The demographic swingometer returns
The demographic swingometer returns
Drilling down on Electoral College bias, positive Rust Belt signs for Harris, (non-AI) Swifties for Trump, TV coverage leans Harris, yard signs work, RIP Latinx (again)
No. 331 | September 20th, 2024
🇺🇲 2024
The latest averages:
Silver Bulletin: Harris +2.8 (H+0.9)
538: Harris +2.9 (H+0.1)
NYT Upshot: Harris +3 (H+0)
The Hill/DDHQ: Harris +3.6 (H+0.2)
RCP: Harris +1.9 (H+0.4)
Cook Political: Harris +2.2 (H+1.0)
VoteHub: Harris +2.9 (T+0.1)
RacetotheWH: Harris +3.7 (H+0.6)
Average of the Averages: Harris +2.9 (H+0.4)
As many others have said: this thing is close. Harris expands her lead with post-debate polls — and I spy some convergence in the averages.
This is a pure tossup race if you assume an Electoral College bias of 3 points, similar to 2016 and 2020. If it’s less than that, it tilts Harris.
DDHQ’s Scott Tranter has the pre- and post-debate forecast averages.
Apropos of nothing:
My favorite interactive of the season is back: Dave Wasserman’s Demographic Swingometer. Swing the states based on what you think will happen with different demographic groups.
Nate Silver dives in on the mechanics of EC bias, finding a 1-in-4 chance that Harris wins the popular vote but loses the electoral college:
It’s pretty nice for Kamala Harris that she’ll win California’s 54 electoral votes and New York’s 28 without so much as batting an eyelash. And dominating in “flyover country” — for instance, Utah, and (probably) Iowa — is worth a little something for Donald Trump, too. But as you can see, there’s an inequity here. The states where Harris will win handily have more electoral votes, and she’ll win them by larger margins. Trump’s projected 7-point win in Iowa is enough that Harris probably won’t repeat Hillary Clinton’s mistake of spending electoral resources there, but it isn’t the 25-point drubbing that the model projects for Harris here in Cali. As a result, there’s almost a 25 percent chance that Harris wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College — but little of the other way around.
What if there’s no Electoral College bias, or it’s even reversed itself? We get a glimpse of that in the NYT/Siena Cinematic Universe this week, with a national tie and Harris leading by 4 points in Pennsylvania. Since the Rust Belt’s lean vs. the country as a whole is the source of a lot of scrutiny (and rightly so), this explainer by Nate Cohn is well worth the read.
Reading the tea leaves on Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.
What can polling from the almost-swing states tell us?
Before the rate cut this week, Independents started out decidedly negative in their views of the economy, closer to Republicans.
Harris’ nearly unbroken string of positive TV coverage, visualized.
🔬 Academia
My contrarian take on campaigns is that yard signs do matter in local races, and via Mark Harris’s great new newsletter, I see that the science agrees.
There’s been two studies on the topic and both have their flaws especially when it comes to top of the ticket races where name ID is no long[er] a real issue.
The first was conducted in 2011 and involved creating a fake candidate for a local race, blitzing the area with signs, and then mailing out a survey. The fake candidate shot up into the leading pack but the design has some problems. First is that they did not do a survey prior to the signs but only did a survey after which and it was for an ultra low information school board race. Anyway all that considered it did lift the fake Griffin’s vote by 9 points.
The second experiment was by Professor Donald Green of Columbia (the godfather of political experiments) in 2015. They used randomization of yard signs in precincts but not others to try to address the issue. Their study found that again also in down ballot races that yard signs might explain a statistically significant 1.5 point bump for a candidate though they admit that people drive outside their precincts so it is harder to assess.
📊 Public Opinion
Pew examines the most notable shifts in U.S. public opinion over the last 20 years.
Latinx is much less en vogue these days, and for good reason: 75% of US Hispanics who have heard the term say it should not be used.
Yard signs do show support but only "Owned ones", that is signs that are clearly put out by the Resident or in the window of a small Business. Those Yard signs placed in street medians are almost worthless. The funny thing is that I worked on a Campaign where the Management only wanted Yard signs for Public Spaces & were not giving them to Individuals. The signs started disappearing from the medians but started appearing in people's yards. That Candidate won handily.
Per Charlie Cook and looking at the data, Electoral College bias is caused by Democrats running up the score in highly-populous states (i.e. California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, etc.) despite not affecting the Electoral College. In 2020, Tennessee (a state with 9 representatives) gave Trump a larger raw-vote margin than Texas (a state with 36 representatives).
The question is whether Trump may do the same in Florida (where he resides) or if New York shifts to the right, like what happened in 2022. This allowed Republicans to win the popular vote in 2022.