Expect updates as they come and check for more!
Monday, November 4th, 2024
SECRET BLUE WAVE COMING?
Many polls are not picking up the excitement canvassers and callers report as they are volunteering to help Harris win. Women especially are expressing over the phone and at the doors not only their eager support of Harris but their rejection of Trump. Trump excites strong positive and negative reactions in Americans. That’s one reason I think Harris might have a secret blue wave coming. Most polls are not picking up the wave of women who are upset about Dobbs, January 6th, and Trump’s convictions. People might not tell pollsters they are concerned about abortion because that is a private issue. They might cite the economy as their first concern. But the urgency about getting out to vote as opposed to staying home is the loss of reproductive rights. The modeling pollsters are using is based on past elections: 2016 and 2020. Those models have built in assumptions that a Republican will vote Republican when this time around Republican women will, I think, break for Harris over Dobbs and over their disgust with Trump in larger than anticipated numbers.
The most recent Iowa poll is the canary in the coal mine, I think. Older women, young women, independent women, and Haley Republican voters both men and women are likely to vote for Harris for the sake of their right to control their own bodies. They could break for her defying the models that pollsters are using to build out their picture of the electorate when they model expected behavior.
In addition, Trump has no ground game. Elon Musk went after the toxic masculinity vote in social media rabbit holes full of low propensity male voters. I don’t expect them to come out to vote for Trump in large numbers especially since Trump is not exactly the image of an alpha male. He almost falls over opening the door of a garbage truck, he has trouble steadying himself after that and can hardly make it up the steps of the big rig.
- Trump’s familiar tune: He continued his chaotic campaign strategy. He said he wouldn’t mind if someone shot journalists at his rally, and he escalated false claims of election fraud.
- Harris’s weekend: She underscored her message of unity and made a surprise appearance on SNL. Meanwhile, Harris’s supporters have been sticking notes in bathroom stalls. (Washington Post)
Investors this morning appear to be unwinding bets on the so-called Trump trade. In a major reversal, bonds have rallied and the dollar and crypto currencies have dipped in the race’s final hours.
One explanation is a surprising new poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris, powered in part by support from women and older voters, edging ahead in deep-red Iowa — a finding that’s also led to a tightening of Donald Trump’s lead in political prediction markets.
Why the change of heart? The highly regarded Ann Selzer/Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll that was published on Saturday gave Harris a three-point advantage over Trump in the Hawkeye State, a Republican stronghold. “It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” Selzer said. (Politico)
Tom Bonier, a senior adviser at market research firm TargetSmart, has identified a few trends suggesting that a female backlash against Trump is already underway. In particular, senior women (who would have memories of pre-Roe America) are turning out in stronger numbers, especially in Pennsylvania, than in 2020. Early voters, including in key states such as Wisconsin and Michigan, are disproportionately women — in some cases, more so than in 2020.
In addition, since Harris became the nominee, women lead men among new registrants. (This has been true in many states ever since Dobbs.) Bonier found that in the past few months, there has been a four-point gender gap in favor of women among new registrants — a five-point margin swing from the same period in 2020. New voter registrations among Black women are up three points over the same period in 2020. In Georgia, the gender gap has increased nine points since 2020. And in North Carolina, the share of new registrations among women leads that of men by seven points, a six-point increase over the same period in 2020. (One reason Harris might overperform polls is that more young women have registered since Dobbs, taking them outside the “likely voter” screens.) Her outreach to GOP women such as Cheney may be paying dividends.
Sunday, November 3rd, 2024
Kamala Harris pulls ahead of Trump in red state Iowa. The shift is led by women, older voters, and independent voters breaking for Harris.
The nationally recognized Iowa Poll shows Kamala Harris picking up support from women to surpass Donald Trump in a ruby-red state he has won twice.
- Democrat Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump in Iowa 47% to 44%, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows.
- A victory for Harris would be a shocking development after Iowa has swung aggressively to the right in recent elections, delivering Trump solid victories in 2016 and 2020.
- The poll shows that women — particularly those who are older or are politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris.
- Trump continues to lead with his core base of support: men, evangelicals, rural residents and those without a college degree.
Is this an indicator of a more general groundswell for Harris across the country? The Harris campaign reports that they are seeing independent voters making up their minds and breaking for Harris across the country. This is not, they say, reason to be complacent. But it does bode well for Kamala Harris in the final hours before the election on Tuesday.
On-the-ground reports also show a strong ground game for Harris with a lot of energy and excitement about her reflected in the number of volunteers for Harris canvassing, calling, and texting in battleground states.
The Harris campaign has held a steady advantage over Trump in terms of physical resources on the ground. It has 353 field offices and over 2,500 staff members in the battleground states.
The campaign says its volunteer effort has been surging and said from Oct. 14-21, during over 124,000 shifts, volunteers knocked on 1.6 million doors and made 20 million phone calls.
By way of contrast, there is an almost non-existent ground game for Trump. At his rallies people do in fact leave early these days. And Trump has lost small dollar donors while Harris has ramped up small dollar contributions.
Trump’s contributions from small-dollar donors have plummeted since his last bid for the White House https://apnews.com/article/trump-campaign-donations-small-donors-decline-f1a6b238d15edb3f72260e4c86d2c552
Is the Force With Kamala? It seems to be.
Polls do not predict the winner of an election. They do not predict who gets over the finish line first. They are a snapshot of the race at that moment in time. Pollsters have struggled to model this race with reliable information. They are using data from 2020 (the pandemic), and 2016. Both of those elections were before Dobbs happened. I believe they have not reliably factored in or accounted for Haley voters who voted in the past for Trump but will crossover to vote for Harris this time because they want to get past the chaos of Trump as well as because of Dobbs. Polls are not able to anticipate the will of those all important independents who actually decide our elections. When it comes to Independents, what matters is how they break at the end of the campaign. There are many more Independents these days (around 35%). Declared Democrats (49%) and Republicans (48%) need the Independent voters to win. Independents are breaking for Harris at a rate of 2 to 1 according to her campaign.
