Bush leads Kerry 48-41 percent of nation-wide RV’s, with 2 percent for Nader and 9 percent undecided, according to a Pew Research Center Poll conducted 10/1-3.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 26: Kennedy Now Taking As Many Votes From Trump As From Biden
Polls are showing a subtle but potentially important shift that I discussed at New York:
For a while there, the independent ticket of ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan seemed to be taking crucial votes away from Democrat Joe Biden, at least as indicated by comparing three-way and five-way (with Cornel West and Jill Stein) polls to head-to-head matchups of the incumbent and Donald Trump. Now, even as Biden has all but erased his polling deficit against Trump, heâs getting some more good news in surveys that include other candidates.
Two recent major national polls show Biden running better in a five-way than a two-way race. According to NBC News, Biden moves from two points down to two points up when the non-major-party candidates are included. In the latest Marist poll, Biden leads Trump by three points head-to-head and by five points in a five-way race. Since left-bent candidates West and Stein are pulling 5 percent in the former poll and 4 percent in the latter (presumably taking very few votes from Trump), you have to figure Kennedy is beginning to cut into the MAGA vote to an extent that should get Team Trumpâs attention. And it has, NBC News reports:
“Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly said heâs confident that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will pull more votes away from President Joe Biden than from him â a net win for the Republicanâs candidacy.
â’He is Crooked Joe Bidenâs Political Opponent, not mine,’Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. ‘I love that he is running!’
“Behind closed doors, however, Trump is less sure. A Republican who was in the room with Trump this year as he reviewed polling said Trump was unsure how Kennedy would affect the race, asking the other people on hand whether or not Kennedy was actually good for his candidacy.”
Politico notes that Kennedy is drawing higher favorability numbers from Republican voters than from Democratic ones, which could indicate a higher ceiling for RFJ Jr. among Trump defectors. And itâs generally assumed from his past performances that there is a lower ceiling on Trumpâs support than on Bidenâs; he needs to be able to win with significantly less than a majority of the popular vote, as one Republican told Politico:
â’If the Trump campaign doesnât see this as a concern, then theyâre delusional,’ Republican consultant Alice Stewart said. ‘They should be looking at this from the standpoint that they canât afford to lose any voters â and certainly not to a third-party candidate that shares some of [Trumpâs] policy ideas.’â
One likely reason that Kennedy could be appealing to Republicans is the residual effect from the positive attention he received from conservative media when he was running against Biden in the Democratic primaries; his identification with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories also resonates more positively on the right side of the political spectrum than the left. So itâs in the interest of Team Trump to begin telling the former presidentâs sympathizers that RFK Jr. is actually a lefty, and that started happening recently, as the New York Times reported: âMr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, pointed in particular to Mr. Kennedyâs views on climate change and the environment, writing on his social media site that Mr. Kennedy was more âradical Leftâ than Mr. Biden.â
The idea, of course, is not only to discourage potential Trump voters from drifting toward the independent candidate, but to encourage potential Biden voters to consider a Kennedy vote.
If Kennedy continues to draw votes from both Biden and Trump, each of their campaigns will need to make a strategic decision about how to deal with him: Do you ignore him and count on the usual fade in support afflicting non-major-party presidential candidates as Election Day nears, or do you attack him as too far left (if youâre Trump) or too far right (if youâre Biden) and try to make him a handicap to your major-party opponent? The more aggressive approach has become common among Democrats seeking to intervene in Republican primaries (or in the recent case of the California Senate race, a nonpartisan top-two primary) by loudly attacking candidates theyâd prefer to face in the general election, encouraging Republicans to flock to the supposed menace to progressivism. This kind of tactic â if deployed with some serious dollars â could have an effect on Kennedyâs base of support.
Certainly Trump seems to be considering it. With his usual practice of saying the quiet part out loud, Trump opined: âIf I were a Democrat, Iâd vote for RFK Jr. every single time over Biden, because heâs frankly more in line with Democrats.â
Trying to minimize losses to Kennedy and maximize opposite-party votes for Kennedy could become a routine practice down the stretch. Where and by whom this strategy is pursued will depend in part on where RFK Jr. is ultimately on the ballot. Right now he has nailed down ballot access in just two states, Utah and Michigan. CBS News reports the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is close to securing a spot on the November ballot in a number of other states:
“Kennedyâs campaign says it has completed signature gathering in seven other states in addition to Utah and Michigan â Nevada, Idaho, Hawaii, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nebraska and Iowa.
“The super PAC supporting Kennedy, American Values 2024, says it has collected enough signatures in Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina.”
Coping with Kennedy could become a game of three-dimensional chess between the Biden and Trump campaigns. But if it begins to look like RFK Jr. has become an existential threat to Democrats or to Republicans, you can bet theyâll go medieval on him without even a momentâs hesitation.
This math just doesnt’ work. If Bush is really up by 7, doesn’t that pretty much mean he would win NJ, NY, and maybe CA?
This is a repost–it’s here because it’s more germane…thoughts?
Data-crunching 101–an attempt at self-education
I just was dinging around (technical term, yes) with the results from the most recent Pew Poll, which found that 48 percent of 1,002 RVs supported Bush compared to 41 percent supporting Kerry. (http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=227)
Tell me if this was a sensible interpretation of the data, but here’s what I found:
Using a combination of the Pew background data (http://people-press.org/reports/tables/227.pdf) and a handy Java applet that solves linear equations with three variables (http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~chamness/equation/equation.html), it appears that the partisan split for the 1,002 respondents is as follows:
333R, 303D, 366I (basically 33%, 30%, 36%)
By comparison, I ran the same analysis for the 9/11-14 Pew survey (again of 1,002 RVs), and got a split of:
303R, 336D, 363I
Where I’m going with this is this: if the 10/4 poll had reached the same number of self-identified Rs, Ds and Is as for the 9/11 poll (assuming that it’s the sampling and not the self-identification that’s changing) with the voting tendencies of the 10/4 crowd, the 10/4 poll results would have been something more like 45.4-43.6 in Bush’s favor, not 48-41. One might then note that this shows a slight shift from the 46-46 split actually noted on 9/11, but by now I figure I’ve hopelessly tortured the data nearly beyond recognition.
Long story short, what I really wanted to explore and perhaps demonstrate is that the Pew poll didn’t reach the same crowd now as before, and that if they had spoken to a similar group, the poll margin would be even tighter. Please, someone who really knows what they’re doing, tell me if I’m playing along intelligently at home–mathematically, not politically, Smooth. đ
This poll gives very interesting education and income breakdowns. In the most recent poll, and some but not all of the earlier ones, Kerry support goes up with increasing education level and down with increasing income. If this is the composition of the electorate, the near-universal practice of weighting a poll to reflect education but not income will bias the results toward Bush. (See my posting last week which explained the mathematics.) I don’t know the magnitude of the bias because it depends on the size of the weighting coefficients.
Another very striking feature of these data is that the voting intentions of the high-income and high-education subpopulations are fairly stable, while there is much volatility at the low income and low education end. Since these are the populations that will be underrepresented in the raw sample, this behavior is suggestive of fluctuations in the calculated weighting coefficients that result from the ill-posedness of the estimation problem and the noisiness of the data from which they are estimated. (See another earlier post.)
Another possible explanation of the reported volatility of low-income and low-education subpopulations is that because of poor response rates they reflect small samples with high sampling error. (Each respondent in this group is highly weighted in reporting the overall poll results.) Very likely, both sources of error contribute.
There is absolutely no way in the world Bush is up 7 after the first debate.