking and talking about current events.

One undecided who leans toward Harris had a vote-splitting approach. If Democrats are poised to lose control of the Senate, keeping a Democrat in the White House could provide a political counterbalance.

While the Harris campaign has deployed Republican surrogates including former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) to try to win over swing voters, just one of the undecided or Trump-leaning voters in this week's focus group viewed Cheney's recent endorsement of Harris favorably.

At the same time, 8 in 12 saw Democrats' argument that this presidential election is the most consequential of their lifetimes as an exaggeration.

"Many of these Pennsylvania swing voters have grown skeptical of end-of-democracy warnings, and now suffer from 'Most-Consequential-Election Fatigue,'" Thau said. Between the lines: Conspiracy theories continue to shape some voters' mindsets.

Trump was targeted in two apparent assassination attempts this year — one in Butler, Pa., as well as another at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla. Despite no evidence, five say they think it's possible Trump staged the attempt.

I think economy will be the deciding factor in this election. I have just seen stuff online, as I'm not American, but it seems like the prices of food have gone up a lot, just like here in Norway. We already have some of the highest grocery prices in the world, in just two years they have increased by 50 %, which is a lot. IF people are unhappy with current prices and inflation, I could see them voting for Trump. Maybe people think money is more important than abortion rights. I obviously don't agree, but I fear Trump will win. I really hope not though.

It’s the economy, stupid.

R63, I was a faithful consumer of Simon Rosenberg’s substack earlier in the cycle, pre & immediately post-June 27, when he consistently hyped Biden’s chances. And he didn’t miss a beat when Harris became the nominee. But his “hopium,” I came to realize, is his entire brand. So I no longer pay much attention to him.

"Much of the erosion in support for Ms. Harris is driven by a growing belief that Democrats, who have long celebrated Black voters as the “backbone” of their party, have failed to deliver on their promises, the poll showed. Forty percent of African American voters under 30 said the Republican Party was more likely to follow through on its campaign commitments than Democrats were.

“They sweep table scraps off the table like we’re a trained dog and say, ‘This is for you,’” LaPage Drake, 63, of Cedar Hill, Texas, just outside Dallas, said of the Democratic Party. “And we clap like trained seals.”

Mr. Drake, who owns a tree removal service, said he would back Mr. Trump.

“Regardless of how people call him racist and stuff, he is for the country of America,” Mr. Drake said.

The vice president’s support from Black women is strong, about 83 percent. Twelve percent of Black women said they would back Mr. Trump, with 5 percent undecided. But the slip from Mr. Biden’s 2020 numbers among Black men is striking; 70 percent said they would vote for Ms. Harris in November, down from 85 percent in 2020. This is in line with the gender gap more broadly, but relatively new among Black voters.

Still, despite Mr. Trump’s continuing efforts to convince African American voters that they were better off during his presidency, more Black voters now, than in February, say the policies of the Biden-Harris administration have helped them.

Substantially fewer now say that Mr. Trump’s policies helped them."

God, this thing is all over the map....

Remember the good old days, when Pennsylvania mattered most? Well, she's holding it.

"In Pennsylvania, Ms. Harris’s polling lead has been steady, though the state remains tight. Her advantage, 50 percent to 47 percent, falls inside the margin of error. But this was the third Times/Siena survey in two months showing support for Ms. Harris from at least half of the state. (Her lead in the poll was four percentage points when calculated using unrounded figures.)"

If momentum counts, this is what passes for it and she's got it, so that's something.

It’s not the economy . The economy is fine.

It’s misogyny with a soupçon of racism.

R71, that's just wrong. Poll after poll says how people feel about the economy is the biggest driver. It doesn't matter if the numbers say one thing but the feeling is another. It just doesn't.

Two others said they're going back to Trump, while the remaining four lean toward Harris [bold]but reserve the right to change their minds, as they grapple with uncertainty or mixed emotion[/bold]. [ref: R65]

Fucking hell, these people who think that indecision and reserving the right to be stupid fucks marks them somehow as intelligent. It's not careful consideration if you can't choose between two candidates distinct in every way; it's a mark of vain idiocy.

[quote] It’s not the economy . The economy is fine.

No it’s not. Every day Americans can’t afford shit. The very rich are doing good with the economy, the majority of Americans aren’t.

People are not going to tell pollsters (or in many cases themselves) that they are misogynistic or racist.

Actually, wages have grown faster than inflation, which is receding, and unemployment is very low. That is “fine” by most objective measures, though people do blame the incumbent for past inflation, which is also a major headwind.

A white male Democrat would be winning in a romp.

It’s sheer idiocy that thinks reproductive rights aren’t part of people’s views about the economy.

It’s like saying people aren’t concerned with inflation because they are more concerned with economy.

^not Biden. Too feeble-looking.

[quote] It’s sheer idiocy that thinks reproductive rights aren’t part of people’s views about the economy.

What?

At the end of our last wave of post-debate battleground polls, there were two state poll results that didn’t seem to fit the rest.

One was Pennsylvania: Kamala Harris led by four percentage points, making it her best result in the battlegrounds. It was our only state poll conducted immediately after the debate, when her supporters might have been especially excited to respond to a poll.

The other was Arizona: Donald J. Trump led by five points, making it his best result among the battlegrounds. Even stranger, it was a huge swing from our previous poll of the state, which Vice President Harris had led by five points.

In both cases, it seemed possible that another New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College poll would yield a significantly different result. With that in mind, we decided to take an additional measure of Arizona and Pennsylvania before our final polls at the end of the month.

The result? Essentially the same as our prior polls.

Ms. Harris leads by four points in Pennsylvania, just as she did immediately after the final debate.

Mr. Trump leads by six points in Arizona, about the same as the five-point lead he held three weeks ago.

That’s not what I expected. The average of other polls continues to show a tighter race in both states, and — unlike in Florida — there isn’t an obvious explanation for why the Times/Inquirer/Siena poll is producing a somewhat different result in these two states.

Nonetheless, the rest of this newsletter will try to make sense of it all. To be blunt, I can’t really make complete sense of it; there’s no conclusive explanation. You may find this unsatisfying — I do too — but it does yield an important insight: With less than four weeks to go, the polls don’t offer a clear answer on who will win.

Whether or not today’s polls are off-target, the last two polls of Arizona take a clear position: Mr. Trump is well ahead.

Other polls differ. As of Friday, he led by only one point in the Arizona polling average compiled by The Times, before the Times/Inquirer/Siena poll was added.

The other polls come a lot closer to what I would have expected. Arizona does not easily fit the two overarching explanations for Democratic weakness offered by Times/Siena polling this cycle. It’s not a state, like Florida, where Democrats struggled in the midterm elections. And while the state does have many Hispanic voters, Ms. Harris has a fairly healthy 20-point lead among them.

Instead, the two Times/Inquirer/Siena polls show something we’re not seeing in many places in the country: a real challenge for Ms. Harris among white voters, including white college graduates.

If I had to craft a narrative to explain why Arizona is playing out differently, it would probably center on the unusual Democratic dependence on Republican-leaning voters (think, McCain Republicans and independents). Republicans have a clear advantage in party registration; to win, Democrats need to peel off a sizable chunk of Republicans and win unaffiliated voters by a wide margin.

When Mark Kelly won his Senate race in Arizona in 2022, he won 10 percent of self-identified Republicans and 14 percent of registered Republicans, and he held a wide lead among unaffiliated voters in our final Times/Siena poll. His fellow Democrat Ruben Gallego is currently seeing very similar results in his Senate race against Kari Lake. Mr. Gallego’s seven-point lead is even larger than Mr. Kelly’s was two years ago.

Ms. Harris is not winning over traditionally Republican-leaning voters, at least not in the last two Times/Siena polls. She isn’t winning independents, and she doesn’t draw away more Republicans than Mr. Trump draws Democrats, perhaps because she is not seen as especially moderate.

It’s also possible, of course, that the Times/Siena poll is simply off by a few points. Polls are inherently imprecise, and the Times/Siena poll is not perfect. On balance, our methodological choices have yielded more accurate results than other surveys, but it’s certainly possible Arizona will go the other way this year; this is the kind of case that poll averages are built to handle.

Over the last month, we’ve done 14 state or national polls. Of those polls, there are only two where Ms. Harris is running more than two points ahead of President Biden’s performance in the 2020 election: the two polls of Pennsylvania.

While the Times/Inquirer/Siena poll in Pennsylvania doesn’t differ as much from the average of other polls as it does in Arizona, the stakes of a four-point lead for Ms. Harris in Pennsylvania could be quite a bit higher. If Pennsylvania really is her strongest battleground state, it’s a big deal.

Here again, this is not what I would have expected. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago when polls suggested that Pennsylvania seemed as if it might be the weak link for Ms. Harris in her likeliest path to victory. The voter registration numbers have looked very good for Republicans as well.

But the Times/Inquirer/Siena polling isn’t entirely alone in suggesting that Pennsylvania might be a relative strong point for Ms. Harris, at least at the moment. Just last week, Quinnipiac had Ms. Harris ahead by three in Pennsylvania, even as it had her trailing in Michigan and Wisconsin. And a series of district polls — a Susquehanna poll in the 10th District and a Muhlenberg College poll in the Seventh District — both looked good or even great for Ms. Harris.

There are plausible reasons for Ms. Harris’s strength in Pennsylvania relative to Wisconsin and Michigan: It has a more highly educated population; it also may have the smallest share of white evangelical Christians (newly relevant in a year when abortion is a key issue); and it has a smaller Arab American and Muslim population than Michigan does (many of these voters are furious with the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza). Together, that may create the ingredients for Pennsylvania to scoot to the left of Michigan (it was already to the left of Wisconsin in 2020).

Of course, it’s hard to avoid wondering about another possibility: nonresponse bias, which could happen if Democrats were overly eager to pick up the phone. That seemed to be the likeliest interpretation of the last Pennsylvania poll, and there were signs of it in the data.

This time, it’s harder to find. In fact, white registered Democrats were only 4 percent likelier to respond to the survey than white Republicans. (After the first debate, they were 16 percent likelier to respond.) There could still be nonresponse bias if, for instance, we simply get the wrong kind of Democrats or Republicans, but it’s reasonable to expect that Republicans as a whole would be much less likely to respond if Mr. Trump’s supporters were less likely to respond. At the very least, this is very different than it was ahead of the 2020 election, when Democrats responded to the Times/Siena poll in far greater numbers than Republicans.

It’s also worth noting that, historically, Pennsylvania hasn’t been an especially bad state for nonresponse bias. It hasn’t been immune, of course; the polls underestimated Mr. Trump here in both 2016 and 2020. But by most measures, the polls were more accurate in Pennsylvania than in the other relatively white Northern states. So while nonresponse bias can certainly explain a good result for Ms. Harris, it is less obvious that it explains why Pennsylvania looks decent for her compared with Times/Siena results like Trump +17 in Montana, Biden +2 in Wisconsin, Trump +6 in Arizona and Trump +13 in Florida.

More on recalled vote There is, however, one warning sign in the Pennsylvania data — and it’s one we’ve been talking about a lot lately: “recalled 2020 vote.”

As regular readers may know by now, recall vote is a measure of how respondents say they voted in the last presidential election. Some pollsters weight their polls using recalled vote, essentially adjusting the number of Biden ’20 or Trump ’20 voters in their poll to match the outcome of that election.

Historically, weighting polls by recalled vote increases support for the party that lost the last election (because, among other reasons, people are more likely to say they voted for the winner). But there’s a case the measure is improving, and pollsters have been using it more, particularly as a way to make sure their polls won’t underestimate Mr. Trump yet again.

By recall vote, the Times/Inquirer/Siena poll in Pennsylvania is Biden +10, even though Mr. Biden actually won the state by just one point in 2020. While recall vote may be inaccurate, this is out of line with our other Times/Siena results. Our national poll, for instance, showed Biden +5 on recall vote (actual result, Biden +4.5).

Mr. Trump would lead the Pennsylvania poll if it were weighted on recall vote. And notably, the previously mentioned polls showing good results for Ms. Harris in Pennsylvania — the Quinnipiac poll, and the Muhlenberg and Susquehanna district polls — aren’t weighted on recall vote, either. And, like Times/Inquirer/Siena, the Muhlenberg poll of the Seventh District asked respondents about their recalled vote and found Mr. Biden with a wider lead on recall vote than the actual result (seven points, compared with 0.6 points in the district in 2020).

As I wrote last weekend, the recall vote measure has been extremely inaccurate in the past — so inaccurate that it would have made the polls less accurate in every election in recent memory. But a majority of pollsters are now using it anyway, and it’s entirely possible that it will make their polls look more like the final result in the end. After all, the apparent degree of error on recall vote varies greatly from election to election, and this election contains a variety of twists — namely, that the loser of the last election is running again (and doesn’t concede defeat) and the winner isn’t running again (and in a sense lost a rematch against the loser). Maybe, this time, it will do the trick.

If we had used recall-vote weighting this cycle, the Times/Siena polls would tell a very different story.

How recent Times/Siena polls would have changed

National: Harris+4 —> Harris+4

Wisconsin: Harris+2 —> Trump+1

Michigan: Harris+1 —> Trump+1

Pennsylvania: Harris+4 —> Trump+2

Texas: Trump+6 — > Trump+3

Arizona: Trump+6 —> Trump+6

Georgia: Trump+4 —> Trump+6

North Carolina: Trump+3 —> Trump+6

Florida: Trump+13 —> Trump+7

If the final election results look like these recalled-vote-weighted estimates, it would be something of a nightmare for Democrats. It would also be a world where the Democrats made a big miscalculation by not going harder for victory in Texas. Ted Cruz would be hanging on by a thread in his Senate race if these recall-weighted results were right, even as other Democrats fell behind (including Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, who leads by five points in today’s poll).

There’s one other thing that’s interesting about these numbers for weighted past vote: If they were the final election results, it would mean a pretty good year for Times/Siena accuracy. The average error across the reported Times/Siena polls would be 2.7 points — well below the long-term average (4.3 points) for presidential election polling. The polls would have understated Mr. Trump by only one point on average — also better than usual, and far better than in 2016 or 2020.

Of course, “good” by statistical measures is not necessarily “good enough” for the purpose at hand. The recall-weight-voted polls tell a very different story about this election. Ms. Harris wins in one; in the other, she loses. But this is mostly because the election is so close: With the race essentially tied, even a modestly below-average amount of error can yield an enormously different outcome.

We will find out which set of results comes closer in November. Either way, the significant effect of recall-vote weighting — and the decision of pollsters to use it — illustrates the uncertainty that’s always inherent in polling and ultimately in our understanding of the election with less than four weeks to go.

I think she means if you want an abortion it's not fair if you can't afford it.

Actually, I don't know what the fuck she means either.

[quote]It’s amazing that in just 1 month Trump might be elected president again.

The last time a sitting vice-president won was 1988 with George H.W. Bush. Before that, it was Martin Van Buren in 1836. It would not be extraordinary if Vice-President Harris loses.

Let's not sane-wash our tilt to fascism.

Loses to TRUMP is the point. He’s a traitor, an idiot, a past loser, insane and a convicted felon.

Not to mention a fascist and a pathological liar.

Anyone a paid subscriber who can give us the balance of this post:

The past quarter-century of American politics has been dominated by two major trends. One is simply increasing political polarization: red states have perpetually become redder, and blue states bluer. In 1996, only 7 states were decided by 20 or more percentage points. But in 2020, 19 states were, leading to many wasted votes.

The other is increasing polarization along educational lines. As recently as 20061, there was basically no difference in voting Democratic or Republican based on whether a voter had graduated from college. But in 2020, Joe Biden won 54 percent of the vote among white voters who’d graduated from college but just 37 percent who hadn’t, according to estimates from the data firm Catalist.2

These educational splits have typically been lesser among nonwhite voters. But the increasing educational divide is coming into tension with the most longstanding feature of American politics: racial polarization. Since the Civil Rights Era, Black voters have been the building blocks of the Democratic coalition, voting for them in overwhelming numbers. Hispanic and Asian American voters have been more swingy but have usually at least leaned toward the Democratic Party.

However, Black and Hispanic voters are more working class — less likely to have completed college degrees — than white ones. So in principle, a continued increase in educational polarization would lead to erosion in Democratic support among these groups, but gains with white ones. From an Electoral College standpoint, this would actually be a good trade for Democrats since white voters are overrepresented in their impact on the Electoral College relative to their share of the overall voting population.

And in some polls, that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Donald Trump’s polling against Joe Biden had consistently shown him making huge gains with Black and Hispanic voters, especially younger voters and those without college degrees. Kamala Harris’s numbers have improved among these groups, but the same trend persists, including in the most high-quality surveys. For instance, a New York Times/Siena College oversample of Black voters from their recent national survey showed Trump winning 15 percent of the Black vote, up from 9 percent in 2020. That’s not great — Black voters are still very, very Democratic — but it’s potentially enough to make the difference in states like Georgia.

Meanwhile, a recent national NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC poll exclusively of Hispanic voters showed Harris winning them by only 14 points. Keep in mind that there’s never any hard evidence of how any racial group votes — we have to rely on exit polls and ecological inference, which themselves can be subject to error — but that’s a considerably narrower margin than in recent elections. In 2020, Biden won Latinos by 28 points, according to the AP Votecast exit poll, and 26 points per Catalist’s data. However, Harris is slightly improving on Biden’s performance in many if not most polls of white voters.

If these trends are real, then you’d also expect to see shifts in the electoral landscape, with Harris making gains in the whiter states, including the Blue Wall battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — but Trump improving his performance in the more racially diverse Sun Belt. And you do get exactly that in some surveys. A pair of NYT/Siena polls on Saturday found Harris leading Trump by 4 points in Pennsylvania but Trump up by 6 in Arizona.

But while these numbers are similar to previous NYT/Siena of these states, they differ from the polling averages there, which show much closer races in both cases — and they also differ from certain other high-quality surveys. Just this week, for instance, Wall Street Journal polls showed Trump 1 point ahead in Pennsylvania but Harris leading by 2 in Arizona. So let’s take deeper look and see if we can untangle the mystery.

Being unable to control the timing and number of children that you have is not cost neutral.

Not to mention the justice and equity arguments: those with economic resources and privilege will get the care they need. Those with limited economic resources will not have the same access.

I know this not "oh, it's the economy stupid" analyses... but uneven distribution of economic resources is central to the need for a nationwide law re-establishing the rights of Roe.

Who turns out is especially critical.

33-1 advantage in Republican shitpolling.

Give R92 a Nobel— a rocket scientist

I don't recall now which political writer's X I linked to, but the import of the comment was that Harris has a better outcome among likely voters, while Trump wins if the less likely voters participate. So yes, who turns out is dispositive. And it flips the pre-Great Realignment consensus that Democrats do better with higher turnouts.

^^ And Presidential elections are when less likely voters come out. So many moving and unsure pieces in this election. I kind of agree with James Carville who says the election will be a blow out (i.e. 6-7 of the battleground states going in one direction), only we don't know yet who is going to be the winner.

[quote] And Presidential elections are when less likely voters come out.

Absolutely. But we're talking about degrees.

Thank you. But there are hundred of people who have made the same point ahead of you—just on these threads alone.

We all get it.

I read that a focus of the Trump campaign is to get non-likely voters to vote (for Trump).

Really? I read that a focus of the Harris campaign is to get non-likely voters to vote (for Harris).

Funny, that.

In latest NBC poll, the two are tied, 48-48. Harris was up 5, 49-44 in its last poll.

