Maximum anxiety
Predicting turnout, the freakout over polls, the freakout over early voting, the see-sawing media race, unmarried women for Harris, young nonwhite men for Trump
No. 336 | October 25th, 2024
🇺🇲 2024
24,040,251 Americans have voted, per TargetSmart.
Substantial (for 2024) movement in the averages this week, with Harris’s lead going from 2.4 to 1.4. This is where you’ll start to see outright Trump leads in some polls.
Silver Bulletin: Harris +1.3 (T+1.5)
538: Harris +1.7 (T+0.6)
NYT Upshot: Harris +1 (T+1)
The Hill/DDHQ: Harris +1.0 (T+1.8)
RCP: Harris +0.2 (T+1.4)
Cook Political: Harris +1.5 (T+0.5)
VoteHub: Harris +2.1 (T+0.4)
RacetotheWH: Harris +2.0 (T+1.0)
Average of the Averages: Harris +1.4 (T+1.0)
Let’s check in on the Cook Political crosstab aggregator, which has Harris potentially expanding on Biden’s margins with White College voters but Trump polling well ahead of his 2020 vote share among Black and Hispanic voters.
This week, Echelon released its turnout estimates for 2024: 153.7 million votes.
We were within 1 million votes in 2020 but high in 2022 because enthusiasm from 2020 did not carry into the Biden presidency. With a full four year presidency under our belt, I’m guessing our methods will work better in presidential rather than midterm elections, but we’ll see what happens on November 5th and adjust.
The biggest part of our release is not the topline number, but the demographic composition of the electorate, which we project as follows:
The electorate continues to get more college educated, going from 38% to 42% since 2020, while White Non-College voters declined from 43 to 40 percent. This underscores the importance of continued racial depolarization to the future success of the Republican coalition.
We also have state-by-state estimates and an extremely detailed map of turnout will look like in your community, searchable by state, city, county, or zip code.
As a bonus feature, we look at how turnout changes in either direction will affect the demographic and partisan makeup of the electorate. I encourage you to dig in.
Ron Brownstein has a look at what these demographic trends mean for 2024.
This is a time of maximum anxiety on whether the polls will “miss” and in what direction. And I will do nothing here to relieve your anxiety: you’ll just have to wait until November 5th—or whenever the race is called—to find out.
In the New York Times, Nate Silver lays out how the polls could miss—either way. Remember: polling error does not consistently favor one party. Counterpoint: It did miss in Trump’s favor whenever he was on the ballot, and he’s on the ballot for a third time. Counter-counterpoint: That’s a whopping n=2. In any case, Silver here makes the counterintuitive pro-Harris case:
How might that happen? It could be because of something like what happened in Britain in 2017, related to the shy Tories theory. Expected to be a Tory sweep, the election instead resulted in Conservatives losing their majority. There was a lot of disagreement among pollsters, and some did nail the outcome. But others made the mistake of not trusting their data, making ad hoc adjustments after years of being worried about shy Tories.
Nate Cohn rounds up the theories for what went wrong in 2016 and 2020, which I’ll summarize as follows: First, is the “unified theory,” which holds that the polls simply don’t do as well with lower-engagement voters who only show up in presidential years who tend to favor Donald Trump. The second is the “patchwork” theory, basically that a combination of gains in turnout and Democrats staying home during the pandemic created a perfect storm of polling error, one which should hopefully be resolved without a global pandemic raging.
So, what has changed? If Nate Silver is right and pollsters are subtly tilting polls in the direction of Trump, what are they doing? Cohn’s follow-up piece dives in to changes in methodology and weighting, with the biggest change being that many are weighting on recalled 2020 vote.
This is also a time of maximum anxiety on early voting data. Trends so far suggest Republicans are much more likely to vote early, but this could reflect the party urging its voters to do so more than a change in underlying enthusiasm. Where I do think you can draw more definitive conclusions are in southern states where a large percentage of the vote is cast early, and traditional Democratic constituencies are not showing up as they did even before 2020.
DDHQ’s Michael Pruser has the best analysis going of early voting trends, and argues that the most unambiguous trend is a Republican advantage in the Sun Belt.
Pro-Trump forces are ramping up again on the airwaves:
🗣️ Public Opinion
Donald Trump is going on Joe Rogan today, the latest in his tour of podcasts catering to young men. And the only podcast Kamala Harris has gone on is Call Her Daddy. This extremely gendered media strategy speaks to growing gender divides, not just by age, but by marital status. Daniel Cox continues to work the gender politics beat, and finds a stunning 65-28 Harris advantage among unmarried women.
Polling from GenForward also backs up Trump’s moves in the Manosphere, and why gender could prove highly significant—especially among nonwhite voters.
A quarter of young Black men are supporting Trump. (Black men overall backed President Joe Biden nearly nine to one in 2020.)
44 percent of young Latino men said they'd back Trump, an improvement over the roughly 38 percent who backed him in 2020.
For her part, Harris is at 58 percent with Black men, 37 percent with Latinos and 57 percent with Asian American and Pacific Islander men.
Kamala Harris is doing incredibly well among women of color. A majority of Black (63 percent), Asian American and Pacific Islander (60 percent) and Latina (55 percent) women say they will vote for Harris.
White women are nearly evenly split between Harris (44 percent) and Trump (40 percent).