End of the double haters?
Undecideds coming off the fence, a more "typical" election, Biden didn't hurt downballot Dems, evaluating the VP prospects, young and old Black voters, a fresh look at immigration
No. 323 | July 26, 2024
🇺🇲 2024
Whither the double haters: we’ve gone from two widely disliked candidates to ones who completely unify their parties’ bases.
Trump vs. Harris is bringing undecided voters off the fence.
The average of all polls don’t show Kamala Harris solving Joe Biden’s problems among nonwhite voters, though the new NYT/Siena poll sees a more “typical” pattern of support for the parties after the switch:
It will take some time — maybe more than a month, given the potential volatility ahead — before we have a good sense of the demographic contours of this new race. But in this poll at least, the Harris-Trump matchup brings a different and more typical demographic divide.
In the poll, Ms. Harris fares better among young (18 to 29) and Hispanic voters than Mr. Biden did in any survey this year. She fares better among nonvoters than Mr. Biden did in all but one Times/Siena poll over the same period. Conversely, she fares worse among white working-class voters and voters over 65 than Mr. Biden did in all but one prior Times/Siena poll.
When this all shakes out, Harris likely does marginally better among nonwhite and younger voters and marginally worse among white and older voters, consistent with the relative differences between Biden and Harris’s favorability all year.
Biden’s position continued to deteriorate the longer he took to decide whether to leave the race.
Democratic leaders used fears of a downballot wipeout to get Biden out of the race, but the data shows the fallout from the debate was contained to Biden and didn’t hurt Democratic Senate candidates.
The 538 model (not to be confused with Nate Silver’s model) has taken a lot of incoming fire this cycle, for continuing to show improved odds for Biden in swing states even as his polls declined in the wake of the first presidential debate. Nate Silver writes that this could be due to some wonkiness in how the model weights fundamentals and polls:
So the chart is telling us that Morris doesn’t think the fundamentals are very informative at all. And yet, his model seemingly assigns 85 percent of the weight to the fundamentals. (I’m going to use terms like “seemingly” a lot because of the lack of transparency in what the 538 model is actually doing.) As a principle of model design, it’s almost axiomatic that if you’re blending two or more components into an average, you’ll want to place more weight on the more reliable component. But they’re doing just the opposite.
It also doesn’t explain what’s going on in Wisconsin or in other states like Ohio — where, to repeat, 538 has Biden doing much better in their full forecast than in either the polls or the fundamentals.
The explanation that Morris has given for this discrepancy is jargony and hard to parse. I might do a follow-up post where I try my best, but I’m reluctant to do his work for him. (He claims to be too busy to provide a longer explanation.) So far, what he’s written raises as many questions as it answers.
Speaking of 538, here they look at the average net favorability of potential Harris running mates:
Split Ticket’s recent poll of Black voters shows a growing split between younger and older voters.
👫 Demographics
Growing numbers of young people aren’t having children, and their reasons differ from the previous generation.
Immigration to the United States reaches a record high, with over 13% of the population hailing from another nation, and half of that number migrating from Latin America.
Encouraging that younger Blacks are wising up.