In latest CBS poll, Harris is up 3 nationally, 51-48, & up 1, 50-49, in the battleground states.

^ same poll shows Independents going from Harris +4 in September to Trump +4 now.

In latest ABC poll, Harris is up 2 among likely voters (50-48) & registered voters (49-47). Down from 5+ & 4+ leads in mid-September poll. Among registered men, a 48-48 tie is now a 52-44 Trump lead. Among independents a 10% lead (51-41) has narrowed to 5 points (49-44).

Where the fuck is Nancy Pelosi now? She was so certain she was the doing the right thing.

Now what?

Chill out—

Nancy Pelosi is already being vindicated R105. Trump was on track to slaughter Biden. We'd have lost every battleground state and maybe even Minnesota. And Biden would have dragged our House and Senate hopes down with him. With Harris we have a real fighting shot, all evidence says it's 50/50.

Biden would be doing worse. He’s simply not up to the task.

It’s just too bad we had no opportunity to have a primary. Harris is just OK as far as I’m concerned. And this is not the election to try to break the glass ceiling with a woman of color. She’s doing better than I feared, but misogyny is a problem and so is racism.

Is it possible that the polls are actually getting it right? By that I mean Harris is on pace to edge out Trump with a win?

We know in 2016 and 2020 Trump was vastly underestimated and in 2022 Dems were vastly underestimated. Could the pollsters have found Goldilocks and these polls are exactly spot on? Which, again, would give Harris the win (barely).

Or am I just being delusional because the thought of four more years of Trump makes me want to scratch out my eyes?

R109, I think the comparisons between mid-term (& special) elections & presidential elections are off, especially in the current era, due to increased size of the latter in the latter. Where a larger electorate one inured to the benefit of Democrats, Trump’s appeal to the working class changes that dynamic.

R97 yikes. Elon Musk is paying people to vote - saw on Jimmy Kimmel a tweet or something offering $47 for a new voter - and added "Easy money!" God I hate that man - maybe more than the Don. He may have more ability to finish our democracy off with all that money.

Saw a Kimmel tweet or something? …you sound as dumb as any Trump supporter.

The Elon Musk $47 thing is real but it's a referral-reward offer, to get unregistered voters to sign up with a Trumpy vote registration org.

R112… that’s about as dumb as any Dump post I’ve ever seen.

[quote] Biden would be doing worse. He’s simply not up to the task.

I'm not so sure. Trump's collapse at his debate doesn't appear to have been a fatal blow. Would Biden be doing as bad among men? He already beat Trump. And he'd be running with the usual advantages of presidential incumbency.

Trump’s brand is incoherent and stupid. Biden’s is not so he’d be doing worse in all demographics.

Don’t you have to be up by 5 nationally to ensure a victory? Isn’t that the magic number? This feels like it’s going to be a disaster with the courts having to get involved or something. Too close to call with Trump already claiming victory.

Maybe, ElderLez. But one of Kamala's problem is an "otherness" that Biden would not have.

[quote] Don’t you have to be up by 5 nationally to ensure a victory? Isn’t that the magic number?

That has been the informed wisdom, but I'm inclined now to believe Nate Cohn's theory of the case - first posited in Sept. 2023 -that, due to his gains with Latinos & Blacks, who are less represented in the key Rust Belt states, Trump will be doing better in the popular vote, but not necessarily in the Electoral College.

Half dead is plenty othering.

Yeah, but Trump has the advantage that he already was president & many people have memory-holed what his presidency was like. And given him credit for the post-Covid economy he inherited from Obama.

Listen, Kamala could be up by 10 points on Election Day and that orange prick is still gonna be screaming he won and it was “rigged”.

Ignore that fat fool and keep working! We can do this.

CNN just delivered another blow to Democrats, more Americans identify as Republican now than Democrats. Republicans outnumber Democrats in all the battleground states and new party registration is now almost tied with Democrats. Republicans are nationally more popular.

Kornacki reporting it too. Both Trump and Kamala unpopular candidates. 50% negatives.

Trump can't be president again, he's fucking nuts. Stupidity + crazy = bedlam.

R125, so are most Americans. Have you seen how many people are on pills?

Revenge of the cranks.

The Harry Enten CNN piece at R123 is uncomfortably interesting. In the 2nd half he dives in on national. I wonder why the GOP is now +1 over the Dems in party registration, after Covid disproportionately killed older GOP voters and another four years of younger voters got registered.

I suspect it’s a mix of new-voter negativity towards Biden, and a growing % of younger voters registering Independent. But not at all sure of that. It does seem like another piece of possible evidence that the polls *aren’t* hiding a big Harris wave.

There wasn’t going to be a Harris wave. It is close all the way to the wire.

It’s almost like boomers dying off and being replaced by Gen X and millennials isn’t going to make the US less MAGA. Ditto for the US becoming a minority majority country soon.

R105 Nancy never wanted Kamala. She and Obama both knew Kamala would struggle to win and were pushing for an open convention. In hindsight maybe having a candidate chosen at the convention would have given them a honeymoon that lasted until election day.

[quote] after Covid disproportionately killed older GOP voters

This never happened.

R132 WTF are you talking about? I work in hospitals - I've seen how COVID has devastated communities that A) never masked and B) refused the vaccine. If you don't think COVID disproportionately affected older GOP supporters then you've got your head farther up Trump's ass than most of his supporters.

R131 you are full of it. You have completely misrepresented what was going on behind the scenes, where there was a full and immediate coalition formed around Harris. What either may have mentioned *once* publicly is no indication of what they were working towards behind the scenes.

[quote]If you don't think COVID disproportionately affected older GOP supporters then you've got your head farther up Trump's ass than most of his supporters.

Hell, it took out plenty of younger Republicans, too.

NPR? lol. Tell us another one.

[quote] Hell, it took out plenty of younger Republicans, too.

But apparently not enough of them.

I think the feeling was that blacks wouldn’t come out if Harris was passed over. It would be ironic if POC not coming out with her on the ticket cost Dems the election.

Yikes.

I see we're at the let's find a way to blame this all on black people phase of the campaign.

[quote] I'm not so sure. Trump's collapse at his debate doesn't appear to have been a fatal blow

Democrats and most independents are not in a cult. We actually care whether the President is sane and healthy.

Noting a drop in support for the Democratic candidate among Blacks is not “blaming this all on Black people.”

Correct: it’s rewarding Trump for how well he relates to Black America. 😵‍💫

[quote] Democrats and most independents are not in a cult.

Sadly, not all Trump voters are hardcore MAGAts. Many cannot stand the man, but will vote for him, nonetheless.

[quote] A CNN analyst reveals that for the first time since 1984, more Americans identify as Republicans than Democrats.

All the more reason for the GOP to continue in its MAGA ways, even if Trump loses. It's hard to argue that Trump and Trumpism is destroying the Republican Party when more Americans than ever are identifying as Republican.

[quote] Sadly, not all Trump voters are hardcore MAGAts. Many cannot stand the man, but will vote for him, nonetheless.

Those people, by definition, don’t care about how poorly he performs in a debate. They want their tax cuts or whatever it is that motivates them.

My point is that it is simplistic to say that because it doesn’t seem to matter how feeble Trump appears, the same is true for Biden. Different sets of supporters with different values.

The Democrats seem to be more burdened by the backlash against their fringe (progressives) than the GOP is by theirs (Christian Nationalists).

The Democrats seem to be more burdened by the backlash against WHAT HAPPENED DURIG COVID than the GOP.

FIFY—

For the ass at R131

I do know some Republicans in my neighborhood who tell me they will not vote for Trump. They are voting a write in. A couple mention Ronald Reagan - it makes them feel better. And yes they know it won't count by the are trying to make a statement.

Do you live in a battleground state, R150? If not, whomever these Republicans write in is of no moment.

There are anecdotal reports of anti-Trump Republicans signaling their disgust to non -MAGAS like r150, as if we should take hope that Trump is not as strong as the polls suggest, but why would these people be missed by the polls?

It's the soft racists who will vote for Trump. Dumb whites who have nothing more than White privilege to vote for.

[quote]Nancy never wanted Kamala. She and Obama both knew Kamala would struggle to win

Neither anticipated the Biden implosion. Biden, Nancy and Obama were good for Kamala to run in 2028.

That’s not correct: there was real anticipation that Biden would melt.

There were reports that Pelosi and Obama wanted some kind of quick primary process, fearing that Harris was a weak candidate, but Biden put a stop to the idea by quickly endorsing Harris.

I suppose we’ll have to wait for history to know.

[quote]Biden put a stop to the idea by quickly endorsing Harris

Last thing Biden wanted was for his step aside to become a divide.

Biden is the political genius of the last 60 years.

[quote] Biden is the political genius of the last 60 years.

Oy vey.

That is an odd thing to say about a politician who was dragged out of his own re-election bid.

R158, he wasn’t “dragged out.” When he realized his position was untenable, he bowed out and fully supported his successor. Now, you known who refuses to be dragged out? Dump.

r157, his manipulation of MAGA to get legislation passed, the volume of his legislation, getting elected in the first place with the aid of Tom Perez, is historical.

R159 is as out to lunch as Joe is. Jesus Christ. Must be a troll.

r161, stop the trolling of a regular poster, Ivan.

Joe hate is a tell.

R161 is a troll. Best block and move on.

Disputing that Joe Biden is the political genius of the last three generations is “Joe hate,” and whoever disputes this must be a Russian bot?

I see.

R155 we don’t need to wait. We already know…it has been much written about.

Joe Biden was a great President. He will go down as one of the best to ever do it. That's my opinion, and that will never change. Joe Biden was the victim of a hit job, pure and simple. Here's the thing, Democrats, the things you all care about, the other side doesn't. As a party, we are pretty out of touch with what many Americans care about. The other side knows what gets you worked up and gleefully pushes that until you fall into their trap. And you fall into their trap every single time. I enthusiastically support Kamala and believe that she will win this thing, but none of this election is about age or health or mental acuity, they just wanted Biden gone.

[quote]I see we're at the let's find a way to blame this all on black people phase of the campaign.

From Bill Kristol, of all people:

r164, there was no discussion, only dismissal. Typical troll-tactics.

[quote]As a party, we are pretty out of touch with what many Americans care about.

And there's the tell.

We might need to create barriers for white people to vote if Trump wins.

[quote] R164], there was no discussion, only dismissal. Typical troll-tactics.

Sometimes an idea is so patently ridiculous that no discussion is warranted..

Besides, it not like you supported your assertion that “Biden is the political genius of the past 60 years with any “discussion.” Odd argument for you to make.

[quote] Joe Biden was a great President. He will go down as one of the best to ever do it.

Said no one ever.

[quote]Joe Biden was a great President. He will go down as one of the best to ever do it. That's my opinion, and that will never change. Joe Biden was the victim of a hit job, pure and simple.

I appreciate his accomplishments in office, I appreciate what he did to put things where they are as opposed to where he found them, but his time has come and gone. The man now in office couldn't find his way out of a wet paper bag. Certainly he can take credit for his significant accomplishments in earlier years of his term, but for a year easily he has not been himself. Except the stubborn part. It's alarming to watch him he seems so frail and befuddled as to where he is, who he is, what he is doing there...

If getting him out of the way of an election where the candidate had to have some wits about himself or herself was a 'hit job,' then anyone who has ever had to take the car keys away from grandpa is a hit man.

Trump is not a smart man, nor a clever man, nor a man armed with facts and yet even Trump was smart enough to see his opportunity in letting Biden hang himself. It was Biden, not fucking Nancy Pelosi or Obama or a squadron of hit men who, by way of one of the most miserable debate performances ever, legitimized Trump as a candidate. Anyone with a less addled brain could have made mincemeat of the idiot, could have embarrassed him, could have drawn a distinction of choice between candidates, could have set a framework for the election themes. Biden --or more likely 'Biden's people' stole that golden opportunity from all Democrats. And all anyone could come up with after the fact were incredibly lame excuses and pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps, and it did the Democrats no fucking good at all. Blaming Pelosi for the alleged cruelty of her 'hit' is fucking ridiculous. Blame Biden for blowing what should have been the easiest thing in the world: looking presidential and decisive against a crazed lunatic wearing the mask of a baboon's ass.

[quote] Blame Biden for blowing what should have been the easiest thing in the world: looking presidential and decisive against a crazed lunatic wearing the mask of a baboon's ass.

Or more fundamentally, for the hubris of thinking he should be President at age 86. He never should have sought a second term. Destroyed his legacy. Especially if Trump returns.

Into the Lion’s Den

Omg! Kamala on Fox. Hope Pete B is providing some strategic advice, he's the only Dem who regularly scores hits on Fox against Fox's intent.

I think (hope) it will be a net plus for her. She’s not going to convince the MAGAts, but there are unentrenched viewers of FOX (lunchroom denizens, visiting relatives, abused spouses, etc.) who will see she’s not scarey or “retarded,” and didn’t just turn Black.

A decent number of Republican women are concerned about the state of abortion and/or IVF. I suspect she’ll work that and taunts (delivered on “his” station) into every fourth answer. Brett Baier will be Chris Wallace-like tough, but fair. She can handle it.

The fact that big talking T’s too much of a pussy to do a second one-on-one debates her, won’t be lost on many.

“debate with”

Kamala is leading in several national polls released today. 😁

Also, the two Michigan areas with the highest return rates on mail-in ballots are Detroit and Flint. Very encouraging early signals for Harris there.

🔵 Harris 49% (+3) 🔴 Trump 46%

Tipp #A+ - 1212 LV - 10/13

“This is the first release of TIPP’s 23-day tracking poll series. “Recognized by The Washington Post in 2020 as the most accurate national presidential poll.” - Joe Scarborough

Yesterday, I was at an event in Middletown, Ohio. You all know where that is, since vile Jimmy claims to be from there (it’s NOT in Appalachia, either. It’s between Dayton and Cincinnati. Closer to Indiana. But I digress).

Anyway, there was only ONE lard assed white man wearing a traitor shirt. No hats, no flags. Just one cunt in a shirt.

There was also a fat guy wearin a Harris/Walz shirt, too, and a 20 something pink haired chick wearing a “white girls against white supremacy” t shirt.

"The new round of October polling from the Senate Leadership Fund shows all but one Republican candidate running behind Donald Trump in battleground states, a pattern that could sharply limit their ability to build a sizable majority unless they can force a change in the final weeks of the election.

Republicans are still favored to take control of the chamber, and their data brought some hopeful news with tightening races in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. But other pickup opportunities, namely Maryland and Michigan, are moving in the wrong direction. And Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of the two incumbents running in a state Trump won in 2020, looks surprisingly strong in Ohio."

[quote] From Bill Kristol, of all people:

Bill Kristol has been a stalwart anti-Trumper from the start. There are a lot of progressives who could learn a lesson from him.

Dave Wasserman's latest take.

Link stinks

^ Actually, not much of a take:

[quote] The national picture: Harris's lead in @CookPolitical's polling average down to 1.9% after peaking at 2.5% a few weeks ago. Since start of October, Trump has gained w/ non-college whites, while Harris has preserved gains w/ Black & 18-29 voters.

As Amy Walter just noted on PBS: at this point in the campaign each side is not trying to turn “swing voters.” Each is trying to get people less inclined to vote “off the couch.” They have the same strategy here on out, but each is using different tactics.

Harris is going on Fox not to get new votes from their viewers, but (1) to turn any Fox viewers off Trump and (2) excite lazy voters otherwise inclined to vote for her.

As always: it’s turnout, and turnout in the right spots. All is in the margins. The rest is spiderwebs in the breeze—gossamer.

Trump's special challenge - with what's perceived to be an inferior ground game - is to get infrequent & first-time voters to the polls.

That’s why Melon Tusk is PAYING them, r189.

Another Tuesday, another FiveThirtyEight roundup. Just THREE(!) weeks to go until Election Day. And early voting is already happening across the Battleground States. Below are the polling averages from week to week (Oct 15 vs Oct 8).

Summary: Not so good. Wisconsin and Michigan have tightened further, this past week. Nothing much changed elsewhere. Overall, either the polls will turn out to be wrong in one candidate's favor, or this will truly be a fight for every last vote and it will likely be contested vehemently for weeks into November.

The data:

ARIZONA. Oct 15: Trump +1.6%. Oct 8: Trump +1.3%. A net gain of 0.3% for Trump. AZ (11 EVs) remains statistically tied with Trump favored.

GEORGIA. Oct 15: Trump +1.0%. Oct 8: Trump +1.1%. A net gain of 0.1% for Trump. GA (16 EVs) remains statistically tied with Trump slightly favored.

MICHIGAN. Oct 15: Harris +0.8%. Oct 8: Harris +1.8%. A net gain of +1.0% for Trump. MI (15 EVs) is now statistically tied within the margin of error, Harris having a slight edge.

NEVADA. Oct 15: Harris +0.5%. Oct 8: Harris +0.9%. A net gain of +0.4% for Trump. NV (6 EVs) remains statistically tied with a slight edge to Harris.

NORTH CAROLINA. Oct 15: Trump +1.0%. Oct 8: Trump +0.9%. A net gain of 0.1% for Trump. NC (16 EVs) remains statistically tied with Trump slightly favored.

PENNSYLVANIA. Oct 15: Harris +0.7%. Oct 8: Harris +0.7%. No change. PA (20 EVs) remains tied, statistically speaking, with Harris slightly favored.

WISCONSIN. Oct 15: Harris +0.5%. Oct 8: Harris +1.6%. A net gain of +1.1% for Trump. WI (10 EVs) is now statistically tied, with Harris holding a very slight edge.

NATIONAL. Oct 15: Harris +2.4%. Oct 8: Harris +2.6%. A net gain of 0.2% for Trump. The tightening continues.

I'm staying hopeful. But going on the data alone, this could be the most intensely close election since 2000.

So all the battleground states statistically tied. It would better if that is how it were always reported instead of showing these tiny percentage figures as if they were meaningful. The outcome will be impossible to know until after the election. The voters on both sides can be happy for the next three weeks knowing that their candidate is on the precipice of winning.

They are, R192, all seven of them except maybe Arizona leaning Trump at 1.6%. I've never seen that happen before.

If they are within the margin… neither is “slightly favored”—jeezus.

[quote] If they are within the margin… neither is “slightly favored”—jeezus.

Yes, a candidate can be "slightly favored" even if their lead is within the margin of error. If a candidate is at 48%, for example, and the margin of error is plus or minus 3, the candidate could be anywhere from 45% to 51%, but they are more likely to be near the center of that range than at either extreme.

No. The mere fact that there could be an error in either direction negates your poor argument. No “leaning” conclusion can be drawn.

Thanks, Torta, for keeping track of all of that.

According to Nate Cohn, Harris, up 3 nationally in the Times poll, would be up 2 if the polls miss as they did in ‘22, while Trump would be up 1.

Pennsylvania (+1 Harris) would be either +6 Harris or +3 Trump.

Wisconsin (+1 Harris) would be either +3 Harris or +9 Trump.

Michigan (+1 Harris) would be either +6 Harris or +5 Trump.

Nevada (even) would be +3 or +3 Harris for either Harris or Trump.

North Carolina (+1 Trump) would be <1 Harris or +4 Trump.

Georgia (+1 Trump) would be either +1 or +2 Trump.

Arizona (+2 Trump) would be either +1 Harris or +5 Trump.

[quote] No. The mere fact that there could be an error in either direction negates your poor argument. No “leaning” conclusion can be drawn.

You're wrong.

