Within the Margin

I wanted to take this time before we get into our race ratings for the presidential contest to think through how I’m thinking about this election. It’s easy enough to look at a polling average in each state, but I see value in assessing where I think the campaign is going to go and why – what will account for the actual results, and any potential deviations from those state-by-state polls as they currently stand at the beginning of September?

Enthusiasm and the short campaign. Democratic fortunes were already imperiled by tepid enthusiasm – fair or not – for Joe Biden before his disastrous debate performance in late June. The turnaround since his departure from the race and the emergence of Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee has been striking. Gallup’s most recent polling finds that Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are now notably more enthused to vote this year than Republicans and Republican-leaning independents – a stark reversal from March. Meanwhile, Tom Bonier at the progressive-aligned data and consulting firm TargetSmart has analyzed registration trends in 15 states (red, blue and swing) that have provided voter file updates since the candidate switch from Biden to Harris in late July. He finds remarkable surges in registration – especially in comparison to the same period in 2020 – with concentrations among women and particularly women of color. The spike in women’s percentage of new registrants looks similar to the one that followed the Dobbs ruling in 2022 (more on Dobbs in a moment). Will this be sustained? Consequential? I’m inclined to think so; I suspected there was more upside to a Kamala Harris candidacy than the chattering class presumed and these numbers (along with her polling improvement over Biden) are certainly confirming that prior. There are plenty of other factors that mitigate against my optimism and I’ll get into them below – but we have substantial data showing that the enthusiasm gap is now working in Democrats’ favor, and that has transformed this election. With a much shorter run-in, it’s not impossible to ride that momentum much of the way to the finish line.

The Dobbs Factor. The basic story is well-known to election analysts: the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade also unleashed a fervor among pro-choice voters, leading to Democratic overperformance in special elections, the midterms, and state-level referenda. That electoral success makes sense: after all, a solid majority of Americans support legal abortion. But polling and focus groups shows that the basics of how Dobbs came to be elude some voters. Donald Trump promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe. His appointed judges then, indeed, overturned Roe – a rare kept promise! And ever since, he has bragged about doing so. It’s his central pitch any time he addresses religious groups, particularly white Evangelicals. He constantly offers it up as a proud accomplishment. But some less-engaged voters are unclear on Trump’s positioning and actually associate this ruling with Joe Biden, since the court ruling occurred during his presidency (and perhaps because Biden was not the most impassioned or articulate defender of abortion rights; this is certainly an area where Kamala Harris has demonstrated greater effectiveness). Trump’s personal history as a womanizing rich guy from Manhattan, and his on-again, off-again attempts at softening Republican rhetoric on abortion, also contribute to confusion over the partisan dynamics at work and the stakes of this election when it comes to abortion rights. He spent the end of August confused and dissembling on how he’d vote in Florida’s referendum this November, or if he’d revoke access to mifepristone, struggling all the while to reassure abortion rights advocates and foes alike with how he’d approach the issue in a second term as president. All of which is to say: engaged and impassionate abortion rights supporters are plugged in and understand the state of play, but Democrats need to work on voters who are staunchly pro-choice but much less knowledgeable about the fundamental facts of American politics. If those voters think they can vote Trump and still protect individual freedoms when it comes to reproductive health, they’re not only mistaken – they could be decisive in the outcome. Can Democrats cut through the fog?

The Trump campaign’s focus on young men. In 1961, Barry Goldwater acknowledged that Republicans were unlikely to win back Black voters anytime soon and told a gathering of Georgia Republicans that they ought to “go hunting where the ducks are” – meaning conservative white Southerners who were wavering from their previous Democratic loyalties. Federal intervention to end segregation was shaking them loose from their longheld party ties and by the time Goldwater ran in ’64, they were increasingly ready to back a Republican for president (unlike the rest of the country: Goldwater won his home state of Arizona plus five Southern states, and lost the other 44 to Lyndon Johnson). Sixty years later, the Trump campaign has made clear that “hunting where the ducks are” means courting the votes of young men, including some who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. I have little to add to the story in terms of who these men are, what’s motivating them (though the story often involves a reaction to “wokeness” and the perceived “feminization” of the Democratic Party or society writ large) and how the Trump campaign is pursuing them. Quite a few media outlets, including the New York Times and Business Insider in just the last few days, have published pieces on these efforts. I readily acknowledge that this engagement is often happening through podcasts or MMA-focused shows that I rarely consume or encounter. To my eye, though, the Trump campaign is doing this deftly, and JD Vance’s daily unearthed utterances might even be a feature, not a bug. Some of these targets are infrequent voters, meaning pollsters attempting to model turnout might lack confidence they’ll actually show up to vote – which in turn means they might help Trump outperform his polling. I suspect they’re also the least likely people in American to answer a poll and if they do, the most likely to troll pollsters with their answers (look, I was a young man once myself!) The prospect of success in growing Trump’s vote share with younger males creates a higher ceiling for Trump and downballot Republicans, but as I discuss below, I’m not sure they raise the floor all that much.

