Here they come into the home-stretch…
NBC News says it’s neck-and-neck!
The Guardian says it’s a dead-heat!
The Financial Times says it’s down to the wire!
Or is it?
It’s a tantalizing question that’ll be answered in due course this coming Tuesday. But that requires patience and the discipline to ignore the non-stop barrage of polls the horserace-obsessed news media uses like a mechanical rabbit to keep us chasing their ratings-driven coverage like starving greyhounds.
Yeah, that’s a run-on sentence and yeah, I am mixing my metaphors, but … dude, I got a lotta tables.
And I’ve got a brand new poll conducted by the venerable J. Ann Selzer for the Des Moines Register. It puts Kamala Harris up by three points over Donald Trump in the heretofore ignored “battleground” of Iowa.
That’s right. Iowa.
After voting for Trump in 2016 and 2020, Harris “leapfrogged” Trump in Selzer’s final poll of the campaign. Today’s 47-44% result completes a epic reversal from Trump’s 18-point lead over then-candidate Joe Biden in June. Trump’s lead dwindled to four points in a September, but it was largely written off as a blip by the news media and the two campaigns. In fact, they did nothing. Iowa was being completely ignored … just like the other forty-two states currently languishing the Electoral College’s de facto political prison.
Something tells me Iowa is on their radar today.
Now, it’s easy to get carried away with what could merely be a blip or an outlier. But this result, which Selzer links to a late-breaking surge of “older” and “politically independent” women in Harris’s direction, matches reports from early voting in the handful of states the media actually pays attention to. As the Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel explains:
Independent voters, who had consistently supported Trump in the leadup to this election, now break for Harris. That’s driven by the strength of independent women, who back Harris by a 28-point margin, while independent men support Trump, but by a smaller margin.
Similarly, senior voters who are 65 and older favor Harris. But senior women support her by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%, while senior men favor her by just 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%.
The poll also identified the issues driving support for the two candidates:
Trump voters say the issue of inflation and the economy is what they’ve been thinking about most in their decision to support him. Forty-nine percent of his supporters cite it as their most important issue.
Another 25% say immigration is driving their decision.
The top issue for Harris supporters is “the future of democracy,” with 51% citing it as their most important issue. Another 22% say it’s abortion.
The fact that just 25% of Trump supporters are motivated by immigration may haunt the Trump campaign if he ends up losing on Tuesday. His monomaniacal emphasis on an alleged “invasion” by mentally-ill criminals from “The Congo” stood in direct contradiction to the advice of nearly everyone in his campaign and his party. They wanted him to hammer home the economy. But, perhaps stupidly, he doubled-down on pet-eating immigrants.
On the Harris’s side, abortion seems to be playing a somewhat smaller role than anticipated. It also looks like Iowa’s voters are vindicating the Biden team’s early, oft-criticized emphasis on “saving democracy.” If a fulsome 51% of Harris voters are motivated by “the future of democracy,” it may indeed point to the source of the late surge in her favor.
Trump was winning two weeks ago. The polling was clear. He mounted a three-week run after the debate, seemingly propelled by his casting of Springfield, Ohio in the starring role of his migrant apocalypse horror show. At the same time, Harris was flailing through overly-managed media appearances and, it seemed, the momentum was all in Trump’s direction. He even took his first lead in a few national polls.
But then he hit the wall … a wall built by Gen. John Kelly.
His warning about the looming danger of a “fascist” Trump is an identifiable before-and-after moment that’s reflected in the polling. That’s what I saw last Sunday morning when the first wave of results came in after the Four-Star General (and Gold Star father) went on-the-record. Although Trump’s team said voters had “heard it all before” and that it’s “still the economy, stupid,” Harris crept back up nationally and in a couple swing states in polls taken after Kelly’s remarks dropped in The Atlantic and the NYTimes. It appeared that Trump’s momentum had stalled.
Then came the rally.
The momentum that stalled by Sunday morning was about to go into reverse by the end of Sunday evening … thanks to the joke heard ‘round the world. The impact of that trainwreck was clear when the first wave of “rally-inclusive” polls came over the second half of last week … the momentum shifted, however slightly, in Harris’s direction. There were some other red flags … including a hastily-organized, Tuesday morning Mar-a-Lago event featuring hastily-edited videos detailing migrant murders, all hosted by a decided low-energy Trump. He was trying to change the subject from the rally. It felt desperate. He’d lost control of the newscycle and he knew it.