Here is what AI says:

Yes, if a candidate is leading in a poll but their lead is within the margin of error, it indicates that the race is very close. While you can't definitively conclude that the candidate will win, you can say that they are slightly favored based on the available data. It's important to interpret these results with caution, acknowledging the uncertainty and the possibility that the opponent could be leading as well. Overall, the candidate's position suggests they have an advantage, but the outcome remains uncertain.

Same as before

R194, point taken but you might try being less of a cantankerous git.

R199 enjoy your AI fantasia. Some of us live in actual reality, where polling does not actually work the way you think it does. Probability has inherent limits. Read Statistics for Dummies!—right up your alley.

Gallup - remember when Gallup & Harris were THE pollsters? - shows independents have flipped 9% in Harris's favor, from 50-45 in September to 49-45 now.

Gallup? Don’t they handicap the races at Santa Anita?

🥴

I feel like all this Trump support is just a big bluff. He has absolutely nothing going for him as a candidate and only won by a fluke in 2016 - which the country paid dearly for. He doesn’t seem to be making any effort. I just can’t believe the majority of Americans - even in swing states - could be stupid enough to vote for this turkey.

I suspect even his backers - beyond Thiel and Musk - have reconsidered their support. Mostly because he’s too unpredictable and is in obvious decline.

And yes, while there is some appetite to institute Project 2025 fascist rule, I think that’s more extreme than most of the .01% want to support. You know why? Because ultimately they like a game that they know they can win. They know the rules of liberal democracy and they know exactly how to break them. That’s a system they understand and can play to their advantage. Project 2025? Not so much.

I think Trump is going to be toast. And it won’t be much of a surprise.

Have you all heard about the first day of early voting in GA? Record breaking.

It’s over 250K so far and that’s the biggest day of GA early voting ever. Twice as big as the first day of early voting in 2020.

[quote] He has absolutely nothing going for him as a candidate and only won by a fluke in 2016 - which the country paid dearly for. He doesn’t seem to be making any effort. I just can’t believe the majority of Americans - even in swing states - could be stupid enough to vote for this turkey.

He only needed 44000 votes to flip in three states to win in 2020, during Covid, so it’s certainly believable that he could win at least a razor thin victory in 2024.

But who’s voting, if I may ask?

Here is a Georgia newscast from today. You can see who’s in line.

R209 that looks encouraging! Fingers crossed.

[quote] that looks encouraging!

Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

NBC Lester Holt just did two minutes on Trump being nuts🤙🏼

R206, Republican registrations across the country are nearly equal to Democrats and more Americans identify as Republican than Democrat. Sorry, but high turnout doesn’t mean Democratic votes. The GOP is pushing for early voting now and their minions are listening.

Trump may very well win by a hair and it’ll be a goddamn disaster. Prepare yourselves.

The double standard is shit. Joe may have been slow but he wasn’t bonkers.

[quote]I feel like all this Trump support is just a big bluff.

I understand. Your feelings are a much better predictor than scientific polling.

R213 doesn’t get how voter registration works in various states.

CA is one of the 5 bluest states with the highest percentage of non-part registration.

non-party*

R217, weren’t not talking about California. You’re methed out WeHo ass is a retarded. Go and take another load.

R217, we are not talking about California. Your methed out WeHo ass is retarded. Go and take another load.

Say it again!

Another local newscast from Georgia…

And more context around today’s Georgia vote:

“ In Augusta-Richmond County, Georgia, which Biden won by 37.1 points in 2020, 1,600 people voted on the first day of early voting in 2020. As of 1 p.m. today, 2,600 people voted. They are on track to double 2020’s numbers!”

For one day—that’s not a track record

Did you ever stop to think that people identify as rethugs so they don’t get purged from the rolls?

I was a registered rethug for YEARS because of all the purges. But I always voted Democratic.

The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll.

[quote] Among these likely voters, Harris held a 3-percentage-point lead over Trump, 47% to 44%.

The latest Morning Consult poll.

[quote] Harris leads Trump by 3 percentage points among likely voters, 50% to 46% when rounded, down from a 6-point lead in our previous update. Harris has a slight lead among independent likely voters (46% to 42%), and is bolstered by her strong standing among Democrats and those who voted for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Another bad day in Trumpworld

ALERT .... BREAKING NEWS... NEW MARIST POLL HARRIS +5 LIKELY VOTERS

Harris (52%) leads Trump (47%) among likely voters nationally, including those who are undecided yet leaning toward a candidate.

The Marist poll from OCT 3 Poll had Harris (50%) and Trump (48%) among likely voters.

I think—and hope—that Dump’s recent antics are finally moving the needle a bit. I also think that Kamala is making appearances in very unexpected places, but where there is huge bang for the buck—Howard Stern, The View, 60 Minutes, etc.

Nice, R229! Marist is one of the pollsters with a longer and better reputation. Harris up by 5 among likely voters is great to see!

Good news.

[quote] NEW MARIST POLL HARRIS +5 LIKELY VOTERS

From the same poll, look at the Biden approval rating. The consensus of polls has been that Biden’s approval rating is about 42%. The Marist poll has an outlier value of 47%, the same +5% that is more than expected. The Marquette poll showing 50/50 is the more realistic result.

Marquette, another A+ pollster, is out with another national poll.

On John Heilemann's podcast, James Carville said that pollsters are having trouble contacting Republicans. He said that could reflect either an undercounting of Republicans or greater enthusiasm among Democrats.

R235, interesting to try to "game out" what that means.

The pollsters will still keep trying until they reach the demographic quota, because they have to. It just takes more time and labor. So there's a higher % of "not willing to talk to a pollster" Republicans than they expected, this time around. What does that mean, and how might it cause the poll result to differ from what voters will actually do? Not sure.

The entire Republican Party has fallen silent. The Blowhard Faggot is quiet. McConnell, if he is out of his coma, Christian Fascist Moses Mike are all fucking quiet.

They see Trump as the enemy, now. The party that wanted to make Obama a one-term President is the same party that repealed Roe, revoked the Voting Rights Act, revoked Chevron and gave Trump Monarchial immunity.

Harris is running against the ENTIRE REPUBLICAN PARTY. Trump is just the meat puppet.

Jimmy has voted!

From FDR to KDH

Exactly, r237.

And now the thugs don’t want to discuss it.

When they lose AGAIN, this will be how many elections in a row? At some point, they will either jettison the hate, or it will doom them.

R238, Jimmy Carter was only 20 when FDR ran for the last time, in 1944, so he wasn't then old enough to vote for him.

I hope she goes on a message track to Republicans that essentially says lend me your vote - this once - a smash the hold that Trump has on your party.

I'd also like to see her planting the seed of doubt: in your heart, do you trust Republicans with your future? Or this time, do they need to be sent a message?

R240 in 1944, the voting age in Georgia was 18.

Thanks, R242. I see now that, in 1943, Georgia was the first state to lower the voting age for its citizens. I stand corrected.

Never doubt me again. 🙃

Notwithstanding record early voting there, Georgia seems to be decidedly trending in Trump's direction. But Harris is up 2 in North Carolina (49-47).

When even Trafalgar has Harris up in Nevada, albeit only by one, it is welcome news.

While Fox now has Trump up 2 nationally, 50-48, Harris is ahead by 6 points among voters from the 7 battleground states.

[quote] That raises the question of whether the Democrat could win the Electoral College while losing the national popular vote.

The Fox poll has Kamala getting 20% of non-MAGA Republicans.

If a decisive thumping of Trump is not in the cards, my optimum result would be an inverse of the '16 election, with Harris losing the popular vote, while winning the election.

[quote] Harris is ahead by 6 points among voters from the 7 battleground states.

Registered or likely?

Oddly, R250, the quoted finding is the lone reference to Harris's battleground lead in the entire article.

Or, considering it's a Fox News article, maybe it's not so odd that Fox would bury the lede, in favor of stressing a more favorable, but less significant, part of its poll.

I have mixed emotions about Nate Silver but he makes a good and reassuring point in this tweet:

"The two prior Trump elections were close in the Electoral College. This one is, too. Maybe it "should" be easy to trounce Trump, but it isn't."

Now's not the time to solve it because the problem is deep and complex, but Trump couldn't be a threat unless he tapped into something. Nobody really talks about root cause. I hold that Trump is a symptom. I'm not saying give MAGA what they want. But I also don't believe that 47 - 49% of those polled are all die hard MAGA. So unless we want to run the risk of going through this, like this, every fucking time... and possibly with someone smoother than Trump who could sell this dangerous bullshit... we gotta get to the bottom of how to erode that support reliably. I don't presuppose what that will take or who can do it but for me, I can't go through this every four years until I die.

The latest YouGov poll of registered voters has Harris up 3, 50-47.

[quote] The October 16 update shows Harris with 250 electoral votes, Trump with 219, and 69 electoral votes as tossups.

[quote] This is a change from the September 10 release, which showed Harris with 256 votes, Trump with 235, and 47 electoral votes as tossups.

[quote] 270 votes are needed to be elected and, according to our model, the outcome will be determined by races that we currently rate as tossups: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska’s 2nd District. All of these contests are within the margin of error and could go either way.

She’s got NE-2nd in the bag.

I’d say I’m going out on a limb, but I’m really not, by saying there’s no way Harris is going to lose the so-called popular vote. Even if she had a few more interviews like the Fox one, the number of automatic Democratic voters + anti-Trump voters will be a 1% to 4% margin over Trump.

Isn’t the magic number 5% above opponent nationally to ensure an election victory? If it’s only 3% then Trump stands a real chance.

No, as has been repeatedly pointed out.

Again, R257, aka R117, I refer you, once again, to R119.

Harris is not running against Trump, she is running against the entire damned Republican Party and their Fox/OAN/Newsmax propaganda machine.

R253, amen X10. The Democrats urgently need to understand why all of this has been happening, before it damages our nation any further. When or if Kamala Harris wins this one, we can't just exhale deep relief that Trump is politically dead at long last, and then get shocked when someone younger and better organized on the MAGA side rises up and replicates the Trump playbook in 2032, eight short years from now, and does it with success.

Because the Electoral College is DEI for retards and racists.

R262 some truth there and it’s all about the US Senate.

Not everyone understands how the Electoral College is proportioned, here’s a review. Add up your state’s # of House Reps and its # of Senators, and that = its number of electoral votes.

At least the US House is proportioned based on a recent US population count; fair is fair, more or less, though the gerrymandering of districts within some states is a problem.

The US Senate, where California gets just 2 senators and so does Wyoming with a tiny fraction of California’s population, is the total root of the problem. The deck is so heavily stacked in favor of lower-population states, most of which are heavily rural and extremely white.

If the Fox poll has any merit, R262, we’ll be singing its praises.

R263. You do realize your second para directly contradicts your first para. 🧐

R263 that’s not a function of design, it’s because of changing demographics. 20 years ago it was completely different array of blue vs. red, and different 20 years before that… and so on. The current era of self-sorting among the states—polarization—is magnified by the EC, but the EC didn’t create it.

R266, true. The Senate was formed with two Senators per US state way way back when it was just the 13 states. During the 1787 Connecticut Compromise which fleshed out some parts of the US Constitution in more detail. That's where it began, the principle that each US State gets two Senators, no more no less, regardless of the state's size or wealth.

It has led to the current situation centuries later, but the current situation was not the intent. The founding fathers never foresaw NYC having 6 million people, for example, and they never foresaw the entire heartland and plains territory becoming US states piece by piece. They'd be absolutely stupefied into shock for all kinds of reasons if they saw the world today. Including the sight of a non-white woman with a first name from India on the precipice of becoming our next President.

Sometimes I think the founding fathers weren't as smart as they thought they were.

. . . or, a lot can change over the course of 250 years.

R268, not even the most creative of writers could've imagined a Donald Trump, so i give the founding fathers some slack.

R267 “they never foresaw the entire heartland and plains territory becoming US states piece by piece.”

Absolute bullshit! It was the very intent of the founding fathers to account for this expansion. Sometimes you write worthy poll posts, other times you type dumb.

Sometime, take a moment and look at any early map and examine the land claimed by various colonies/first states. Then read about the attempts to bring parts of Canada into the U.S. Then read about the ”frontier” of the 1780s forward. Then read about the Louisiana Purchase. Then read about Lewis & Clark. For chrissake, George Washington’s colonial military career was based on surveying western expansion.

R271, yeah, well, we all type dumb from time to time and we all can retain a little humility.

Here's a map from 1778. There's a lot they didn't know and a lot didn't seem to plan on. I don't think they expected their states' relative senatorial power to be so diluted, over the coming centuries. Their states held all the cards of power when the 1787 Constitution was ratified.

p.s. absolutely the expansionist conquest of territories and the taking from them to get rich was very much on the founders' minds from the get go. But if you were to tell them that the "Louisiana" French swath, later the Purchase, would become divvied up into 15 states that would have even more Senatorial power than the original 13 states held... they would have responded with the1787 equivalent of saying "you type dumb."

Yes that’s why the Constitution, and the first federal statutes, expressly provided for the creation of organized (and unorganized) territories expected to become states?! I’m sorry, but please know that your understanding of expectation for additional states coming into the union is completely wrong.

That’s not any defense of the EC on my part. It’s just the most basic U.S. history.

R273 the first state from the Purchase was admitted in 1812. The founders, other than Washington and Franklin, were alive. Three states from the westward expansion had already been admitted, with many to follow shortly.

OK, points taken. I still think it's more complicated and that there is a lot they didn't know. The 2-senators-per-state-regardless-of-size principle was set down in 1787 and that's 15 to 20 years before Lewis and Clark launched their history-changing expedition and discovered how big North America actually was.

Anyone got any new polls today?

*and Hamilton

Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were alive and knew what they had done—and were doing—regarding statehood.

Harvard professor Michael Klarman, explaining the founders' intent:

"...Another way the framers addressed populism was to ensure that the president was selected not by individual voters but rather by a body of electors selected by the states, Klarman says.

"The framers tried to insulate Congress from populist pressures, too. Before the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913, senators were selected by state legislators — not directly elected by voters. Members of the Senate were also given longer terms of office — six years — in the hope that this would further insulate them from undue populist influence. Even the House of Representatives, whose members are directly elected, was kept relatively small to limit its populist inclinations, he adds...."

The presidential candidates were not supposed to be chosen by ordinary voters in the primaries. The title of the above article: "The framers of the Constitution didn't want you to choose the president"

Yes—thanks. Torta and I were engaging on a different aspect, however.

☮️ all. Keep hope alive.

The original reason for the Electoral College is completely irrelevant and it’s foolish to engage in any discussion about how it does or doesn’t apply today. There’s a current reason to have the Electoral College and it’s that reason that will keep it in place for a long time into the future. The problem scenario is when a large state runs up the score for a candidate, greatly magnifying the power of the people of that state to the detriment of the people in other states, large or small. With the Electoral College, it doesn’t benefit anyone to get a huge margin in a state. The people of each state get their defined share of the Electoral vote, regardless of how lopsided the margin is within the state, and that’s a good thing.

“..,it’s foolish to engage in any discussion about how it does or doesn’t apply today. There’s a current reason to have the Electoral College and it’s that reason that will keep it in place for a long time into the future.”

So which is it it: the first sentence or the second sentence?

R282, reread it as many times as you need until it comes to you.

If it’s foolish to engage, then why did you? Asking for a friend.

Meanwhile, for what it's worth, and corroborating everything we are seeing... FiveThirtyEight's forecast says Harris 52% chance of winning and Trump 48% chance of winning.

Nate Silver, founder whom they kicked out, does his own forecast and says it's tied 50.5 to 49.5 (he gives the miniscule edge to Trump).

[quote] FiveThirtyEight's forecast says Harris 52% chance of winning and Trump 48% chance of winning.

Election odds are literally funny because even the odds makers describe it as “If the election were held 100 times, Harris would win 52 times and Trump would win 48 times.” Since there will only be once occurrence, it’s impossible to know how valid the stated odds actually are.

Shhh—that’s too hard for their heads.

It does sort of strike me as "we built a supercomplex statistical full-run analysis model and...drum roll... no freakin' clue." I don't see how a description of having run 100 individual simulations, sheds light.

The founders didn’t expect sky scrapers, modern agricultural practices and transportation options like subways that would allow super dense population areas to emerge. And super dense population areas drive a lot of the population differences between states.

10/17 According to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s polling index, Harris has a 2.7 percentage point lead over Trump, 49.8 percent support to 47.1 percent.

If you, unlike me, put much stock in this.

There are plenty of angered women who do not like to tangle with their men who will vote Blue November 5th.

November 3rd we flushed the turd.

November 5th we kill the Sith.

Republicans in 2028 will need to nominate a handsome man, like Harding was considered to be, to get the women's vote and close the gender gap.

Tons of women support Trump.

Boomer women love Trump. Reproductive rights mean nothing to them and they hate men cosplaying as women.

I believe that you are wrong. Reproductive Rights, the Rights to Privacy and the rights of women health and women's daughters are very important to them.

Boomers, men and women, do not want to see their granddaughters bleeding out in Hospital parking lots.

College educated boomer women don’t vote the same as h.s grads. I know MAGA is supposed to fade with boomers and the rise of POC voters. Guess what it’s not going that way. Plenty of Gen X and POC are now MAGA. David Brooks has a great column today on why the election is still close even though Harris should be trouncing Trump.

For what it’s worth, according to this guy:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average’s strong year-to-date return translates to a 72% probability that the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, will win the presidential election in November.

R298, please see R291.

Jennifer Rubin, Republican or at least right leaning Never Trumper in the Washington Post, writes today:

"At this stage, not very many voters are persuadable; it is a matter of turnout (sorry for the cliché). Harris’s organization, rational schedule (spending time in swing states, not the other side’s safe states as former president Donald Trump is doing) and money advantage give her the edge."

"Far too many media outlets gain clicks and eyeballs by hyping minute changes in polls that are all within the margin of error. Statistically, these “changes” mean nothing; the analyses assuming these tiny shifts are significant are, frankly, a waste of time. The race remains very close, but polls will not tell you who will win."

"Journalists should not be tarot card readers or betting pool operators suggesting they have divined the future. Fortunately, mainstream outlets have begun focusing on Trump’s apparent mental deterioration and abject racism. Focusing the electorate on the stakes inherent in electing such an unstable character — instead of guessing at the outcome — is the appropriate journalistic function."

And in WaPo the headline about the Smith dinner is: Trump delivers profanity, below-the-belt digs at Catholic charity banquet

NYT today: Trump’s Meandering Speeches Motivate His Critics and Worry His Allies

Since it's a war on increments, better late than never, I'd argue and far better than headlines treading him seriously.

I would like to know the very mysterious reason voters don’t want Sam Brown as Nevada’s senator. You would think he’d be welcome on Face The Nation periodically for the next six years…

Pretty low blow, R301.

[quote] At this stage, not very many voters are persuadable

It looks like the polling has settled into what will be the likely outcome: Harris with a few percentage points lead in the popular vote and Trump with a small victory in the Electoral College. It’s all locking into place.

My true, gut reaction to R303 (who reasons it out well) is No - women and choice will surprise by a whisker in one or two key places, so Harris will take the EC. My wishful thinking is it will be widespread but I think there's a surprise lurking out there in enough states that Harris prevails. That's my gut. The minute I try to rationalize it I start yeah, but, yeah, but... still, my gut says she'll do it - barely.

R303 that’s if the polling aggregates are accurate or undercounting Trump support just a little.

If they’re off just 2 pts in Trump’s favor, Harris wins all or nearly all the battleground states.

if they’re off just 2 pts in Harris’s favor, Trump wins all or nearly all the battleground states.