Friday, October 25th, 2024
THE CAMPAIGNS SEEM TO BE NECK AND NECK
Currently the election looks like a coin toss. Polling data is not a prediction of who will win the election. It is a snapshot of what is happening in the race at that moment. Just because someone is ahead in a race and the finish line is close, does not mean that the frontrunner will be the winner. The will to win, the effort taken to get across the finish line, the energy exerted by the runners has a lot to do with the final result. If you listen to a top notch pollster like Carl Allen, you realize that polling is something of an art form. It matters how a pollster asks a question and whether the pollster asks a follow up question or questions. The pollster needs to understand how a citizen is likely to break if there is a 3rd party candidate or if there is no third party candidate. It matters how partisan you are and how transparent your data is. Not all polls are equally good polls, in other words.
Pollsters Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier, who have a very good track record for solid polling, have been watching the data for this election. They have noticed that there have been about 80 junk “partisan” Republican leaning polls recently dumped into the polling mix which has affected the averages, dragging Harris’ numbers down and elevating Trump’s numbers in these final days of the race for the White House. The Trump team sounds very confident that he will win. Democrats are deeply concerned that Harris’ advantage after the debate seems to be slipping. But the truth is that this race has been remarkably stable ever since Biden dropped out and Harris replaced him at the top of the ticket.
Looking at this race from a distance, it is hard to imagine that Trump has convinced anyone beyond his already staunch supporters to back him. He has been more than usually bizarre and unhinged in his rants and attacks on Harris and Democrats in general. He has not been courting Haley Republican supporters. He has outsourced his ground game to Elon Musk who is pouring money into untested ways of engaging men, in particular, using social media. These guys are low propensity supporters. Will they get off their couches for Trump? Who knows.
Meanwhile, a lot of Trump’s former aides are sounding the alarm about his desire to be a fascist dictator and telling stories about what he wanted to do but was stopped from doing in his term as president. He wanted to have the military show up for peaceful George Floyd protests and shoot Americans in their legs, for example. He couldn’t understand why he didn’t have the power to do whatever he wanted to do like dictators can in Russia, China and North Korea. More stories are coming out at long last from people who worked most closely with him like General John Kelly, his longest running chief of staff, General Milley, and General Mattis. None of them are good stories about Trump.
Current polls make it look like Trump is up a point or two in key battleground states. You have to wonder if those partisan polls got dumped into the mix to make Trump feel better, encourage MAGAs and discourage Democrats. You have to wonder if the polls are being manipulated to support the plan to claim that Trump was cheated out of the presidency once again if he loses. If Trump were way ahead in the polls he wouldn’t need to shape the polling data. If Trump is such an energizing candidate then why do his rally goers leave early? Which they do.
Harris, on the other hand, has a robust ground game. She is having huge, energizing, upbeat rallies in Georgia and Texas with surrogates that include Barack Obama, Beyonce, Michelle Obama, Bruce Springsteen, and Marc Cuban. Her campaign has been flooded with volunteers who are canvassing, calling, texting, writing post cards to citizens in swing states reminding them about the importance of the election, and curing errors in registration and ballots to be sure each one is counted. Canvassers report a mixed bag when they knock on doors in battleground states. There are some devoted supporters to Trump but there are a surprising number of people who are excited about Harris and eager to talk with the canvasser, some even ask if they can volunteer to help her win.
DOES HARRIS HAVE SURPRISE VOTERS WHO ARE BEING OVERLOOKED BY POLLS?
In 2016 Trump supporters surprised everyone by showing up in larger than anticipated numbers to choose him. After the election when pollsters had the opportunity to review the data, they realized that Trump supporters who surprised pollsters were mainly a large pool of white, low education men who had not voted before. These men believed Trump was a populist leader who would help them gain a living wage and have better lives. They eagerly rose up to elect him in numbers that got him over the finish line. Now, nine years later after Trump has been exposed in many ways as an unfit leader and a man who really wants to help the ultra wealthy like Elon Musk and his pals at Mar-a-Lago get richer, buy more yachts and accumulate more money to pass along to their heirs. Are these non-college white men any wiser about Trump than they were 9 years ago? Will they stay home, support Trump or maybe switch to Harris? We don’t yet know.
When people register to vote there is no way to know if they will become reliable voters. So when you see a poll that says it is measuring “likely voters” the newly registered voters are generally not counted.
This time is it possible that Kamala Harris could have a pool of surprise supporters?
- Registrations went way up across the country for younger first time voters after Biden dropped off the ballot and Harris came in. If these first time, younger citizens do in fact fill out ballots, Harris could surprise everyone with that demographic.
- Registrations went way up for Black and Hispanic women after Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket. Harris could surprise everyone with that demographic.
- The Republican share of early returned mail ballots has risen from 27% last time to 32% so far in 2024, while the share enjoyed by Democrats has held at just under 48%. (The Economist) When a registered Republican fills out a ballot we don’t know who that Republican wants elected.
- There is a campaign going on across the country in women’s public bathrooms with activist women putting post it notes up in bathroom stalls that urge women to support Harris whether or not they are Democrats. “No one needs to know”. The Dobbs decision has been far more impactful than Republican lawmakers expected it would be.
- Given the number of Haley supporters who are registered Republicans who cannot stomach voting for Trump and the effort that Harris and Liz Cheney are putting in to woo the Haley supporters, could Harris surprise everyone with large numbers of crossover ballots for her that look like they are Republican?
Expect updates as they come and check for more!