They were gifted a “garbage” gaffe by Biden, and it did become a useful rallying-cry for his troubled get-out-the-vote operation. But his campaign was focused on something else. They quickly cut a new ad after the rally. It aired during the World Series. Instead of the usual doom and gloom, it featured Trump’s upbeat voice announcing his commitment to Americans of “every race, color, creed and religion” while a parade of diverse faces filled the screen. The biggest tell for me, though, was the final scene … which had Trump walking on a tarmac next to an unidentifiable general. It was a classic example of a “response” ad. Campaigns pump them out when they need to quickly address a crisis or an exposed weakness.
If nothing else, it shows they know they screwed the pooch at MSG. And, according to a new story today in the Washington Post, Harris’s team is convinced it was a turning point:
Harris’s advisers attribute the recent movement in their direction among late-deciding voters to the divisive tone that Trump’s campaign has struck in the closing days, and especially to remarks by one of his warm-up speakers at a Madison Square Garden rally who described Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage.”
The WaPo story details the shift they saw in the numbers in the days after the rally sunk in. The impression that Harris has the momentum, particularly among the “late breakers,” is matched by Harris-leaning numbers today from the NYTimes/Siena poll, among others.
None of this is a dead certainty, though, given the widely-accepted reality that Trump’s support was badly underestimated by polling in 2016 and 2020. However, there is widespread speculation that pollsters may have over-corrected this time as they sought to avoid taking a third strike in their effort to poll the swing states.
Today we also learned that the over-correction puzzle may have been solved by a British pollster’s “mega-poll.” Politico revealed the results of a “multilevel regression and post-stratification” poll developed by Focaldata in the U.K. According to Focaldata’s “MRP” poll, “Harris is likely to take Michigan, with a lead of nearly 5 points, Nevada with a lead of about 2 points over Trump, and with a slight edge in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”
Just like the Des Moines Register, the Brits found “Harris’ advantage comes in part from her strong appeal to older white women, a historically right-leaning group.” And they confirmed the conventional wisdom about Trump’s “gains with younger Black and Hispanic men.”
They also confirmed my sense that this all shifted within the last ten days:
Our MRP model has shown a Trump win throughout the campaign and only in the final update has it nudged Democrat,” said James Kanagasooriam, Focaldata’s chief research officer
One of the key difference in the MRP model is the sample size, which included “more than 31,000 voters across the United States over the past month.” The MRP model marries a “massive nationwide sample” with “demographic data to estimate seat or state-level outcomes.” It’s quite effective, but not entirely perfect, in predicting election outcomes in the U.K. since it “burst onto the scene” in 2017.
Perhaps the most interesting detail from Politico’s introduction to Focaldata’s MRP is the pollsters diagnosis of US pollsters’ performance during campaign:
This time, according to Focaldata’s research, the pollsters may be “herding” — clustering their results around the idea that the race is 50-50 in order to avoid looking like they’re wrong. Some analysts have suggested the polls could even be understating support for Harris.
Analysis by Focaldata showed clear grouping of poll results in the middle of the distribution chart, suggesting the contest is virtually tied. There was a strange lack of “outlier” results showing a clear win for either candidate that would normally be expected from time to time.
“We, along with others, have seen evidence of herding among pollsters at this election — likely out of fear of underestimating Trump for a third cycle in a row,” said Kanagasooriam. “The result is the current public polling is … displaying much too high levels of confidence in a close race when we are a normal-sized polling error away from a clear victory for either candidate.”
In other words, it is totally possible that the election isn’t going to be close at all, despite what the pollsters are saying.
And, apropos of both the horse- and dog-racing at the start of this post, we find ourselves circling back to where we started this little journey … with the Des Moines Register’s surprising poll.
What if this race isn’t headed for a photo finish, after all?
What if a significant portion of the 5.8 million pissed-off Puerto Ricans living in the US not only deliver Pennsylvania, but also manage to put Florida in play?
What if it is not Gen Z, but it’s a cohort of aging, democracy-motivated Boomers who ultimately trump Trump-loving Gen Xers?
And what if the Trump campaign already knows all this?
It would certainly explain the growing number of legal challenges Trump’s team is filing around the country. That’s not surprising. But the increased pace and escalating rhetoric may be, like that DEI-themed ad they rolled out after the rally, an ominous tell.
Because one thing seems certain today … you can bet on Trump declaring victory Tuesday night regardless of whether he’s winning or losing the vote count. And while his gamble on immigration might not pay off Tuesday night, I expect him to continue the scapegoating with claims of illegals voting illegally as he makes the case for a rigged election. That’s no secret. He’s been tipping his hand for months. This time, though, he’s got Elon Musk’s propaganda megaphone. He’s got millions of true believers already flooding social media with unfounded claims. He’s got an army of local election officials. And I suspect he’s counting on the Supreme Court to be his ace in the hole.