History suggests the polling aggregates have a much better chance of being a bit wrong, than of being dead accurate.

Basically we’re all just anxiously shaking a Magic 8 Ball that keeps saying ASK AGAIN LATER. Nate Silver doesn’t know much more than we do in this case.

[quote] Voters who made their decision on who to support over a month ago break for Trump, 52% to 48%, while voters who made up their mind in the last month or week break for Harris, 60% to 36%,” Kimball said. “The three percent of voters who said they could still change their mind currently favor Harris, 48% to 43%.

Of the two options, I find it hard to concieve Trump wins nearly all the battleground states. That doesn't seem plausible, accepting anything could happen.

Excluding North Carolina from the mix, R307, both Trump & Biden ran the table with the then-six battleground states in their successful elections.

[quote]I find it hard to concieve Trump wins nearly all the battleground states.

You’re probably right, but Trump doesn’t need to win all of them to win.

Neither does she. But Harris has more options to get to 270 than he does.

How do you figure, R310? If you take out the 93 outstanding electoral votes of the battleground states & Nebraska-2's 1, she's at 225, while Trump's at 219.

And then you add back in the various likely outcomes, mix and match…she has more ways to get there. Simple.

P.S. some of those “battlegrounds” are less close than others. Por ejemplo: she will win Wisconsin.

R311, I fact checked r310’s response through AI and it did the calculation and replied that Harris has 53 winning combinations and Trump has 26, using the seven battleground states.

I’ll add that Google’s Gemini wouldn’t do the calculation since I stated it was about the election. Copilot did the calculation though.

I earned a Poli Sci degree in 1984, and I’m still better than AI in 2024. Poli SIGH!

All of you young folks are hopelessly devoted to future b.s. 🤷🏻‍♂️¡Buena suerte!

[quote] Harris has more options to get to 270 than he does.

Technically, that's true, but some of her options no longer seem very viable. The Sun Belt states, especially Arizona and Georgia, have been tilting toward Trump, although by very slight margins. North Carolina is basically a dead heat. In the end, the "Blue Wall" states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are still Harris's most likely path to victory, and they may end up being her only viable path. If she loses any of those 3 states, she's in trouble. If she loses in a state like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, it's probably a sign of a broader weakness, making it unlikely that she will win in a state like Arizona or Georgia.

310 replying^^

R326 pls. stop. Thanks.

[quote] In the end, the "Blue Wall" states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are still Harris's most likely path to victory, and they may end up being her only viable path.

If she wins those three and thus has 270, every Democrat should thank the Republican in Nebraska who prevented the effort to move that state back to winner take all. The Republicans, on the other hand, would have legitimate reason to crucify him.

[quote] Por ejemplo: she will win Wisconsin.

Actually, Harris is polling better of late in Pennsylvania than she is in Wisconsin (& Michigan).

[quote] Today's update. Harris's lead in national polls is down to 2.3 points from a peak of 3.5 on 10/2. The race remains a toss-up, but we're at a point now where we can be pretty confident this is real movement and not statistical noise.

We are at a point where there’s no real change.

Trump holding on to a small lead in Arizona.

Mood of the country: a majority (52%) feel they are not better off than they were four years ago. It’s surprising that the Trump campaign isn’t using the classic “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” line more.

[quote] In an eight-way race, both Trump and Harris are tied at 47%. That’s because there are the major candidates (Democrat and Republican) and minor candidates (Natural Law Party, Green Party, Libertarian, etc.) on Michigan’s ballot. However, in a two-way race between the major candidates, Trump leads Harris by 1%. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 4%.

Slotkin holds on to a 4 point lead.

In a ten-way race she wins all 7 battlegrounds by .008%

These days I'm more worried about Michigan and Wisconsin than I am about Pennsylvania. I think Pennsylvania will go for her. It's close but it's usually her with the upper hand.

If she loses Michigan & Wisconsin, she'll need to replace them with Georgia & North Carolina, since Arizona looks to be her biggest reach among the battleground states.

Another reason to discount the significance of betting markets.

There were a shit ton of weirdo candidates for President on the Ohio ballot. Half of them I’d never even heard of.

[quote]There were a shit ton of weirdo candidates for President on the Ohio ballot. Half of them I’d never even heard of.

I've thought it would be fun to get myself on a ballot, because I have a name that people like and so would get a lot of votes from people who don't know anyone running for the office. Unfortunately, the possibility of someone noticing me and making public my sordid past would make it certainly not worth it. Maybe once I'm retired, or terminally ill.

Indiana and Kentucky returns generally come in the earliest on election night. If Trump outperforms his 2020 results in those states, it will be a canary in the coal mine for Harris.

Biden won Virginia by +10%. I’ll eat my hat if I’m wrong, but if Kamala’s only winning VA by 6-7% then she’s in trouble generally, and specifically she probably has little chance of winning Pennsylvania.

Or R332, it would fit within Nate Cohn’s oft-stated theory of the case … & the latest Fox poll which raised the possibility of Trump winning the popular vote, yet losing the Electoral College. Another thing to note is that a Virginia result might not be predictive of what might happen in Pennsylvania because the election is not being engaged at the president level there.

Feeling anxious? Watch this four minute video on the state of the state.

MSNBC keeps bringing Steve Kornacki on midday to breathlessly explain the “very real” possibility that the election might hinge on Nebraska’s 2nd district, where the whole thing would get thrown to the House of Representatives to decide.

The election definitely seems like a toss up, but that type of West Wing plot line fantasizing really betrays how much the media wants to turn this into a nail biter photo finish horse race.

I’m sick of stressing out about politics. My intention right now for election night (though I’m sure I won’t live up to it) is to unplug my modem and put my phone on airplane mode. Sleep in super late on Wednesday, then reconnect and just deal with whatever happened overnight. I’ve donated what little I can, I’m going to vote early. I don’t have any more agency than that. If my country wants to be led by Trump again, then I’m stuck living among a hundred million some people with whom I want nothing to do.

It really is that close, R335, IF the polls are to be believed. And if it is that close, Kamala’s path ends up wholly through the Rust Belt, Nebraska-2 could well be dispositive.

Agree with r335

Although, I should add, since Nevada looks to be Harris’s best chance among the swing states, her election chances probably won’t turn on Nebraska-2.

Kamala has to win right leaning states and Trump has to win likely blue states in order for it all to come down to Nebraska. Possible? Sure. Could Trump win Hawaii? Sure.

I will try my very best to avoid election night this year. I will just deal with it all on Wednesday morning. I'll do a Joan Crawford film festival or something and even stay off DL.

No, R339, if, as expected, all the other red & blue states fall into their predictable place & the election turns on the battleground states, Nebraska-2 IS relevant, but only if Trump sweeps the Sunbelt states, while Harris runs the table in the Rust Belt. In that scenario, Harris would also need Nebraska-2 to end up with the requisite 270 electoral votes.

I know this is sick and probably stupid of me, but Rick Wilson's video cheered me up (a tiny bit.) He believes they're planning to bump Trump asap after the election if the rat bastard is elected, because Trump has actually suffered a mental collapse.

I do HATE J D Vance, but I don't think he's insane enough to blow us all up in a fit of pique, which is EXACTLY what I think Trump is capable of doing, if he can manage it - and look at January 6. They couldn't stop him then.

All of Nebraska will have its results counted and known before other states in Harris' column, and certainly long before Pennsylvania is counted, so it's ridiculous to say the Nebraska electoral vote in the 2nd district will have decided the outcome out of the 270 votes. If Harris has exactly 270 votes, then every state she won will have equal claim of being the one that put her past the finish line. The best claim however, will be the state that is called last, the one that brings her total to 270 or more.

Here’s another video today from another Republican veteran campaign expert explaining why Harris has a lot of factors that favor her winning.

The Rust Belt is Ohio, Indiana, western PA, upstate New York, West Virginia. Do you even go to this school?

I saw a recent picture today of Kamala wearing jeans, not mom jeans but Levi's I think. She looked slim and hot. You go, girl.

Kamala IS hot, r346.

With so many people already having voted, polls are meaningless now.

This actually has some encouraging gems and is recent

THIS is a new video and a good one- WEAK rally turnout- confirmed my CNN journalist-- Trump walking around silently for 16 minutes-

Really. important- check this out

R348, polls may now be meaningless, but not for the reason you state. They may be meaningless because, with the exception of the lone (outlier?) Georgia poll, the battleground states are all within the MOE. So it’s all now about turnout.

Except the polls are all over the place from week to week. You’d have to look at where they were when someone voted. It’s impossible to know.

There’s much more money in this than any Sportsball championship, so there has to be more drama.

Most of the drama is created for the Boomer set, which is why it’s so crusty. I’m hoping xenophobia is the last gasp of a spoiled, bitter, unsatisfied ME generation.

[quote] Here’s the other reason you can safely tune out the daily polling news: The polls are remarkably, eerily stable.

[quote] A week before the Harris-Trump debate in September, Harris led Trump by three points. Then came the debate, during which Trump turned in the second-worst debate performance in recent memory. Then came another attempted assassination of Trump, after the shooting at a campaign rally in July. Then the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 50 basis points. Then Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. Then came the vice-presidential debate. Then came a surprisingly strong jobs report. In this period, Harris released an 82-page booklet of policy proposals and Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Trump in the Jan. 6 case, filed a 165-page brief adding new details of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. After all that, Harris is now leading Trump by … three points.

[quote] There are voters who are still undecided, but they are, almost by definition, voters who pay less attention to political news and are either so uninterested in politics or so cynical about both candidates that nothing has yet caused them to make up their minds. There are many more voters whose minds are made up but may or may not actually fill out ballots by Election Day. These are the voters who will decide the election, and they’re not tipping their hands yet.

This past week Trump sure hasn't been acting like he knows he's winning. Tired, bored, fed up, can't even fake enthusiasm in front of a crowd, just going through the motions because he has to. Wonder what his internal polls are telling him.

And I have the opposite reaction, R355. His liberty's at stake, so I think he'd likely be putting on a very different face if he thought he was losing. I think he's convinced he's gonna win, so he doesn't have to make an attempt to seem more normal, more reasonable.

From the NYT story about the Al Smith Dinner, Trump quoted:

“I don’t know what’s going to happen three weeks from now,” Mr. Trump said at one point. “Isn’t it sort of exciting? Right? Isn’t it just exciting, what’s going on. "

Am I wishfully thinking too hard to ask if that's an indicator his internal polling isn't telling him what he wants to hear?

I think it's kind of a Rorschach test. Some see his refusal to debate again, his pulling out of the 60 Minutes interview as a sign that his handlers don't think he's up to it. Others see it as evidence that he's confident of winning. I fall into the latter camp.

What does it say about this country re-electing after all the damage he’s caused?

I believe he’s crafting a plausible insanity plea. His kids will be fucked, but he’ll rebuild. The grifter

U Mass Lowell, a top-rated pollster (by both 538 & Nate Silver), has Harris up 1 (46-45; 4 MOE; LV) in Pennsylvania.

[quote] Today’s numbers show one of Harris’s better polling days lately, though not a lot of high-quality data over the past 24 hours.

R359, I posted about that the other day. There's some serious thinking has to be done after this, assuming thought is still allowed in the country. If she wins, it can't always be these nail biters every four years. I don't know what the answer is but there's got to be a way to shore up a Democratic majority that reflects a Republican majority in that you can count on it. Republicans, for their faults, as if often said, still fall in line (though this election, hopefully a little less so.) So how they do Democrats achieve that outcome through their own lens? I don't know but to drift toward the next election... yikes. I think there were glimmers of it from Harris from time to time this campaign, when she called out nonsense for what it is in plain terms. Same with Walz when he called weird. That's not the only part of it, but there was some refreshing honesty there.

I think the boldest thing Harris could do to is call out Republicans and say they've got to fix their party and, in the meantime, she's who to vote for until they do.

And if Trump wins, r363, then what?

Then everything is fucked until we know what he does, R364. I don't allow myself many tinhat theories but I am not sure he leaves office at the end of four years. I don't know what you can count on. Everything's potentially up for grabs if he wins.

Elon Musk is pending a couple of hundred million on PA alone, on Trump’s. Behalf. He can’t wait to put his Ayn Rand bullshit to full use without any interference, and make a few extra billion off military and intelligence contracts.

*spending

Trump is anti-EV, so that's not going to help Musk.

1. Tax credits keep Tesla in business.

2. His focus is Space X and other companies you havient even heard of, all getting government contracts.

Read Foer’s piece in The Atlantic.

[quote] Trump is anti-EV

Speak English.

I don’t understand how the ban on political donations by government contractors doesn’t apply to him.

R370 I am not R368, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know EV in the context of Elon Musk is electric vehicles.

R372, text speak needs to be banned. Enough already.

And while you are banning text speech could you keep the whippersnappers off of my lawn???

TIA

[quote]Trump is anti-EV, so that's not going to help Musk.

Trump is not anti-EV. He's purely transactional. If MAGA hates EV then Trump hates EV. If Trump can benefit more from the EV king giving him money then Trump will be pro-EV.

What are you worried about R374, no one has trimmed that lawn in decades.

[quote]And if Trump wins, [R363], then what?

If Trump wins, he will gut the courts and fill them with clones of Aileen Cannon the one in Florida, sick the DOJ on all media that says anything negative about him except Fox News and their ilk. He will make Elon Musk head of everything steering maybe Trillions of dollars to his company, elemiate the department of education and give all that money to the rich to send their kids to private religious schools (ala JD Vance request), he will let Russia take Ukraine, pull out of NATO, 30%tariffs ( import taxes) on all imported goods, destroy the economy, sign an anti-abortion bill, encourage the Supreme Court to revers gay marriage AND gay rights. And install all his spawn like Jr and Eric as his successors while waiting for Barron to finish college in a Trump Dynasty Coupe.

Anything else?

[quote]I think it's kind of a Rorschach test. Some see his refusal to debate again, his pulling out of the 60 Minutes interview as a sign that his handlers don't think he's up to it. Others see it as evidence that he's confident of winning. I fall into the latter camp.

OR, they see he’s [italic]barely [/italic]ahead in their internals, but drops 1/4% every time he gives Harris an opening. They’re telling him if he keeps his trap shut for two weeks he [italic]might[/italic] win.

[quote]I think it's kind of a Rorschach test. Some see his refusal to debate again, his pulling out of the 60 Minutes interview as a sign that his handlers don't think he's up to it. Others see it as evidence that he's confident of winning. I fall into the latter camp.

OR, they see he’s [italic]barely [/italic]ahead in their internals, but drops 1/4% every time he gives Harris an opening. They’re telling him if he keeps his trap shut for two weeks he [italic]might[/italic] win.

[quote]I think it's kind of a Rorschach test. Some see his refusal to debate again, his pulling out of the 60 Minutes interview as a sign that his handlers don't think he's up to it. Others see it as evidence that he's confident of winning. I fall into the latter camp.

OR, they see he’s [italic]barely [/italic]ahead in their internals, but drops 1/4% every time he gives Harris an opening. They’re telling him if he keeps his trap shut for two weeks he [italic]might[/italic] win.

[quote]I think it's kind of a Rorschach test. Some see his refusal to debate again, his pulling out of the 60 Minutes interview as a sign that his handlers don't think he's up to it. Others see it as evidence that he's confident of winning. I fall into the latter camp.

OR, they see he’s [italic]barely [/italic]ahead in their internals, but drops 1/4% every time he gives Harris an opening. They’re telling him if he keeps his trap shut for two weeks he [italic]might[/italic] win.

Yes, [382], if he was really ahead he'd be gloating about it constantly in public. When things don't go his way he sulks like a toddler and lashes out in all directions. He does not like being told what to do.

I just came from a Bulwark event where I got to meet & talk to our fellow gays, Tim Miller & Sarah Longwell. Jealous, bitches?

Video today from the Ring of Fire channel on youtube:

At the 1 minute mark, he reports an internal Republican poll, commissioned by the Senate Leadership Fund, an independent super PAC, which showed that not only is Trump losing nationally, but he is losing enough in the swing states to give Kamala the electoral edge: losing Pennsylvania by two points, losing Michigan by about two points, winning Wisconsin by one point, but tied in North Carolina and Arizona.

R385, I don’t who this guy is, how credible he may or may not be, but I don’t know anyone else reporting that the widely reported McConnell’s internal Senate poll also addresses the presidential election.

Yuck.

I’ll say, R387. And it’s a highly rated pollster, to boot.

R387, the very good news is that if you give Trump & Harris each of the states where they are ahead, however narrowly, along with giving Harris Nebraska-2, Harris wins the Electoral College 270-268. That, of course, assumes that all the other states fall into their expected place. So we’d have an inverse of the Clinton/Trump race.

I need to recheck my numbers. I had the race starting out at 225-218, with Harris in the lead, with 94 electoral votes up for grab. But I see now that that doesn’t add up to 538. If the race is, instead, 225-219 at the outset, taking the poll as is would mean a 269-269 tie, which would mean a Trump win.

I gave you a wit and wisdom R376.

Alas, Trump does "start" with 219 electoral votes, not 218, so the 50 he nets by "winning" Pennsylvania, Georgia & Michigan would be enough to at least get him to a 269 tie ... & victory in the House.

No wonder Trump isn’t doing any interviews. He already knows he’s winning.

That's been my take, R395.

Not shocking.

[quote] Trump has moved up 5 points in the TIPP tracking poll in a week. He’s two points ahead this morning.

Is thus normal? In one week?

No it is not.

Carter's numbers cratered in the last weeks of the '80 campaign.

Yeah, but Carter also had an ongoing crisis on his hands.

But nothing that changed in those last weeks, R401. It was a long, ongoing crisis.

R402, the longer it went on and the closer the election became people had made up their minds. People waited until they could wait no more. The election shifted accordingly when everyone had the election at the forefront of their minds and saw that the crisis was still going on. They were being forced into making a decision because it was going to be time to vote. The hostage crisis killed Carter’s presidency.

Anderson was also a strong third party challenger.

But the momentum was already being reported shifting against Harris.

[quote] The hostage crisis killed Carter’s presidency.

The epitaph for the Harris campaign may well be the high inflation most Americans had never experienced. Even if the war against higher inflation has largely been won.

These last polls here have blown me away- if its THIS bad? why the fuck even talk about this anymore- We are done.

Have we forgotten that Repukes are flooding the news with crappy polls? It’s all to discourage Dems/Harris supporters from voting. R407, just stop. We are NOT done and you’re crazy for thinking so. Or a troll.

R407, I was thinking this would be the first Trump election that I would have some doubt before the polls closed. I was convinced Hillary was going to win, & I thought the same of Biden (his poll numbers in the Blue Wall states were that good to the very end). This may be the first time I'd be expecting a Trump win.

R397, that’s got to be the most extreme split by gender, ever, among younger voters.

R408, AtlasIntel is an A rated firm by Nate Silver. And ranked #22 by 538. It is NOT a crappy poll. And one not be a troll to acknowledge that.

^The Nate Silver rating of pollsters.

That’s from June r412. A lot has changed since then. My issue is not a discussion of polls, it’s posters like r407 who actually tell us we’re done. There’s an agenda behind it.

I do not believe in polls, like I always say, I have never ever ever come across anyone in my friend, family , coworkers who have ever participated in an election poll, zero. Elections are won because of the turn out to vote.

If indeed, Trump wins the election, I won’t give a fuck if elderly veterans retirees lose their social security, Medicare, if a Latino or black is bashed and picked on by a racist Karen because of their skin color, good for them. I will enjoy. All of my humanitarian and progressive ideas and feeling will be over.