A potential “last mile” problem for Republicans. I’m far from alone in thinking the Trump campaign is hunting where the ducks are in targeting young men across various ethnic backgrounds, and doing so in clever ways. I’m curious about how adept they’ll be at turning these young men from Trump-curious or even Trump-supporting into actual voters. My gut tells me that a great many of these potential voters have not spent a lot of time thinking about the mechanics of registration and voting; these guys come from the “too cool to think about that politics shit” crowd. To anyone reading this and therefore possessing some interest in political campaigns, it seems obvious that one must give a bit of thought to how to actually turn support for a candidate into a vote. But to people who think about politics in passing, there might be a lack of attention to civic basics. Combine that with the talk of the Trump/GOP focus on recruiting “election protection” volunteers and outsourcing their field and turnout operation to outside entities with little history of producing results and I’m left to wonder: are the Republicans ready to turn sporadic or new voters into reliable ones? In states with automatic vote registration, do some of these voters realize they’re registered? Is the Trump campaign finding these folks and talking through logistics? I suspect that the Democratic field operative’s focus on making a voting plan strikes them as quaint or intrusive. But it might come in handy, and I’m not sure the Trump campaign is mapping out an equivalent.

Democratic ground game versus Republican “election protection.” Pairing these concepts is not ideal from a rhetorical standpoint, insofar as the former represents the normal blocking and tackling of an election campaign while the latter takes on a more ominous aspect in this era of political violence in America. But as alluded to above, the Trump campaign is largely outsourcing turnout to unproven, grift-infused outfits that may or may not actually be skilled at getting GOP voters to the polls. After Lara Trump took over leadership of the Republican National Committee (RNC), her team ditched plans to open and staff 40 field offices in swing states. The Trump campaign’s focus, instead, is on the largest “election protection” effort yet seen, where they plan to have droves of people watching poll sites for signs of “fraud” or “theft.” Keep in mind that the RNC spent decades under a consent decree that stemmed from its violations of the Voting Rights Act through their Ballot Security Task Force‘s actions in the 1981 New Jersey governor’s race. After several amendments and renewals, the consent decree was ruled in January 2018 to have expired and would not be extended. That made 2020 the first presidential election since 1980 without the decree in place, and the RNC intended to mobilize 50,000 poll watchers for “ballot security” alongside the Trump campaign’s efforts to deploy an assortment of law enforcement official and military veterans for this purpose. Election turnout proved to be very high in 2020, and it’s unclear whether these efforts bore fruit – but more ballots than ever were cast via mail or drop boxes, making it harder to employ in-person intimidation tactics. As we return to a more “traditional” approach to this year’s election, will Republican efforts to “protect” the vote be more successful, or is this a dog that fails to bark?

The perils of polling. To be clear, polling is a public good. This is especially true in a huge and diverse country, where it’s valuable to get some sense of where the electorate stands on policy measures outside of campaigns. Even horserace polls have value: both for strategic voting and volunteering and, within reason, for setting expectations for outcomes that can serve as a check on illicit activity by election administrators. And most of the election-related polling is still pretty good despite myriad challenges posed by low response rates – there are sound statistical principles at work in quality survey research, and many public-facing pollsters employ those principles and offer valuable insights. Polling was pretty solid in 2018 and 2022 (with the exception of some partisan GOP pollsters who, whether due to poor assumptions or intentional malfeasance, spent the final weeks of the 2022 cycle depositing gobs of polls of low methodological quality which missed pretty badly on the final results). But now we’re back to a presidential year with Trump on the ballot, and pollsters struggled with those conditions in 2016 and 2020. That sets up some questions for us in 2024:

