I looked at the polls again
So I keep saying that the polls are just the polls, they’re often wrong, and we shouldn’t spend any time worrying about them. But I have also admitted that I have a poll dependence problem and I’m afraid I’ve fallen off the wagon. Please feel free to scroll on by if you have taken my advice to spare your sanity.
But if you are still playing the parlor game against your better instincts, as I unfortunately am, here’s Dan Pfeiffer on the current state of the race according to the polls:
The national polling has been remarkably stable. As of October 4th, Harris leads a bit more than two points nationally.
Her lead sat between one and three for months with very little change. It “ballooned” to three points after the debate but later regressed as public memory faded.
Harris’s lead seems durable. It is, however, not yet big enough to feel particularly confident about her chances with the Electoral College. The battleground states that Harris needs to win are more Republican than the nation as a whole, which is why the Electoral College is biased towards Republicans.
The Electoral College bias is calculated by looking at the delta between the national popular vote and the margin of the “tipping point” state. This margin puts the winner over the top. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 points and Trump won Wisconsin by 0.8%. Therefore, the bias was 2.9%. In 2020, the gap was 2.8%. If the Electoral College bias looks like 2016, Harris will win. If it is as large as 2020, she (and we) are in trouble. The good news is that the polling thus far suggests less bias towards Republicans than in ‘16 or ‘20. This is why electoral models like Nate Silver’s suggest that Harris is a slight favorite to win.
But as we all know, it’s all about the battleground states. The rest of us might as well just watch Netflix and forget about it since we are pretty much irrelevant. Of course, the campaigns need our money and if there’s a House race that’s close to where we live we can devote our time or you can write postcards and phone bank wherever you are. But in the end the swing states are going to decide the presidential election regardless of what the majority wants and the fact that we’ve had two elections in the past two decades decided by the minority shows that our archaic system isn’t working the way it should in a healthy democracy. But that’s for another day…
Pfeiffer asks why Trump is as popular as he is and he chalks it up to the fact that Biden is unpopular and the wrong track numbers remain so high. In other words, it’s not that unusual under the circumstances. (I might argue that this raises the question of why Biden is so unpopular and the wrong track numbers are so high and I would suggest that’s a consequence of Trump being out there pounding the negativity in a media environment that rewards that.) I also think that the cult-like devotion of the MAGA base skews the fundamentals in some unprecedented ways. After all, Trump is a convicted criminal and adjudicated rapist who tried to upend a legitimate election and brags about overturning Roe. That seems pretty fundamental to me and yet he’s got nearly half the country behind him.
The good news is that Harris has everything else going for her which explains why she leads slightly. Pfeiffer notes that her favorability rating is positive while he’s 10 points down. She has more money than him and she has a much better campaign. A Harris campaign aide told Politico last week:
The campaign [has] 238 offices and roughly 1,750 staff in battleground states as of Wednesday. And the record fundraising hauls Harris has brought in — raising $310 million in July, including $200 million in the first week after she replaced Biden — has allowed the campaign to pour additional resources into its ground game, including 418 staff and 30 offices in the last month.
Trump’s ground game looks pathetic compared to that. He’s outsourced it to Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk and they have no experience at any of it. They’re trying an unconventional approach of targeting non-voters but the word is that they really don’t have much presence anywhere. Republicans in the swing states are loudly complaining that they don’t know what they’re doing.
Pfeiffer concludes:
Harris’s field advantage could be the difference maker in such a close race. While the voters could break one way or the other in the coming 30 days, this race will likely be decided on Election Night.
I’m so tired…