I’m a white fully Caucasian looking cuban Latino, I won’t be a target of racism on the metro. Deport cubans, send them back to that prison island. Eliminate the Cuban adjustment act, no more refugees, enough with feeling compassion with people fleeing third world communist dictatorships. Latinos that vote for republicans have to be punished and treated with the harshest laws possible. Ungrateful Latinos must be shown their real status and situation in this country.They have become illusioned with a false idea of acceptance, white supremacists will make sure to break their bubble.

do not even tell me anything about black men, sorry, do not expect me to feel bad if I see kkk marching down the street. Sorry my white ass gives a shit if they think that you are an inferior monkey deserving to be sent back to Africa. Are the cops killing you like flies? Good enough.

Are you gay and you voted for Trump, you better don’t tell me or I will treat you worse than a street dog. I will make you feel line you have a contagious disease worse than leprosy.

I'm not R407 & I don't know what, if any, agenda this poster might have. My own agenda is to look at the polls & make my own, non-spin, judgments. The AtlasIntel poll IS highly regarded, & I'm encouraged - in part - with its showing a Harris (small) lead in Arizona & a Harris lead in North Carolina. And, as I pointed out earlier, if everything falls in line with this poll, we'd end up in a 269 tied vote.

[quote] I do not believe in polls, like I always say, I have never ever ever come across anyone in my friend, family , coworkers who have ever participated in an election poll, zero. Elections are won because of the turn out to vote.

While I do tend to believe in good polls, like AtlasIntel, I agree that the GOTV is critical. And Harris's is said to be the far superior one. In addition, Trump is relying on a disproportionate number of new and/or infrequent voters.

R407 here- not a troll- Just blown away by those. When I say that we are done, I really meant- I AM DONE "hoping".. That is all. What kind of. humanity has at least 50% of it's people voting for a monster like this? Every day I am wondering- what the fuck has happened to us?

R408 has a problem with any poll that shows Harris behind and any person who acknowledges it. She should start her own “Post only poll results here that show Harris winning” thread.

Again, r418, I have a problem with posters who post “we are done.” My opinion? It’s a ploy to discourage Harris voters from voting. It’s the actions of a troll who is trying to suppress the vote.

[quote] I have a problem with posters who post “we are done.” My opinion? It’s a ploy to discourage Harris voters from voting. It’s the actions of a troll who is trying to suppress the vote.

On DL?!?!

Some ploy?!

With two weeks left to go, the contours of the 2024 presidential election are clear: Both campaigns need voters who usually don’t vote, and Kamala Harris needs to bring the Democratic coalition, including its Trump-curious members, back home.

While the Republican side plans to spend the remaining days of the contest trying to lure low-propensity voters to the polls, the Harris team will attempt to persuade voters of color to return to its side and will try to increase numbers among white voters in previously red suburbs.

Despite some increasingly erratic public appearances, Donald Trump has the momentum: He has managed to narrow Harris’s already microscopic lead in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada while holding steady in the battleground states where he has a small advantage: North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona.

But the Trump campaign — called an unstoppable force by its own officials — is about to run headlong into what the arris team describes as an immovable object: the vast get-out-the-vote apparatus that Democrats have built over the past four years. “We have the MAGA coalition,” one Trump official said. “But we also know that it is not enough. And so we need to form a broader coalition, mostly with people who have never voted before. The other side has the easier task. You never want to plan a victory party that is dependent on new voters.”

But that other side is reaching beyond their base, embarking on a media blitz to capture the vanishingly small slice of the electorate that is still considered persuadable, appearing on nonpolitical podcasts including All the Smoke, a show hosted by two former NBA players, and Call Her Daddy, by one metric the second-ranked podcast among women 18 to 29, as well as sitting down with Howard Stern and Fox News. Harris is also exploring the possibility of an interview with Joe Rogan.

Trump, meanwhile, is making the rounds on bro-themed podcasts, chatting with hosts such as Logan Paul and Theo Von. But it’s likely that many listeners of these shows are already in Trump’s camp. The Lex Fridman Podcast, on which Trump appeared in September, is the 58th-most-popular podcast in America and 36th among white men and has been described by Business Insider as “A Safe Space for the Anti-Woke Tech Elite.” By contrast, Call Her Daddy is the seventh-ranked podcast overall and has nearly as many listeners who are Republican or independent as those who are Democratic, according to NPR.

Harris-campaign officials insist that simply reaching new listeners isn’t enough. The key is to get them to the polls. Lauren Hitt, a Harris-campaign spokesperson, said, “These are voters who are just now tuning in, who have not been paying attention to political news, and we are bombarding them at every opportunity with digital ads on mobile platforms, television ads, traditional canvassers going door-to-door, family and friends doing relational organizing. It’s an all-of-the-above vortex.”

The Republican campaign, on the other hand, is relying more on Trump’s media appearances. Harris officials believe this will be insufficient, especially because the Trump ground operation has been outsourced to two super-PACs run by conservative figures without field experience — one largely funded by Elon Musk and the other headed by conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. “If you are reaching people who are literally hard to reach,” Hitt said, “you have to be talking to them for a long time through programs they trust. You have to work really hard to get to them, and that is what we have been doing.”

“I just don’t see a big turnout from low-propensity voters being the thing that helps Trump,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster. “A lot of those voters Trump is trying to activate may turn out to be Democrats anyway.”

What we are left with, then, is an election that could be the closest in American polling history, one in which even the slightest shift in voter turnout or conviction will affect the outcome. The variables, like the voters, are too vast to even be knowable. “My advice to everyone is that you just need to stop trying to read the tea leaves,” said Carlson. “Polls aren’t built to do what everyone wants them to do at this point, which is to tell us the winner. We all are just going to have to learn to embrace uncertainty.”

In one week in mid-October alone, the Harris campaign knocked on over 600,000 doors across the battleground states and had 2,500 staffers working in over 350 offices. And while there is a constellation of churches and conservative groups that are working on behalf of Trump, both campaigns say the Democrats have a more robust independent ground game, led by labor unions and outside groups such as American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super-PAC, which is spending $140 million to target white women without college degrees across the three northern battlegrounds.

The one thing the remaining hard-to-reach undecided voters seem to have in common is they dislike politics and distrust politicians. In theory, such a group should be a ripe target for Trump, who ran up huge margins in both 2016 and 2020 with voters Democrats didn’t expect to come to the polls. “There is nobody who does better with low-propensity voters than Donald Trump,” said Jim McLaughlin, a longtime pollster for Trump. “There are very few undecideds out there, and those that are don’t like the job that Kamala Harris is doing, they don’t like the direction of the country, they tell us that inflation is still a real problem, they don’t like the open border and the wars.”

“When you have two-thirds of voters saying the country is on the wrong track,” he added, “that should be good news for Republicans.”

Democrats acknowledge these headwinds and admit to many others. The vice-president only began running for the top job three months before Election Day, a dead sprint for a U.S. presidential race, and Democratic strategists say she remains largely undefined in the minds of the public. Still, they think the concerns of undecided voters dovetail with Harris’s message, and they plan on hammering Trump over the next two weeks on abortion, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the chaos and division of his term in office.

Encouragingly for Democrats, recent polls show that Harris has drawn even with Trump on the economy, after both Harris and Biden trailed him in this terrain for much of the campaign. Alyssa Cass, a Democratic strategist associated with Blueprint, a polling outfit that has provided messaging guidance to Democrats this cycle, said, “The message is that she is someone who has moved up from the middle class, who has worked at McDonald’s, who has prosecuted evil price-gouging corporations. That aligns with what will peel Trump- curious undecided voters away.”

The Trump campaign sees it differently, believing that Harris has boxed herself in while trying to distance herself from her more progressive California past. As Trump continues to push for mass deportations, saying that immigrants bring “bad genes” to the country, Harris continues to tread lightly, denouncing Trump’s comments but touting her own tough-on-the-border bona fides. Trump talks about a national stop-and-frisk policy, but even in her appeals to voters of color, Harris remains hesitant to attack Trump directly on criminal justice.

Meanwhile, there is substantial risk in Trump’s efforts to turn out occasional voters, even if he succeeds. Trump has improved his standing with Black voters by 16 points since his 2020 showing, according to Adam Carlson, a former Democratic pollster, but among Black voters overall, Harris will still win in a blowout. And young men likely to vote favor Harris by 17 points, according to the Harvard Institute of Youth Poll. Turning out more voters of color and more young people could end up disadvantaging Trump in the end.

Enough with this back and forth over one and two percentage points. The White House is going to be won by turnout, not by polls.

A candidate could be behind by five points in the polls, but if he or she turns out substantially more of their supporters - that person wins.

I’ve already contributed a lot of money (for me). I’m now going to sign off of this thread for the next two weeks and go volunteer to knock on doors.

See you (hopefully happily) in November.

[quote] A candidate could be behind by five points in the polls, but if he or she turns out substantially more of their supporters - that person wins.

True. But the better polls have a good sense of modeling who the likely voters are.

What helps Trump’s GOTV is when he goes big and gets Democrats to attack him in response, like with the Al Smith dinner. He’ll probably ratchet up the rhetoric, saying things his supporters will cheer, and then getting the free media and social media response that will promote what he says.

When Joe Biden’s top political aides started setting up his campaign early last year, Jim Messina was one of their first calls. Messina, who managed Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, had plenty of thoughts on building a machine to get a second term for an unpopular president with a bad economy. For a while he sought to be helpful with occasional advice from the outside, including when he tried reminding Democrats of Biden’s (narrow) possible paths to victory.

But then those paths closed, Kamala Harris took over, and Democrats had a whole new race on their hands. Messina now leads Democracy Defenders, a super PAC that’s backing the party’s legal battles against Donald Trump and Republicans’ challenges to voting rules and their rigged-election claims. He is also closely monitoring the campaign as one of the party’s most wired-in operatives, who has worked closely with just about everyone atop Harris’s team. I called him with about two weeks left until Election Day to talk about what he sees as her best shot at victory, Democrats’ best ways to talk about abortion and January 6, and how nostalgia is buoying Trump over Harris when it comes to the economy.

Play oracle for me for a second. How would you map out Kamala Harris’s most likely path to 270 electoral votes? I’ve always said, all along, that the “blue wall” states are the path of least resistance for the Harris campaign. If she can win Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, plus the blue dot in Nebraska, then Harris will be our first woman president.

But getting there is tough. When I ran President Obama’s campaign, one of my jobs was to create as many pathways to 270 electoral votes as possible, and I think that’s what they’re doing — they have backup states. Georgia is tied, and I was recently talking to the governor of North Carolina, who feels very good about what he’s seeing. You combine Arizona and Nevada, you could lose one of the blue wall states. I think they have several pathways to get there.

As I look at it — and every night we run 66,000 simulations of the election and look very closely at it — I would rather be Kamala Harris than I would Donald Trump for two reasons. One, I think she has room to grow. After three presidential campaigns, there isn’t a voter who doesn’t have an opinion of Trump. There are still people trying to figure out what she’s about and what she can do to make their lives better. And the second thing is I think enthusiasm matters. The number that I looked at every day as a presidential campaign manager was enthusiasm. Why? Because really you want voters to do three things. Obviously you want them to vote for you, and then you want them to give you all their money. But almost as importantly, you want them to persuade their friends and family to vote. And in looking at enthusiasm, Harris has built a big enthusiasm lead over Trump. You see that in the rallies, you see his rallies not selling out. I’m not throwing a mean punch at him — it’s hard the third time, everyone’s seen him in these states over and over and over.

As long as the actual votes trend towards 54% female vs. 45% male, Harris carries the day. That’s been the trend so far in early voting.

Pollsters aren’t factoring that imbalance into their methodology because, of course, they’re mostly men.

But look at her volunteer shifts. I did an event in the second district of Nebraska, and we thought there were going to be 25, 30 people there, and like 150 people showed up to knock on doors. Not even the organizers on the ground knew those people were coming. And then you look at the early vote stuff. It’s too early to draw a whole lot of conclusions, but what seems to be true is that Democratic voters are more enthusiastic than Republicans. And in 2016 that was really the metric that said Trump was gonna win.

The other thing I’m looking at, which I think is one of the underreported things about this election, is the gender divide. It’s really been the story of every election since Dobbs. I remember sitting with Cecile Richards, the former head of Planned Parenthood, the day after Dobbs happened. She said, “This ruling is going to age very poorly. This throws it to the states, and you’re going to see all sorts of chaos. People, individually, will get very upset about this and take it out on elected officials.” After 2022, I said to her, “You were right.” She goes, “Oh, no no, Jim. I was right in those places, but the first time it’s really on the ballot nationally is in the 2024 presidential election.”

I’ve spent some time this cycle in states where abortion is front-and-center thanks to referenda, like in Arizona and Nevada. You’ll see where I’m going with this question in a second, but as I think about those states, I’m reminded of the focus in recent weeks on Harris’s relatively weak numbers with Latino and Black men. I asked David Plouffe about this the other day, and he more or less made the point that even if she lags where previous Democratic candidates were with those voters, Harris would over-perform with other groups, including women of all kinds. And that’s largely because of the abortion issue. Do you buy that? I know some abortion-rights activists and strategists have been warning Democrats that even though they’ve won consistently since Dobbs, they have to work to keep the focus on the issue and make sure people are paying as much attention as they were two years ago.

The Republicans are out there saying that in smaller turnout elections, in referendums, in 2022, this issue played bigger but that in a general election it won’t play as big. I don’t think that’s true, for one really big reason. Right now, women voters are going for Harris over Trump by 16 points, and this race really depends on how much Harris wins women by. Specifically, white women and working-class white women without a college degree could be the decisive voter group. White women make up about 36 percent of the overall electorate. Traditionally, Republicans win these voters — these are the voters who broke Hillary Clinton’s heart. Mitt Romney beat us with white women by 9 points, Trump won them by 6 points in 2016 and 7 points in 2020. Right now, it’s deadlocked. That’s just a massive swing. Harris is polling better with white women than any Democratic presidential candidate this century. So if she can keep white women close, that puts her in a very strong position.

Does that mean you don’t need to focus on African American men and Latino men and the bedrock of the Democratic Party, which is Black women? Of course it doesn’t. You can walk and chew gum. You can do two things. There’s this absolutely fucking stupid argument in my party that says you either turn your voters out or you persuade. The campaigns that win at the presidential level do both, and that is the campaign that Kamala Harris has built. She has the biggest field operation on the ground that we’ve ever seen to turn her vote out and to focus on some of the groups we’ve talked about: African Americans, Latinos, young people. And then she has a persuasion machine for these women. Now, these women are the same women who walked away from Hillary at the end after the Comey report, and she lost a very close election. So I agree that you can never stop talking about the abortion issue, and I think the Harris campaign knows this. It’s now the single most important issue to women under 30, with 4 in 10 saying it’s their top issue.

Gretchen Whitmer is one of the best messengers we’ve ever seen on this. Think about how she talks about it: Abortion, IVF, and fertility treatments are pocketbook issues with women. And you can now see the Harris campaign talking about it in that way. There’s this argument that, Well, in the end these women aren’t abortion voters, they’re economic voters and they’re going to walk away from Harris in the end because of the economy. But Harris has made significant strides in eroding Trump’s lead on this issue, and nearly two-thirds of women surveyed said inflation and the economy were an important issue as they decide their vote. Of these women, now 46 percent prefer Harris on the economy and 38 percent Trump. If she can keep it that close with these white-working class women and get them to vote like more educated women, she’s going to win this election.

You’re talking about the movement we’ve seen on who voters trust more on the economy, specifically. One reason Harris has until recently struggled with this is clearly that she’s part of an administration that many voters have problems with, especially when it comes to the economy. So when you study these latest positive shifts for her, do you interpret them as the product of Harris successfully differentiating herself from Joe Biden and his White House? Or is it just that people feel better about the economy now than they did a few weeks or months ago?

I don’t think any of those reasons are right. I think it’s because she’s become the change candidate. She’s now the person that voters say is more like change, and it’s not because she’s distanced herself from Joe Biden. It’s two reasons. Donald Trump’s now running for the third time, and always makes it about himself every single day, so he is functioning as the incumbent in this race. And two, she embodies change in her story and her positions and who she is. With her positive campaign and laying out a clear agenda for where she wants to take this country, she’s made it clear this is her campaign, not Joe Biden’s, or Barack Obama’s, or Bill Clinton’s.

When I look at the numbers on “Who represents change in this election?” questions and she leads, that is really important, because the overhanging thing for Democrats is 70-some percent of Americans think we’re on the wrong track. Now, that’s not a Joe Biden number. They blame both parties, they’re unhappy with the partisanship, they’re unhappy with a lot of things. But she is not bearing the brunt of a lot of that because she is viewed as the change candidate in this election.

And yet, Trump is still at the absolute center of this race, for obvious reasons. What do you see him doing from a campaign perspective that concerns you now that we’re two weeks out?

Two things. It’s incredibly cynical, but I think his team has done a great job hiding him. He’s mostly stuck to his right-wing media bubble and voters are not seeing him as much. The problem for him is that the more people see him, the less they like him. He reminds them of the part of him they didn’t like. And the second thing is that he still has a lead on the economy and that is a challenge. We need to blunt this weird nostalgia, voters thinking they were better off with him. This voter amnesia — people forget we lived through the hell of his COVID policy, he was talking about injecting bleach, and the economy tanked!

Sure, but isn’t the evidence fairly clear at this point that voters aren’t responding to messaging that says something like, “Remember how bad COVID was? It was all Donald Trump’s fault.”

What people are receptive to is the January 6 stuff. And he’s playing right into that because he’s talking about it over and over. If I was his campaign manager I’d be throwing my desk out of the office.

Okay, so what’s the best way you’ve seen for Harris to talk about this, or about Trump as a threat to democracy? Clearly Biden tried to center this issue for over a year when he was running, and it never stuck as the issue in the race. I really like this new thing where she reads his comments on January 6, and what he’s said recently. In both the campaign and super PAC ads, they’re now showing Trump talking about it. It really is a twofer issue for the Democrats. One, it really reminds the base how important this is, and two, we know swing voters just want all of this to go away. They’ve made their decision on January 6 — they’ve made their decision on whether or not he lost — and they just don’t want to talk about it anymore. He reminds them. Her just going straight at it and saying, “Let’s just talk about what he said yesterday,” I love that tactic.

I want to talk about how you’re preparing for legal war. Tell me what you’ll be looking for when the polls close on November 5. One thing we know for sure is that if Trump loses he will try to steal this election. He and his allies are already laying the groundwork now. You’ve already seen over 100 lawsuits before the election, in all the battleground states and around the country, trying to change the rules. In Georgia, they tried to change the rules a month before the election and the court stopped them. They tried to disenfranchise 225,000 people in North Carolina, and they’re trying to change who can vote and when they should vote in Arizona. This stuff is all happening and it’s going to get worse after Election Day. It’s not just me saying this: Every day Trump is lying about millions of people voting illegally and about illegal immigrants voting.

I’m curious: How do you respond to the fairly common argument from some Democrats that all this is clearly true, but that there’s a massive difference between now and 2020 because Trump was president then, and it’s something entirely different trying to seize power versus trying to keep it?

Some of this is damage on the front end. We know what their goal is: to create chaos and confusion and weaken the trust in the electoral system. We know that some of these lawsuits pre- and post-election are meant to scare voters and make it seem like it’s going to be really hard. He’s already saying he’s going to send supporters to “watch the polls,” which means voter intimidation. And when people see those stories they start to get worried and they say, “Jesus, is it even worth going to vote?”