• Do we assume a repeat of presidential polling misses in the last two cycles (especially 2020)? Generally, there’s no correlation between the direction of polling misses from year to year; in 2012, for example, presidential polling underestimated Barack Obama’s fortunes (though Within the Margin was generally on the mark). But is there something specific about Trump’s presence on the ballot that confounds pollsters? Is there something specific to 2020? Nate Silver posited that pandemic protocols were more likely to be followed by Dem-leaning voters, meaning they were sitting at home more likely to answer a call from a pollster. That part, at least, should be removed from the equation this time around. I tend to think the thing to do is to operate with less certainty: all things being equal, I’d probably take a polling edge that points to a Likely Dem rating and move it to Lean Dem. If polling pointed to Tilt Dem (the closest pro-Dem forecast), does it then follow that I would shift to Tilt Rep? I’m not sure. Thinking that through in the coming weeks.
• Is polling properly capturing the magnitude of shifts toward Trump among non-white voters? This is a two-part question, really: first, are surveys and turnout models confounded by shifts among traditionally Democratic groups and second, are those difficulties magnified further when the movement is among non-college voters? Part of the issue facing pollsters in the Trump Era has been a difficulty capturing the realignment taking place along education lines.
• Are pollsters struggling with Arizona again? It might be unfair to say polling companies writ large “missed” here in 2022, as the high-quality pollsters like Marist and Fox News had Mark Kelly leading in the AZ Senate race. But the lower-quality pollsters that nonetheless were more accurate about Trump’s chances around the country in 2020 went on to perform disastrously up and down the ballot in 2022, and particularly Arizona where they kept finding sizable leads for Blake Masters (and smaller but consistent leads for Kari Lake in the AZ governor’s race). This is a state where I’ll probably lean even more heavily into the highly-rated, methodologically-transparent pollsters in 2024.

Pennsylvania’s downballot results in 2020. I’d say Pennsylvania’s recent election results are a three-part story: Working backwards: Republican midterm in 2022 hopes crash upon the rocky shoals of abysmal candidate recruitment. Dr. Oz loses the Senate election; rabid election denier Doug Mastriano is obliterated by Josh Shapiro in the race for governor. Two years earlier, “Scranton Joe” Biden narrowly wins back the Keystone State from Trump in 2020 by crushing him in the suburbs and yes, faring slightly better than Hillary Clinton in some of the former industrial territory that swung away from Dems for decades. The third piece? Republicans running quite well downballot statewide elections in 2020 even as Biden was carrying the state. Unheralded GOP candidates flipped the state auditor and treasurer positions and kept the attorney general race close. I think it’s dangerous to point to the Oz and Mastriano losses as signs of healthy Democratic performance downballot without looking at those treasurer and auditor wins for the Republicans. Is Trump fighting himself in Pennsylvania more than he’s fighting a propensity to elect Dems statewide? Does he simply have to match the performance of a replacement-level Republican? That’s a pretty low bar, with grim consequences for Democrats if that’s all he has to manage.

Palestine and campus protests. I’m not interested in using this platform to address the October 7 attacks, the war in Gaza, or the related protests. But a note about their impact on my thinking about this election is required. These events are especially complicated for the Democratic coalition and do not map perfectly onto a left-right spectrum within the party. It’s important to keep in mind that public polling shows a more nuanced picture of American thinking than many of the online discussions we encounter; Nate Silver broke down findings from several respectable pollsters back in May. Michigan and Minnesota stand out as states whose sizable Arab and/or Muslim populations could be particularly impactful if the hostility of some of these voters toward Joe Biden carries over to Kamala Harris. As for the protests, the media class made clear their hunger for a 1968 redux at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, seemingly rooting for blood in the streets. But it did not come to pass. Whether the fall semester brings a return of the angry convulsions seen on a relatively small percentage of campuses in the spring remains to be seen, as does the degree to the Harris and Trump campaigns are asked to weigh in on the tone of those protests, the police response, and so forth. My starting assumption is that they will not play a major role down the stretch; I would also suggest, though, that Trump is desperate for chaos in Gaza and unrest in America. The degree to which Benjamin Netanyahu and his government can or would contribute to that in some fashion is worth contemplating, but is such a tangled web that it can only impact my thinking so much.