I also think we shouldn’t assume that the Supreme Court is going to be a rational actor on some of this stuff. Let’s not assume that it means much that we are in government now. We need to have a long memory from the 2000 election and understand that things can happen. I’m just not as confident as people who think that. It’s more serious than some well-meaning Democrats think it is.

Early voting has begun. Where are the exit polls?

^^^THAT is a better indicator than all of the pearl clutching.

Kamala wore a skirt today, for church. She’s going for it!

[quote] This election remains extremely close, but Donald Trump has been gaining ground. One of my pet peeves is with the idea that this is Kamala Harris’s election to lose. I could articulate some critiques of her campaign, but if you study the factors that have historically determined elections, you'll see that she’s battling difficult circumstances.

[quote] Today's numbers. Starting to see some Trump leads in high-quality national polls, which is certainly not a great sign for Harris. Very close race, though.

Trump pulled an insurrection and is on the verge of being rewarded with reelection. Only in America.

In a choice between either the potentially first female president or a convicted felon, only in America would the felon be on the precipice of victory.

Trump has never reached 50% in any election. He beat Hillary because she was just as unpopular as he was, and she ran a terrible campaign. The only way Trump gets to 50% is if white women vote for him in much higher numbers than they did in 2016 and 2020. I just don't see that ever happening post Dobbs decision.

Plus, a poll shows Harris getting more white women than Obama, Hillary and Biden. Same with college-educated whites. Also, A-rated Emerson College shows undecideds breaking heavily towards Harris.

[quote] Trump has never reached 50% in any election.

But we've been led to believe he's doing much better among minority men, as well as with men aged 18-29.

R440 America, America!

This is where we are🤷🏻‍♂️

If anyone here wants a deeper understanding of how the gender gap could impact the election, check out this article. It’s enlightening and encouraging for Harris and the Dems. She applies the 2024 polling based on gender to 2020 turnout rates based on gender for each swing state.

Worth reading.

[quote] Plus, a poll shows Harris getting more white women than Obama, Hillary and Biden. Same with college-educated whites. Also, A-rated Emerson College shows undecideds breaking heavily towards Harris.

She’s lost men, or haven’t you been paying attention. People have been screaming this for weeks. Men simply don’t like her, and that includes black men.

Men simply don’t like women, and that includes Black women.

FIFY

Men are a MINORITY, r445.

But the majority of women have also voted for Trump, in both '16 & '20, R447.

R448, I think you mean the majority of white women. Not the majority of all women.

No, I think it's all women. White women being the great majority of all women tends to skew those numbers.

R450, no.

Trump lost the popular vote both times (2016 and 2020). Use logic:

- This means more voters voted for Trump’s opponent.

- Trump does better with men than he does with women.

- This has to mean that his opponent got >50% of women’s votes (which they did)

Yes, you're right, R451. Of course. In '16, for example, Hillary won the female vote, while losing the white female vote, 45-47.

[quote] Men are a MINORITY

“In the United States, women make up 50.4% of the population, while men make up 49.5%.”

Not even by a single percentage, dimwit.

When you consider that more men lose their right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement, the difference is more pronounced.

Here’s some helpful numbers.

According to this report, 70% of eligible females were registered to vote in 2022, compared to 68.2% of males.

Elderdyke is a moron.

And those white females will once again vote for the orange turd. Mark my words.

Even if she cannot get a majority of the white female vote, Harris can maybe offset her losses among minority men if she can reduce her deficit with them.

I don't know why the The Hill bothers to post an article like this and then point out in the next to last paragraph that, no, the race is actually still a toss-up.

If, as suggested, Trump is now on a path to win the popular vote, it’s most unlikely that all the purple states that held for Hillary & Biden will hold for Harris.

Life expectancy is another small piece of why women voters outnumber men voters. Once you get up past age 85, the numbers really start to separate.

I have a feeling that this is going to be a blowout win for Trump with Republicans also taking Congress. It’s going to be a major shitshow for the foreseeable future. The idiots who dragged their feet on prosecuting will be blamed in the downfall of America. They are this year’s James Comey.

You mean The Lost Cause WASN'T?

If Trump wins, say goodby to MSNBC, CNN and Morning Joe on day one. His Ilk will find some legal way to put them out of business. Then if you thought Fox was bad, his people will replace it with Truth Social live. Devin Nunez will become a billionaire the likes of Rupert Murdock. Tucker Carlson will be hired back as the highest paid "news anchor". Laura Ingraham will be the new press secretary. Elon Musk will be the new Energy Czar. Aleen Cannon will be appointed to the Supreme Court. Don't think he won't do it, he will and they all would love the power and money they will extort in the process.

R465, put down the pipe.

Odds are BS. Just remember 538 had Hillary's odds of winning 71% to 28%. In 2016.

R467, not all of 2016.

Hmm. Lots of loons here. There is no way that Trump can win the popular vote.

Why, r469?

Since linking to WaPo is now verboten... here's this:

From WaPo this morning... their poll is giving her the lead in Georgia... who the fuck knows now?

"A Washington Post-Schar School poll of more than 5,000 registered voters, conducted in the first half of October, finds 47 percent who say they will definitely or probably support Harris while 47 percent say they will definitely or probably support Trump. Among likely voters, 49 percent support Harris and 48 percent back Trump."

She's ahead 51 to 47 among likely voters in Georgia, with ~2% leads over him in Michigan, PA and Wisconsin.

The WaPo poll is most uplifting … especially after two quality pollsters just showing Trump with a national lead, a first in his three presidential campaigns.

Tons of people have already voted. We have no idea how this election will go. You’d have to look at the polls the day each voter voted early to know. It’s impossible.

[quote] Since linking to WaPo is now verboten

When - & why - did this become the case?

I think that, after the particularly loony couple of weeks Dump is having, the numbers will improve for Harris. And he’s getting loonier by the minute.

Most registered voters believe the economy is not doing well and neither candidate for president is particularly trusted to handle economic issues. Voters are split on whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris is better able to handle unemployment, the cost of groceries and housing, or tariffs.

The rosier perceptions are driven by Democrats. About 6 in 10 Democrats now say the economy is good, up from less than half last year. Large majorities of Republicans say it’s not doing well.

Trump’s most consistent advantage continues to be immigration, where he has an 8-percentage point advantage over Harris among registered voters. Harris does best on climate change, abortion policy, and election integrity, where she maintains an advantage of at least 20 percentage points among voters.

Independent voters are closely divided in their opinion of Harris while most have a negative view of Trump

---

It's part wishful thinking but if her numbers as described I think there's a good chance the polls are off again and she's got enough support to carry it off.

Far as I can see, and I obsess about this stuff, the polls” have slid in Trump’s favor for two reasons.

(1) a growing number of Trump-friendly polls from “firms” with little to no track record have entered the chat, and

(2) Sorry to say it but the recent 2-3 point shift toward Trump is real. It is being tracked by too many reputable pollsters who do have a track record.

A month ago I thought Harris had a 75% chance of winning. Sadly today I feel it may be Trump with the 75% chance.

Are the polls accurate? Part of the reason they were off in 2016 is that some pollsters overcorrected in the Democratic nominee’s favor after being quite wrong in Romney’s favor in 2012. This constant self-correction based on what happened last time is ongoing. But the pollsters were quite accurate in the 2022 midterms. I think it is possible they are accurate today.

[quote] A month ago I thought Harris had a 75% chance of winning. Sadly today I feel it may be Trump with the 75% chance.

I never gave Harris that high a chance of winning, for me it was never (much) more than 50%, but I'm in agreement with you on your current assessment.

Nope, Pollsters are going to blow it again because there will be either an over or under correction now that we have the first woman this close to winning. Pollsters just cant handle new variables.

It's hard to believe with all the support from high ranking Republicans and no Democrats for Trump that there is something the pollsters are not getting. If that's a reflection of a bigger undercurrent Kamala is for the win.

R479, true, and in their defense we have a stack of new variables here. The July Dem-nominee switcheroo. Kamala being female AND non-white. Trump being 78. Trump being a convicted felon who fomented the insurrection attempt of Jan 6. This being the first national election since SCOTUS killed Roe vs Wade.

It’s a lot. This isn’t Bush vs Gore, or Obama vs Romney.

[quote] It's hard to believe with all the support from high ranking Republicans and no Democrats for Trump that there is something the pollsters are not getting.

Maybe not high level Democrats for Trump - although there are RFK, Jr. & Gabbard - but there's no shortage of regular Joes, minority men, who've left the Democratic Party for Trump. The Great Realignment.

Just watch: this week and next week, we will see a flood of momentum in Kamala’s direction. You’re already seeing it today. A bunch of positive polls for Kamala. Bret Stephens endorsing her over Trump. Fox News starting to call Trump out on his bullshit. Big donation advantage to Kamala. Early voting starting to swing in her favor in more states than his.

She’s been consistently up in the polls. She has more impactful surrogates than he does. She’s working harder than he is. She represents change more than Trump does.

And women will carry her to victory.

And here’s another one…

I think you're probably right, R483, but I don't think it will show in the polls. There's either something wrong with the polling or people are lying. It won't be a landslide but I think she is most likely to prevail.

R477, are you saying that the Trump-friendly polls are fake? You’re saying two opposing things. Either they’re real or they ain’t. If the Trump pills are wrong, how can the shift be right?

[quote] And women will carry her to victory.

They won’t. Bookmark me. White women are still for Trump. It’s battered wives syndrome.

From your lips (hands typing) to ears of the gods, R483!

What Trump hath wrought:

R486, pardon the confusion.

Both things are true.

Some untrustworthy right-wing-leaning pollsters with no history or a suspect history are putting out polls. Those can be disregarded.

But it’s also true that trustworthy pollsters like Quinnipiac, Emerson and NYT Siena are tracking a recent 2 pt movement from Harris to Trump, compared to what they were seeing earlier. This seems real.

R491 that’s interesting but we’d need to know what % of the whole are in each group. If 95% already decided a month ago, that’s good for Trump. If only 90%, that’s more hopeful for Harris.

Do we know what percentage of likely voters have voted early?

"A majority of voters (80%) say they made up their minds about which candidate to support over a month ago, while 11% made up their minds in the last month, 6% made up their minds in the past week, and 3% still have not made up their mind."

Thanks R494! Well, that is some hope worth holding onto.

R484 That's one of the more interesting and important "details" in the crosstabs of all these polls. This demographic was where Biden was strong enough to win PA, MI, and WI. If Harris is outperforming him with these folks, that's very good news.

The polls are all over the place and it's time now, with three weeks to go, to ignore them. Battleground states will likely fall predominantly in one way or another. My guess is the winner will get over 300 electors, and that we don't know which way it will break, but the "breaking" variables favor Harris.

Early vote in PA, MI and now WI are starting to look really good for Harris as of today.

FYI: if you’re in NYC—we’ve finally joined the 21st century—you can request a mail ballot (delivered in 72 hours) and you can track its receipt at the BOE, which will confirm validity and that it is ready to count.

Almost like California…over a decade ago.

We could put an end to this bullshit, r489, if the goddamned DOJ would immediately arrest, prosecute and detain these domestic terrorists under the KKK Act.

But they won’t, because keeping us safe from white male terrorists is not a priority.

Makes me sick.

I can't make sense of these lineups. Trump isn't generating any excitement... loyalty, obviously (puke) but his polling numbers are generally static (despite the drift.) But to me the drift doesn't explain the advance voting. Are these abortion and other voters coming out quietly for Harris? It feels like most of it must be for Harris but I know I'm making shit up for my own benefit. Still, what is it with the huge advance voting?

R499 lacks basic knowledge: that’s not how it works.

[quote] The polls are all over the place and it's time now, with three weeks to go, to ignore them.

Two weeks from tomorrow.

With the reports coming out re: early voting in the battleground states, the obviously key thing is to compare the D vs R breakdown today vs 4 years ago.

By this metric, North Carolina is looking grim for Harris so far, I’m sorry to say.

“ Compared to this point in 2020, early voting turnout is down nearly 40 percent.

Democrats account for 35% of early votes cast, followed by Republicans (33%) and unaffiliated voters (31%).

At this point four years ago, Democrats accounted for 44% of early votes, followed by unaffiliated voters (31%) and Republicans (24%) according to Catalist.”

What's to say the people who haven't voted early won't yet vote or won't vote on election day?

What's to say there aren't some Republican voters voting Democrat this time?

What is the point of investing in meaning about how turnout now compares to then? Now is different to then. What's on those ballots is unknown. There's a lot of people's minds in North Carolina at the present time. It's worth noting Democrats, even in reduced numbers, are still the largest number of voters.

NC is also still recovering from Helene, so I’m not surprised those numbers are behind 2020.

[quote]Democrats account for 35% of early votes cast, followed by Republicans (33%) and unaffiliated voters (31%).

In 2020, Democrats were voting early and by mail because of the pandemic. Republicans (a) didn't care about the pandemic and (b) distrusted vote by mail, so their percentage of the early voting turnout was lower. Now, Trump is encouraging his supporters to vote early so naturally there's going to be a higher percentage of Republicans in the early vote totals than in 2020. I don't think those numbers are indicative about the state of the race.

What’s your point, r506? We know all that.

R503 is there a pandemic this election year? I thought not

Jonathan Last: “I believe that for all her political ambition, Kamala Harris is carrying this burden for us. She’s not Barack Obama, basking in the warmth of a cultural moment en route to becoming a cultural icon. She’s more like Frodo Baggins, walking toward Mordor while carrying a millstone around her neck, in an attempt to save all of Middle Earth from a dark fate.”

[quote]What’s your point, [R506]? We know all that.

I was responding to Torta/R503, who was worried that the early voting patterns in North Carolina don't look good for Harris, whereas I don't think there's any basis for that conclusion. Clearly Torta (and probably others) didn't "know all that" so it's worth pointing it out.

I agree, R511. Early voting in '20 was exclusively a Democratic thing. It is no longer.

Good to be reminded of this, R506 / R511. Thanks.

David Plouffe, on John Heilemann's podcast that dropped today, was asked on Friday if the campaign's internals were seeing any Trump momentum in the battleground states. He said they were not.

It still feels like Henny Penny out there screaming that the sky is falling. I refuse to believe that after everything that TFG has done and said in the last nine years, a majority of Americans would still vote for him. If I'm wrong then this country deserves to die. Too stupid too live. But still, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

[quote]We could put an end to this bullshit, [R489], if the goddamned DOJ would immediately arrest, prosecute and detain these domestic terrorists under the KKK Act.

Not the KKK act, but:

Was he a great big fat person?

Because, you know...

Despite the headline, The Economist model still shows it could go either way and the electoral vote very tight.

“The simulated elections in the model show a range of possible outcomes, with Trump projected to win between 179 and 341 Electoral College votes, while Harris could secure between 197 and 359. The median projection for Trump is 276 electoral votes to Harris' 262.”

[quote]Maybe not high level Democrats for Trump - although there are RFK, Jr. & Gabbard - but there's no shortage of regular Joes, minority men, who've left the Democratic Party for Trump. The Great Realignment.

Uh, NO. Gabbard officially left their party and really to be honest was never really into being Democrats in the first place. Not the same as someone like Liz Cheney who voted 90% of the time with Republicans. And you missed the point, Kamala met with over 100 high level Republicans who are switching this one time for her. There is nothing like that on the Trump side at all. So to say it's the regular guy doing this in some "great realignment" Is pure BS. Yes maybe some regular Dems have switched but even MORE regular Repugs have switched as well or even left the party. Trump is not growing his party, but Kamala sure is.

You want another example? Look at all the former or current high profile Republicans that show up on Morning Joe every night. You dont see anything like that happening on Fox with dozens and dozens of high level influential Democrats against Kamala.

I can’t believe he is going to win again… I feel sick to my stomach. I really do.

R518 Knows quite well Newsweek is a right wing leaning news source. Stop posting from the Trump PROPAGANDA machine. Trollin, Trollin, Trollin.

People have been noticing on Quora and Reddit it's turned into Fox News lately, so that poll is highly suspicious.

R519, continually denying that Trump has augured a Great Realignment doesn’t make it not true. Yes, there are a lot of Republicans, elected officials, political professionals and plain regular people, who have left their party in droves to align themselves with Democrats. Increasingly, the Democratic Party has become a home to college educated white men & women who were once a lock to vote Republican. But if the converse was not true, if many onetime Democrats, mostly non-college educated whites & minority men, have not transferred their allegiances, at least to Trump, the election would’ve been conceded to Harris long ago. It is true.

[quote]Newsweek is a right wing leaning news source

If you prefer to read about it directly from The Economist site, here is a link.

That Harris has spend the day today touring the Blue Wall states with Liz Cheney is further evidence that she is seeking to expand her electoral base by assiduously courting the votes of non-MAGA republicans.

One political analyst I heard said his Democratic sources tell him that, owing to her superior ground game, Harris will win if she can keep it close in the battleground states.

That Fox New Post R525 is not what you think it is. It's basically pointing out Trump is losing followers year after year which may be the handful of voters that Kamala might receive pushing her over the top to a win.

Hm.

And I had understood Nevada to be Harris's strongest swing state.

I care less about the party affiliation of the voters and more about the gender breakdown.

R529, yep. Now we have to hope that a large % of Nevada Dems are doing vote-by-mail.

Another Tuesday, another FiveThirtyEight roundup. Just TWO(!) weeks to go until Election Day. And early voting is already happening across the Battleground States. Below are the polling averages from week to week (Oct 22 vs Oct 15). Summary: I’m sorry. It’s not good. The worst week yet for Harris. What we’re seeing is the last thing you want to see as early voting is in full swing across all the battleground states. Trump is caught up to Harris and is showing momentum. Some of the polls that contribute to this “Trump surge” can be dismissed as Trump-friendly. But several of the others cannot, and collectively they are seeing it too.

The data:

ARIZONA. Oct 22: Trump +1.9%. Oct 15: Trump +1.6%. A net gain of 0.3% for Trump. AZ (11 EVs) has Trump in a small lead, within the margin of error.

GEORGIA. Oct 22: Trump +1.5%. Oct 15: Trump +1.0%. Oct 8: Trump +0.5%. A net gain of 0.1% for Trump. GA (16 EVs) remains statistically tied with Trump showing a small lead.

MICHIGAN. Oct 22: Harris +0.2%. Oct 15: Harris +0.8%. A net gain of +0.6% for Trump. MI (15 EVs) is now exactly tied. What’s troubling is that Trump shows real momentum here, and Harris’s lead used to be well over 2 points. It was even +3 for a while in August.

NEVADA. Oct 22: Harris +0.3%. Oct 15: Harris +0.5%. A net gain of +0.2% for Trump. NV (6 EVs) is exactly tied.

NORTH CAROLINA. Oct 22: Trump +0.8%. Oct 15: Trump +1.0%. Oct 8: A net gain of 0.2% for Harris. NC (16 EVs) remains statistically tied with Trump slightly favored.

PENNSYLVANIA. Oct 22: Harris +0.3%. Oct 15: Harris +0.7%. No change. PA (20 EVs) is now exactly tied. This is a concern because Trump is showing some momentum, and Harris needs PA more than Trump does (he very likely has AZ and GA).

WISCONSIN. Oct 22: Harris +0.3%. Oct 15: Harris +0.5%. A net gain of +0.2% for Trump. WI (10 EVs) is now exactly tied. Similar to Michigan, this is not good: Trump shows real momentum here, and Harris’s lead used to be as high as 3.5 points.

NATIONAL. Oct 22: Harris +1.8%. Oct 15: Harris +2.4%. A net gain of 0.6% for Trump. The tightening continues. And now the election is happening in the present tense, with early voting and vote by mail.

Here’s what I keep thinking about. The polls, in aggregate, have been unreliable by more than 2% in the past three presidential elections (2012, 2016 and 2020). First in the D’s favor, and then twice in the R’s favor. This is likelly happen again and we don’t know in which direction. If the battleground state polls are just 2% too Trump-friendly vs what’ll actually happen, then Harris wins decisively. And vice versa… if the battleground state polls are too Harris-friendly by even 2%, then Trump wins decisively. What we don’t want is a literal tie where the outcome can be litigated before an extremely Trump-friendly majority on the US Supreme Court.

So… we don’t know. In the meantime… big thanks and love to anyone and everyone out there who’s volunteering for Harris 2024.

Will the polls be wrong again this cycle?

It’s the question I probably get most, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy one to answer, and one reason might surprise you: Pollsters still don’t know exactly why the polls underestimated Donald J. Trump four years ago.

As a post-election report by professional pollsters put it: “Identifying conclusively why polls overstated the Democratic-Republican margin relative to the certified vote appears to be impossible with the available data.”

The exact explanation matters. Under some theories, polls may be much better in 2024; under others, pollsters are still vulnerable to another misfire.

In the absence of a clear answer, most theories center on “nonresponse bias,” in which Mr. Trump’s supporters were less likely to respond to surveys than demographically similar Biden voters. This is reasonable enough, but the details are murky — and again, they matter. In particular, they need to explain why the polls have sometimes been accurate during the Trump era.

It’s easy to forget, but the polls haven’t always been terrible since Mr. Trump came down the escalator. For all the problems with state polling in 2016, the high-quality national polls were excellent, and almost all high-quality polls excelled in the 2022 midterm elections. This variation in results requires pollsters and analysts to build a theory that fits the shifting error. It requires something much more nuanced than “Trump supporters don’t respond.”

Pollsters and analysts have studied the last eight years very closely (and they have made substantial changes, which we’ll explore tomorrow). Although they have countless hypotheses, I’d broadly say there are two not-entirely-mutually-exclusive theories for the polling misfires in 2016 and 2020. Depending on which you find more compelling, you’d have a different guess about how vulnerable the polls are to a misfire in November.

The unified theory Let’s call the first approach the unified theory. It tries to explain, in one swoop, why the polls and Democrats do well in midterms, while the polls and Democrats do poorly in presidential elections.

This theory holds that pollsters simply can’t reach enough of the least politically engaged voters — and these voters overwhelmingly back Mr. Trump. The polls can do fine in midterm elections, when only the highly engaged (and now relatively Democratic-leaning voters) cast ballots, but they underestimate Mr. Trump in presidential elections.

If you’re a liberal reader of this newsletter, this theory may send a shiver down your spine. All cycle, we’ve noted Mr. Trump’s strength among less engaged voters. We’ve agonized over the challenges in polling. Recently, we’ve observed that the Times/Siena poll shows strange similarities to the midterm election. The unified theory stitches all of this together into one potential nightmare for Democrats, where all the subtle patterns in the Times/Siena data add up to a harbinger of yet another polling misfire — and another Trump presidency.

A version of this theory is popular among the most renowned pollsters and data scientists, and there’s a lot of evidence to support it. Pollsters have known for decades that the least engaged, least political voters are least likely to respond to surveys. This may even sound obvious: A political junkie would naturally be more excited to take a poll than someone without any interest in politics.

We see this in our data, too: In a typical Times/Siena poll, people who have previously voted in a primary are about twice as likely to respond to a survey as people who haven’t. Worse, the people with no voting history who do take polls clearly aren’t representative of nonvoters as a whole. The previous nonvoters who take polls are much more likely to vote compared with otherwise similar registrants who decline to respond to surveys. (We know this because, once the election is over, we’re able to see which people we’ve polled actually voted.)

There’s also considerable evidence that less engaged voters are likelier to back Mr. Trump, especially after accounting for their demographic characteristics. The Times/Siena data has supported this proposition all cycle — including once Kamala Harris became the nominee, if to a lesser degree.

Put it together, and pollsters might be stuck: As hard as they may try, they will never properly represent politically disengaged voters, and they will therefore never show enough support for Mr. Trump — at least when those disengaged voters decide to vote, as they tend to do in a presidential election.

The patchwork theory (but ultimately the pandemic) The second theory is not so unified. Let’s call it the patchwork theory, though ultimately a lot of eggs wind up in the “it was the pandemic” basket.

In this tale, the polling errors in 2016 and 2020 may look similar, but they were actually very different. For one, the “gold standard” national polls were pretty good in 2016, while they were terrible in 2020. This suggests that there were distinct challenges in both elections, like undecided Republican voters who disliked Mr. Trump in 2016, the failure of state pollsters to weight by education, and ultimately the pandemic.

In most cases, these challenges have either faded since 2016 and 2020 or they have been fixed by pollsters. This theory doesn’t necessarily dispute that there’s a challenge reaching less engaged Trump voters, but perhaps that’s only one of many problems. With those other problems gone, the polls might be set up for a much more accurate 2024 cycle.

The patchwork theory obviously lacks the sweeping coherence of the unified theory, but in many respects there’s more evidence for it, starting with the 2016 election:

Education. In 2016, most state polls — including polls by the campaigns — were not weighted by self-reported education, and consequently had far too many college graduates. (Before 2016, whether you had a college degree was not a meaningful predictor of whether someone would vote Democratic or Republican; that’s no longer the case.) By our estimates at the time, weighting by education shifted polls by an average of four percentage points toward Mr. Trump. This helped explain the accuracy of the traditional national surveys, which were almost always weighted by education.

Late deciders. The 2016 election also featured an unusual number of undecided voters and voters backing third-party candidates. These voters were disproportionately Republican, and they appeared to break toward Mr. Trump over the last few days, based on the exit polls and post-election studies that recontacted previously polled undecided voters. Here again, the national polls had the edge: There were many national polls taken over the final few days of the race, and they were both accurate and showed Mr. Trump gaining. Conversely, there were few or no high-quality state polls taken over the last five days of the race. Every major final national poll, for instance, was fielded entirely after the end of the last high-quality education-weighted poll in Wisconsin — a Marquette poll fielded from Oct. 26 to Oct. 31.

These factors gave pollsters cause for optimism heading into 2020. In theory, weighting by education alone would fix many state polls, while late shifts wouldn’t be so much of a problem with fewer undecided voters. Put them together, and pollsters entered 2020 confident there wouldn’t be another polling misfire.

This confidence turned out to be misplaced. In 2020, the polls erred even worse than they did in 2016. This was especially true for the national pollsters who seemed to nail the 2016 election. The state polls fared no better than they did in 2016, and they often erred in the same places — like Wisconsin, where polls underestimated Mr. Trump by about eight points. They erred even though nearly all the state pollsters weighted by education, and even though the number of conflicted, undecided voters had plunged. So what happened?

The unified theory holds that the same underlying problem was behind the polling misfires in 2016 and 2020, helping explain the similar geographic distribution of error across the Northern battlegrounds in both elections. In this view, this nonresponse problem became even more severe as turnout rose to record modern levels and drew even more disengaged Trump voters into the electorate. The higher turnout in 2020 effectively canceled out the gains pollsters made by weighting on education.

When it comes to 2020, the patchwork theory ultimately leans a lot on one explanation: the pandemic, an extraordinary event that affected every American. Importantly, the pandemic affected people’s behavior. Many people stopped going outside and started working from home. All of this had a clear effect on surveys. Response rates went up, and surveys were becoming cheaper and seemingly demographically more representative — so much so that pollsters were rejoicing.

The pollsters may have been right to celebrate in April, but by the fall the pandemic was becoming partisan. Democrats tended to be masking and staying home — and more likely to respond to polls. The (overly simplistic but plausible) story here is that Democrats were free and available to take surveys all day, lonely and grateful to speak with a human, enraged by Mr. Trump and the pandemic, all while Republicans tended to be out living their lives.

There’s a mix of evidence to support a major but hard-to-quantify role for the pandemic in the 2020 survey error.

Response rates. As mentioned earlier, there’s clear evidence that response rates increased during the pandemic. Democratic response rates were significantly higher than Republican response rates in 2020 — about 20 percent higher in Times/Siena data — although we can’t be sure the pandemic was the reason for Democrats’ higher response rates relative to Republicans.

Timing. Before the pandemic, the polls showed a highly competitive race. The Times/Siena polls in November 2019, for instance, were extremely close to the final result, as were the poling averages by state in early 2020. Of course, it’s possible the polls were always wrong and Mr. Trump actually held a significant lead until his response to the pandemic put President Biden over the top. But the pattern is nonetheless what one might have expected if the pandemic had induced a problem in the polls.

Landlines. Landline telephone polling, which might be expected to be most affected by people staying at home, had extraordinary survey error. Remember the infamous ABC/Washington Post poll that found Mr. Biden up 17 points in Wisconsin? The landline respondents backed Mr. Biden by 30 points.

In Times/Siena polling, registered Democrats were twice as likely to respond as Republicans on a landline, but there was little to no gap among those reached via cellphone (the majority of our respondents).

Geography. There was a relationship between coronavirus prevalence in November 2020 and the polling error. Wisconsin was the epicenter for cases in late November, along with other states across the Northern tier. At the time, this was considered the likely explanation for why Mr. Biden was surging in Wisconsin down the stretch — that infamous ABC News poll contended: “Covid Surge Hurts Trump in WI.” In retrospect, the surge might have been merely helping Mr. Biden in the polls.

Which theory is right? We’ve looked at two basic ways of understanding polling error in 2016 and 2020, but just about every analyst would probably position themselves somewhere on a spectrum between them.

After all, almost every theory for error described so far has merit. They’re rooted in reasonable theories of survey response. They’re backed by evidence. They would help explain why the polls were worse in 2020 than 2016, and why polls were better in 2022 and 2018 than either presidential election.

Unfortunately, there’s almost no way to untangle the relative merit of the various theories.

The best-case scenario for pollsters would go something like this: Pollsters fixed the problems that hurt them in 2016, and the pandemic hurt them in 2020 but it’s over now. Thus, the polls will finally have a good cycle in 2024 — possibly even if they make no meaningful methodological changes whatsoever. Maybe the polls could even underestimate Democrats now, if there’s some new source of error working to Mr. Trump’s advantage. The polls underestimated Democrats back in 2012, after all.

On that point, it’s noteworthy that many of the worst pollsters of 2020 seem to be producing far better results for Mr. Trump in 2024, even when they’re not making many or any methodological changes. The Quinnipiac poll is perhaps the best example. It’s the last remaining of the traditional telephone political polls using random-digit-dialing, and it’s shown far better results for Mr. Trump than four years ago. It’s not easy to explain how the Quinnipiac poll can show Mr. Trump ahead in Wisconsin and Michigan under the most extreme version of the unified theory, unless Mr. Trump is on track for a landslide.

Similarly, it’s hard to argue that the survey respondents who yielded a Biden +17 lead in Wisconsin were representative of the midterm electorate — the implication of the unified theory. Those respondents probably wouldn’t have said they favored the Republican Ron Johnson in the race for U.S. Senate, if they had been asked two years later. Clearly, something got a bit easier for pollsters for them to get the midterms right.

While it’s reasonable to say things might be better for pollsters, the worst-case scenario still remains: There is no reason to assume pollsters can reach the least politically interested voters in sufficient numbers, and there is plenty of reason to think they will back Mr. Trump in November. If this challenge remains just as great, the polls might miss badly yet again. Perhaps the polls could fare even worse if Mr. Trump fares even better among less engaged voters than four years ago, as polls have shown all cycle.

In that event, pollsters will hope that the changes they’ve made since 2020 will help address the problems that come next. Tomorrow, we’ll take a close look at those changes — and whether that gives them a chance to avoid another 2020-like polling error.

R533 thru R537, thanks for posting this in full. It's worth a complete read, or at least it was for me.

Ok so basically what we have is what the story has been for last 2-3 months.

Kamala is slightly ahead….but

1) Trump is doing better than hoped

2) young voters are pissed about Gaza

3) men (black men, white men and all in the inbetween me) still don’t like voting for women just like they didn’t like voting for women in 2016.

4) it will be a horrible election night where there will be many moments where it seems like Trump will win (and he might)

Miss Lindsey is doing PAC commercials for Trump. She thrills TV network executives and gentleman callers. Who else even likes her? I don’t want to hear her anymore cursing and showing her lust for Trump. Mesmerized anchors only ask her fawning, softball questions.

Trafalgar releases another set of bullshit polls which causes another spiral. The Harris team knows what they’re doing. They need everyone to keep contributing and volunteering but they have the better hand.

The number of Republicans who vote for Harris and the number of women who vote for Harris will tell the tale.

R539, there's not much of evidence out there to support your (2). The loudest lefty college campus protesters are not representative of their generation.

R542 ... and the margin of young voters who will vote on Gaza only is small, and they'll likely vote for Stein or West. However the Arab-American voters in MI who decide not to vote for Harris is a problem for her.

More bad news. This time from Jon Ralston, the longtime eminence grise of Nevada politics.

[quote] The headline: Republicans lead statewide in Nevada after three days of early voting and mail ballot counting. This has not happened in a presidential year in The Reid Machine Era, which encompasses the races since 2008. This could signal serious danger for the Dems and for Kamala Harris here.

[quote] It's pretty easy to explain: The Clark firewall has all but collapsed (it's 4,500 votes) and the rurals are way overperforming their share of the electorate with what has been tabulated, nearly by 4 points -- almost all taken from Clark's share. The large mail ballot lead enjoyed by Dems has been erased and more by the GOP lead in in-person early voting.

[quote] The Rs have a nearly 2-point turnout advantage, and nearly 250,000 votes have been cast. That's probably not too far from a fifth of the total vote.

[quote] It's too soon to call it a trend, but this was a huge day for Republicans in Nevada (they are ahead in Washoe now, too, erasing a deficit). A few more days like this, though, and the Democratic bedwetting will reach epic proportions.

[quote] Far from over, too early to call, lots of mail still to come, but if Dems don't build that Clark firewall...

Is the Nevada voting going to help the burn guy?

Sorry, but more on the early voting point. The co-writer of Game Change who is not John Heilemann said today on his morning call that we'll "almost certainly know" who - Trump - is the winner of the election on Election Day IF the early voting patterns persist. Trump, he said, is overperforming by various metrics in the battleground states. He cautioned that this will have to be tracked day-to-day, but it's more important than the polls. IF this pattern continues, he stressed, Trump cannot lose because Democrats cannot possibly do well enough on Election Day to make a difference.

This surprised me.

That is surprising.

I am really surprised at Trump's momentum and I think I am turning off all news and stopping checking out these threads. I would probably be wise to take the next few weeks, get used to the idea of this CUNT as president, prepare for NO social security when I retire in 25 years, ect... That way, if it happens, I have already mourned this country. I have such a bad feeling about this. What's worse, is that we will end up having President Vance in a year or 2. Its a modern day nightmare.

Don’t pre-mourn R549. Leave tomorrow its own sorrow.

Conclusions of Dem strategists (Plouffe, Carville, et. al.), as of today: Harris is ahead, barely. If we do everything we need to, we will win (early voting turnout, outreach to likely voters, hitting all media outlets daily, election day voter turnout) ... if we mess up any of the steps, we will lose.

If you had to choose, you'd want to be Harris.

Now, stop paying any attention to polls (advice to self).

R549, I hear you. I just cannot believe it's even a possibility this could happen. I remember an SNL skit from a thousand years ago when Jon Lovitt was playing Dukakis to Carvey's Bush and Dukakis turns to the camera in a debate skit and says: I can't believe I'm losing to this guy.

But I still think it is an if this happens and agree with R551.

I also think everybody's going to have to hold their nerve well beyond Nov. 5. We're back to Bush Gore in all likelihood.

Fivethirtyeught is now at 50/50.

I'm calmer when I prepare for the worst.

But... what's a good place to look for the Senate/House polling. Do we have a good chance to win either? (sorry, I know I should have been keeping up with this but I've been mesmerized by the prez race, and up till now, it's been fun - now, not so much)

R549 here- R552, I'm the guy posting this everywhere here- HIGHLY RECOMMENDED- The Neal Katyal interview of what Trump will do - And because this is now the likely scenario- an extremely close race- we are into months of hell- IF K wins--

Trump is going Rogan. Rogan holds A LOT of power sadly. Men will come out in droves for Trump.

It’ll be interesting if the Roe decision leads to a Trump victory. That will really be saying something and social conservatives will have a field day with it.

If Trump wins, I'm going to sit back and laugh when his uneducated, racist, misogynist supporters are propelled into even more suffering.

Yes, R558, his cultists will have to suffer for the spell to break. Unfortunately, the rest of us will have to endure the pain, too.

God, this is all so depressing. I was allowing myself to feel a little hopeful the last few weeks.

Now I am back to doom and gloom.

I can't believe we have to deal with that asshole for four more years. I can't believe students will have to learn about Trump for however long our country lasts in the same breath as FDR, Washington, Jefferson, Obama, Reagan, Eisenhower, Grant, Teddy, etc.

I don't agree with all those presidents, but they were serious men doing serious things.

Trump is a fucking grifter by every single metric. It will never not shock me this happened - and yet we all knew something like this would happen eventually.

They'll continue to blame Democrats, R559.

[quote] Just speaking anecdotally as someone who answers a lot of poll calls I’ve stopped picking up the phone for unknown numbers the last few weeks.

I live in a rural area with much recent development. I have a landline that now connects to my WiFi system. I kept it as a backup to my iPhone usage just in case, and I had negotiated a much lower cost to maintain it.

I received on average five or six calls a day on the land unit from marketers, scammers, pollsters and local area politicians with recorded messages. If I vote in a party primary, these politicians somehow are provided my name and phone number and location from county or state election officials. I do not like that. My land unit it’s supposed to have a number that is unpublished. I had long added and updated my phone number to ‘do not call’ lists. I block last incoming calls from unwanted sources, but they do not stop, using alternate numbers.

I stopped responding to pollsters long ago. Some have sinister intentions and misrepresent who they really are. I have gone to disconnecting the land unit, except when I want to make an external call to another. On those rare occasions, when I have answered a call from a scammer, I will deliver them grief in varied ways.

I believe posters call land units as an easy method to reach household that have them. Most of those households are senior citizens living in semi-rural or rural areas. Pollsters that rely heavily on calling land units, will often be delivering skewed results.

[quote] I can't believe students will have to learn about Trump for however long our country lasts in the same breath as FDR, Washington, Jefferson, Obama, Reagan, Eisenhower, Grant, Teddy, etc.

Also, Trump would get to open the 2028 Olympic Games, and preside over the the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.

r562 pollsters, not posters; households

I dropped my landline and then later decided I wanted it back. The phone company said they were not installing new landlines anymore in my neighborhood (despite most of my neighbors still having one).

I assume AT&T or whoever is trying to end landline service, without forcing people to give it up. Or maybe it's just my area?

This will force pollsters to find a new way to poll, if there even is a good way anymore.

R563 can you imagine 82 year old hippo Trump waddling out to open the Olympic games.

Can he even survive that long? You know being president will be at least a little bit more stressful and require more energy than having nothing to do but golf and gripe.

[quote] You know being president will be at least a little bit more stressful and require more energy than having nothing to do but golf and gripe.

Trump didn't exactly burn the midnight oil his first go-round.

If you're looking for optimism, there's always Simon Rosenberg, where the glass is always nearly full.

[quote] Non-red wave national and state polling has been remarkably consistent and steady since the debate. The VP leads by 2-3-4 points nationally, and we are closer to 270 than Trump. Her favs/unfavs are far better than Trump’s, which can matter for late-breaking voters. She’s closed the gap on the economy with Trump - a huge achievement.

[quote] With our ground and financial advantage, we should be able to reach more voters and close stronger than the Rs in the final two weeks (why we have to keep working it). The organized opposition to Trump from prominent Republican leaders in the home stretch is also going to matter.

[quote] The early vote is very encouraging in MI, NE and WI, and competitive everywhere else. All seven (or eight) battleground states remain competitive and we just need to go fight it out and win it on the ground, together.

[quote]

The latest A+ poll in Pennsylvania has Harris ahead. The latest A+ poll in North Carolina has Harris ahead. If you’re tracking the early vote, Harris is doing great almost everywhere. Detroit is killing it. Early signals from Wisconsin are good.

Harris is heading to Texas! Walz is heading to Kentucky!

I know we have some doom and gloom trolls who want us depressed but I’m feeling pretty optimistic.

[quote]I know we have some doom and gloom trolls who want us depressed but I’m feeling pretty optimistic.

For what it's worth, I was just reading an article about early voting on WaPo's website and one person commented that he has always been a Republican but was proud to go out and cast his vote for Kamala Harris, so I agree, let's not give up hope.

The doom and gloom trolls are closet MAGATs. Of course they’ll deny it but since I’ve blocked them I won’t see it. But trust me. They’re MAGATs.

R570 That’s why I am not overly concerned about the number of Republicans voting. What’s the male/female breakdown and how does early voting compare Haley areas vs. non-Haley areas.

Also let the Trumpers vote by mail. It lessens the red mirage.

When you’re reflexively dismissing the real concerns of Jon Ralston, you’re in a deep bubble. As well as a paranoid who believes anyone who doubts Harris has this in the bag has to be a troll.

Care to provide us with a link, R569?

Here’s the thing. Republicans may be leading statewide in Nevada per Ralston. But that only tells you they’re voting, not who they voted for. It’s not a stretch to think some of them are fed up with the orange felon and holding their noses to vote for Harris.

Be careful, R575, lest you attract the scorn of the poster who insists there is no great realignment.

[quote] If Trump wins, I'm going to sit back and laugh when his uneducated, racist, misogynist supporters are propelled into even more suffering.

You don’t understand cults. That will never happen. They will blame everyone else enabling Trump to go after his enemies. MAGA will fight to the death.

I think that this particular election will have more Republican voters voting for the Democrat candidate and more democratic voters voting for the Republican candidate than a normal election would. I also think there’s a double liar aspect to the answers on polling and a huge skew on who picks up the phone that is probably the opposite of the pandemic skew. Feel free to disagree with me. But I still think Kamala is 🔥

More Republicans are voting for Kamala than vice versa. What kind of Democrat is voting for Dumper?

Um, lots of minority men, formerly Democrats, are voting for Trump, R579.

[quote] More Republicans are voting for Kamala than vice versa. What kind of Democrat is voting for Dumper?

As someone pointed out, you have people who have called themselves Democrats their whole life and stay with that even as they consistently vote Republican. My mother always referred to herself as a Democrat, adamantly, even though she was very conservative and literally listened to Fox News every waking hour she was at home.

You also have a situation with people who always referred to themselves as Republicans, probably because of family, although they don’t support the party’s policies in whole. The existence of Trump has finally given them permission in their own mind to jump ship and support Democrats.

Not true r580.

GET IT, DETROIT!!!!!

R582, it’s totally true. In fact, many people in Philly are voting for Trump. They’re all registered Democrats. They have their reasons: crime and they hate black women.

Part 5.

Dave Wasserman answers some questions:

With two weeks to go before Election Day, voters and commentators are alternately freaking out and projecting confidence about their preferred candidates. Dave Wasserman provides a coolheaded counterpoint to all the hubbub. Wasserman is a senior editor and elections analyst at the venerable Cook Political Report. His Twitter catchphrase, “I’ve seen enough,” signals a race’s conclusion for many political junkies, and perhaps no one knows more about the ins and outs of congressional districts. I spoke with him about why Kamala Harris still may prefer a lower-turnout election, why Democrats are gaining momentum for control of the House, and what he’s watching for on Election Night.

National and swing-state polls show Kamala Harris has lost a little momentum in the past couple of weeks, a point here and there. But it’s tough to sort out how much it means, and Democrats are prone to panicking over everything. I’m wondering whether you see this as a real shift or more like statistical noise.

There has been a very small shift toward Trump on average in these swing-state polls, and we’ve noticed a slight dip in Harris’s net favorability. That’s to be expected given that we’ve transitioned from Harris’s reintroduction into a more pitched-battle October race that is characterized by partisan trench warfare. I’ve been calling 2024 the Aladdin election because we’re in a whole new world from where we were three or six months ago. It was less than three months ago that Joe Biden was still the de facto Democratic nominee. Yet the notion that this was going to be a joy-filled magic-carpet ride for Harris was never realistic, and I think most Democrats understood that even as they were euphoric.

If anything, they were surprised the euphoria was happening at all. They didn’t expect it to last.  Look, Harris has achieved a remarkable brand turnaround. She went from a net favorability of negative 16 for the summer to dead even. And now we’ve seen her unfavorability tick up in these battleground states as Trump’s ad spending has taken its toll.

There are a few factors that explain why there’s not just a vibe shift but a transition from a very slight Harris lead to more like a tied race or perhaps even slight momentum for Trump. I think the first is Harris had a very favorable August with the Democratic convention and Trump flailing for a message to define her, whether it was questioning her ethnicity or her IQ. She had a very favorable September between her debate win and a Fed rate cut. But October was always bound to be harder because this is when the airwaves stop being polite and start getting real, to paraphrase MTV.

Right. The ads Trump has run in October lean into the culture war. And what we have found in our polling is that the small slice of undecided voters have very negative views of both candidates, not unsurprisingly. They view Harris as too liberal and Trump as too erratic, but on average they trust Trump more than Harris to rein in inflation. And so the Trump anti-trans ad that highlights Harris’s support on the ACLU questionnaire for federal funds for gender reassignment plays into those undecided voters’ fear that Harris is too liberal, and it ends by talking about Trump cutting taxes and increasing workers’ paychecks. But I think the most potent element of that ad is its use of the logos of media outlets perceived to be left-leaning, whether it’s CNN or CNBC, to validate Trump’s claims and make a play for those undecided voters.

It’s commonly thought that Harris’s best path to victory is the “Blue Wall” Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, as opposed to the Sun Belt, where she’s doing slightly worse. If so, is that because there are fewer undecided voters in those places or because the demographics are more favorable to her there?

To be honest, I’m skeptical that we have a real handle on where these states stand in relation to one another because polls in Sun Belt states in the past ten years have underestimated Democrats slightly or been more on target, whereas polls in the northern battlegrounds have underestimated Trump by more. So for polling averages to have Harris up by one or a fraction of a point in the Great Lakes states and down by one or two in those Sun Belt states, I have very low confidence that Harris is meaningfully performing better in those Great Lakes states than in the Sun Belt states. It’s possible we’ll see a somewhat disjointed election result where there’s not a neat relationship between how these states vote.

I’ve talked to a bunch of pollsters and other analysts and have gotten their thoughts on how they’ve tried to fix the massive polling errors from 2016 and 2020 in these northern states. Do you have any confidence that they have done so effectively? What pollsters are doing more this cycle is weighting, and I’m including our polls in this because we’ve used this methodology. More pollsters are weighting their samples to recall the vote in the 2020 election. Very few voters have actually changed their minds, so it’s no surprise that the results we’re seeing look a whole lot like the 2020 election.

Now, every pollster is making a somewhat different assumption about what the electorate is going to look like when all the votes are counted, and those assumptions may or may not be correct. It’s possible that Trump’s being underestimated yet again; after all, he’s polling much better this year than in 2016 or 2020. But it’s also possible that Democrats do have a superior ground game that will turn out more of their voters.

One metric I look to is the NBC polls that ask voters their interest in the election on a one-to-ten scale, and we’ve seen two NBC polls in a row now that show Republicans with a two-point enthusiasm advantage in the high 70s. That’s not all that meaningful — it’s well within the margin of error. But 79 percent of Republican voters rate their interest as at least a nine out of ten compared with 77 percent of Democrats. Harris has been able to close the gap since April, when the NBC poll found 70 percent of Republicans at nine out of ten compared with 65 percent of Democrats. Even a five-point gap could have led to a catastrophic result for Democrats up and down the ballot.

So now what we see is there’s interest in the election that’s on par with 2020 among partisans. I think it is a little bit lower among independents. Harris’s best-case scenario in my view is a slightly lower turnout where you have fewer white working-class voters show up, but that’s why Trump is dialing up the intensity level as he always does.

The whole Trump campaign seems predicated on this notion that it can turn out low-propensity voters through unorthodox means — outsourcing it to super-PACs. But we’ve seen that Trump is pretty good at getting people to vote who don’t vote regularly. So I guess the $64,000 question here is whether he can do it on an even grander scale than before. Ultimately, Trump could get that high turnout he’s looking for even though the super-PACs he has enlisted don’t do an effective job of reaching them. Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk have next to no experience at persuading low-engagement universes and turning out low-engagement voters, yet Trump’s ads and his persona may be enough to turn out a very high rate of these voters without much direct contact.

And that still matters? I always question the effectiveness of blanketing the airwaves with ads, but you draw a pretty direct correlation between House Democrats’ financial advantage and their odds. That doesn’t seem to always be the case in presidential and Senate races.

Right, because those are saturated. Now, there are Senate races where money has made a meaningful difference. Democrats have vastly outspent Sam Brown in Nevada, and that’s made a huge difference. Elissa Slotkin is being vastly outspent by Rogers in Michigan, and that may end up making the difference in that contest. But in the House, we’ve rarely seen this big a money differential between the parties. And Republicans, after 2022 and their underperformance relative to expectations, put a heavy emphasis on raising more hard dollars for their candidates. Because the dynamic then was that Republicans had a massive super-PAC advantage yet Democratic incumbents vastly outspent Republican challengers. And that’s why people like Slotkin and Abigail Spanberger held on to their seats.

So Republicans really wanted to shift more dollars to their candidates because candidates get better ad rates than super-PACs do. Dollars at the candidate level sometimes go three or four times further than a dollar spent by a super-PAC. So what happened? Well, that strategy has fallen flat. Republicans have not been able to get more money to their challengers, and part of that is their leadership turmoil. Mike Johnson is simply greener at the political aspect of the job, and Kevin McCarthy has spent much of the year on a vengeance tour against the Republicans who voted to get rid of him.

It’s generally not a good sign when that’s happening.

The Kevin McCarthy Schadenfreude is real here. McCarthy is confident that Republicans would not be in this predicament right now financially if he were still there. That said, the House is still very close, and when you add up all of our toss-ups, if the toss-ups broke evenly, Republicans would still have a very slight majority, an even slighter majority than the one they have today. The reason Republicans might keep the House is that their incumbents are still polling okay in New York — Mike Lawler, Marc Molinaro. In part, that’s impacted by Kathy Hochul and her unpopularity there. The House could take a while to know because of all these races in California in our toss-up column that will take weeks to count.

I want to turn to the House. It feels like the race for control of it has been subsumed by the presidential and Senate elections, but there has been quite a bit of movement there lately. And you’ve highlighted the fact that GOP candidates are at a huge financial disadvantage to Democrats in a lot of places. So for people who haven’t been paying attention, where do things stand?

Democrats have a much better chance at flipping control of the House than they have of holding the Senate; that has been the case for a long time. This may be the first phase of the election where I think Democrats’ chances in the House may be on par or maybe a tiny bit better than their chances in the presidential race because of the money factor. Democrats have the ability in many of these races to dictate the narrative on the airwaves in the final three weeks of the race.

When we spoke before the midterms two years ago, I asked which race encapsulates the headwinds that Democrats were facing at the time; you said Oregon’s Sixth Congressional District. Democrats ended up doing quite a bit better than people were expecting, and Andrea Salinas, the incumbent in that district, won that race. By about two and a half points, yeah.

So what would you say to the same question now: Which race encapsulates the entire thing?

Perhaps Pennsylvania’s Seventh District, Susan Wild versus Ryan Mackenzie. This seat ought to be very winnable for Republicans. Biden won by a fraction of a point in 2020, and it may very well go for Trump narrowly this year. Yet Mackenzie, the Republican nominee, has raised just a tiny fraction of what the Democratic incumbent has raised. And Democrats have aired an ad that mocks him for lying about his age on a dating profile. Incidentally, there’s a Democrat in California who has come under fire from Republicans for lying about his age by ten years on a dating app.

I guess that’s the age we live in.

Right.

Are you going to be active on Twitter after the polls close?

No, I never am on the big Election Nights.

Because people look to you in these moments, and we’ll have to do without, what will you be watching for? What are the early indicators that things may be going one way or the other?

North Carolina’s First District, Don Davis versus Laurie Buckhout, will be a key one to watch. This is a more rural seat in our toss-up column. So that’s the first true toss-up where we’ll perhaps have a decent handle on things. And then we’ve got Virginia Second and Virginia Seventh. If Democrats are winning Virginia-2, which is currently in our lean-R column, that’s a good sign that Democrats are headed for the House majority. But that would be an upset.

The Seventh District we just recently moved to toss-up. This is Eugene Vindman versus Derrick Anderson, and Vindman is not as natural a fit for this seat as Spanberger is. He does have the money, but he doesn’t have the rural appeal or the ties Spanberger worked hard to build. And Anderson is a stronger Republican candidate than Yesli Vega, whom Republicans nominated two years ago and who crashed and burned. But this is a seat Democrats need to hold, and if Republicans win it, that would be a good sign that they’re headed for the majority and perhaps even expanding it to a few seats.

Any other thoughts on the state of the races?

I just want to be totally clear on how I view the presidential race overall. I don’t think there’s a clear favorite, but the way I’d characterize it is that I see a few more warning signs for Harris at this point than for Trump.

That’s not going to please our audience.

I think the question in the final weeks is what kind of closing argument we hear from the prosecutor in this race. I actually think a big question is the extent to which January 6 becomes part of her closing argument. But I do think that Democrats right now may be misframing January 6 because when they cast it as a future-of-democracy issue, it resonates with Democrats but falls flat with independents, who don’t believe Trump represents this threat of backsliding into authoritarianism.

What independents do believe is that Trump generally sows chaos and could sow instability, and I think the issue has much more potency for Harris as a law-and-order issue — specifically, Trump’s pledge to pardon rioters who attacked police officers. Yet that was absent from Walz’s line of questioning in the VP debate, and it hasn’t been prominent in Harris’s messaging. So I’ll be watching to see whether that becomes more of an element in the final weeks.

Just to be clear on what you meant when you said “warning signs,” is that a mix of your looking at the data and your gut feeling about what’s resonating and what’s not?

Well, the warning signs are, No. 1, that undecided voters care even more about pocketbook issues than the rest of the electorate and they trust Trump more to rein in inflation. No. 2 is we’re still seeing Harris underperforming with Black voters and Hispanic voters. And then the third is that Trump is introducing new information about Harris in his late attack ads that cast her as a radical, whereas Democrats’ messaging against Trump, whether it’s Mark Milley, Mike Pence, or Liz Cheney, doesn’t really tell voters things they don’t already know about Trump. And we’re seeing Harris’s negatives tick up a little bit.

Any other thoughts on the state of the races?

I just want to be totally clear on how I view the presidential race overall. I don’t think there’s a clear favorite, but the way I’d characterize it is that I see a few more warning signs for Harris at this point than for Trump.

That’s not going to please our audience.

I think the question in the final weeks is what kind of closing argument we hear from the prosecutor in this race. I actually think a big question is the extent to which January 6 becomes part of her closing argument. But I do think that Democrats right now may be misframing January 6 because when they cast it as a future-of-democracy issue, it resonates with Democrats but falls flat with independents, who don’t believe Trump represents this threat of backsliding into authoritarianism.

What independents do believe is that Trump generally sows chaos and could sow instability, and I think the issue has much more potency for Harris as a law-and-order issue — specifically, Trump’s pledge to pardon rioters who attacked police officers. Yet that was absent from Walz’s line of questioning in the VP debate, and it hasn’t been prominent in Harris’s messaging. So I’ll be watching to see whether that becomes more of an element in the final weeks.

Just to be clear on what you meant when you said “warning signs,” is that a mix of your looking at the data and your gut feeling about what’s resonating and what’s not?

Well, the warning signs are, No. 1, that undecided voters care even more about pocketbook issues than the rest of the electorate and they trust Trump more to rein in inflation. No. 2 is we’re still seeing Harris underperforming with Black voters and Hispanic voters. And then the third is that Trump is introducing new information about Harris in his late attack ads that cast her as a radical, whereas Democrats’ messaging against Trump, whether it’s Mark Milley, Mike Pence, or Liz Cheney, doesn’t really tell voters things they don’t already know about Trump. And we’re seeing Harris’s negatives tick up a little bit.

Idiots for trusting Trump with their money.

I saw a Senate prediction of 51R-49D. Ugh. As it said above in R589 "Democrats have a much better chance at flipping control of the House than they have of holding the Senate."

Please at least let us have that!

This should cheer you up

From link at R594:

The polling also shows Republicans majorly trail in swing states like Michigan and Ohio, as well as Maryland by as much as eight points, but the the super PAC still tried to delusionally spin that the “environment is ripe for a GOP win.”

Listening to the evening call of the co-writer of Game Change who is not John Heilemann & he said, obliquely, that he's been pitched a story for the last week that, IF true, would end Trump's campaign.

What story could possibly end Trump’s campaign? His voters will refuse to believe it.

Another not great poll result, for the presidential race at least:

[quote] The great irony of the NY polls out today: increases chance of a Dem takeover in the House... also could mean that the electoral college-popular vote gap won't be as small as I might have thought a few weeks ago.

[quote] What story could possibly end Trump’s campaign? His voters will refuse to believe it.

He was caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy?

Harris leads by four points, 50% to 46%, in Morning Consult’s weekly poll released Tuesday, consistent with last week’s results, but down from her 51%-45% lead in the two polls prior to last week.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll, also released Tuesday, found Harris with a three-point lead, 46% to 43% (but two points when using rounded figures, within the poll’s two-point margin of error); last week’s Reuters/Ipsos poll also found her with a three-point lead, 45% to 42%.

Harris is up one point, 45% to 44%, in a USA Today/Suffolk University poll of likely voters taken Oct. 14-18 (margin of error 3.1), as Trump has narrowed the margins since the groups’ last poll taken in August that found Harris ahead by five points.

Harris also led Trump by just one point—49%-48%—in Emerson College’s poll of likely voters published Friday, after Harris posted two-point leads in September and early October and a four-point lead in August.

Trump regained a lead over Harris in a Fox News poll released Wednesday that found him up 50%-48% among likely voters—a change from Harris’ 50%-48% edge in September, after Trump led her 50%-49% in August.

Harris leads in two other surveys published Wednesday: She has a five-point advantage (52%-47%) in a Marist College poll of likely voters, up from Harris’ two-point edge in the closely watched pollster’s September survey, and a four-point (49%-45%) lead in an Economist/YouGov likely voter poll, equal to Harris’ lead last week.