The Zogby Interactive Poll of LV’s was conducted for the Wall St. Journal Sept. 13-17.
Kerry’s leads (%): Arkansas 0.1; Florida 0.5; Iowa 3.0; Michigan 6.0;
Minnesota 9.7; New Hampshire 3.6: New Mexico 12.7; Oregon 12.0; Pennsylvania 3.1; Washington 8.7; Wisconsin 2.4
Bush’s leads (%): Missouri 5.4; Nevada 2.2; Ohio 3.3; Tennessee 5.5; West Virginia 12.4
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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October 23: Four Fear Factors for Democrats
I figured this was as good a time as any to come clean about reasons Democrats are fretting the 2024 election results despite some quite positive signs for Kamala Harris, so I wrote them up at New York:
One of the most enduring of recent political trends is a sharp partisan divergence in confidence about each party’s electoral future. Democrats are forever “fretting” or even “bed-wetting;” they are in “disarray” and pointing fingers at each other over disasters yet to come. Republicans, reflecting the incessant bravado of their three-time presidential nominee, tend to project total, overwhelming victory in every election, future and sometimes even past. When you say, as Donald Trump often does, that “the only way we lose is if they cheat,” you are expressing the belief that you never ever actually lose.
The contrast between the fretting donkey and the trumpeting elephant is sometimes interpreted as a matter of character. Dating back to the early days of the progressive blogosphere, many activists have claimed that Democrats (particularly centrists) simply lack “spine,” or the remorseless willingness put aside doubts or any other compunctions in order to fight for victory in contests large and small. In this Nietzschean view of politics, as determined by sheer will-to-power (rather than the quality of ideas or the impact of real-world conditions), Democrats are forever bringing a knife to a gun fight or a gun to a nuclear war.
Those of us who are offended by this anti-intellectual view of political competition, much less its implicit suggestion that Democrats become as vicious and demagogic as the opposition often is, have an obligation to offer an alternative explanation for this asymmetric warfare of partisan self-confidence. I won’t offer a general theory dating back to past elections, but in 2024, the most important reasons for inordinate Democratic fear are past painful experience and a disproportionate understanding of the stakes of this election.
Democrats remember 2016 and 2020
It’s very safe to say very few Democrats expected Hillary Clinton to lose to Donald Trump in 2016, or that Joe Biden would come so close to losing to Donald Trump in 2020. No lead in the polls looks safe because in previous elections involving Trump, they weren’t.
To be clear, the national polls weren’t far off in 2016; the problem was that sparse public polling of key states didn’t alert Democrats to the possibility Trump might pull an Electoral College inside straight by winning three states that hadn’t gone Republican in many years (since 1984 in Wisconsin, and since 1988 in Michigan and Pennsylvania). 2020 was just a bad year for pollsters. In both cases, it was Trump who benefitted from polling errors. So of course Democrats don’t view any polling lead as safe. Yes, the pollsters claim they’ve compensated for the problems that affect their accuracy in 2016 and 2020, and it’s even possible they over-compensated, meaning that Harris could do better than expected. But the painful memories remain fresh.
Democrats fear Trump 2.0 more than Republicans fear Harris
If you believe the maximum Trump ‘24 message about Kamala Harris’s intentions as president, it’s a scary prospect: she’s a Marxist (or Communist) who wants to replace white American citizens with the scum of the earth, which her administration is eagerly inviting across open borders with government benefits to illegally vote Democratic. It’s true that polls show a hard kernel — perhaps close to half — of self-identified Republicans believe some version of the Great Replacement Theory that has migrated from the right-wing fringes to the heart of the Trump campaign’s messaging, and that’s terrifying since there’s no evidence whatsoever for it. But best we can tell, the Trump voting base is a more-or-less equally divided coalition of people who actually believe some if not all of what their candidate says about the consequences of defeat, and people who just think Trump offers better economic and tougher immigration policies. While the election may be an existential crisis for Trump himself, since his own personal liberty could depend on the outcome, there’s not much evidence that all-or-nothing attitude is shared beyond the MAGA core of his coalition.
By contrast, Democrats don’t have to exercise a lurid sense of imagination to feel fear about Trump 2.0. They have Trump 1.0 as a precedent, with the added consideration that the disorganization and poor planning that curbed many of the 45th president’s authoritarian tendencies will almost certainly be reduced in 2025. Then there’s the escalation in his extremist rhetoric. In 2016 he promised a Muslim travel ban and a southern border wall. Now he’s talking about mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants and overt ideological vetting of legal immigrants. In 2016 he inveighed against the “deep state” and accused Democrats of actively working against the interests of the country. Now he’s pledging to carry out a virtual suspension of civil service protections and promising to unleash the machinery of law enforcement on his political enemies, including the press. As the furor over Project 2025 suggests, there’s a general sense that the scarier elements in Trump’s circle of advisors are planning to hit the ground running with radical changes in policies and personnel that can’t be reversed.
Only one party is threatening to challenge the election results
An important psychological factor feeding Democratic fears of a close election is the unavoidable fact that Trump has virtually promised to repeat or even surpass his 2020 effort to overturn the results if he loses. So anything other than a landslide victory for Harris will be fragile and potentially reversible. This is a deeply demoralizing prospect. It’s one thing to keep people focused on maximum engagement with politics through November 5. It’s another thing altogether to plan for a long frantic slog that won’t be completed until January 20.
Trump has been working hard to perfect the flaws in his 2020 post-election campaign that led to the failed January 6 insurrection, devoting a lot of resources to pre-election litigation and the compilation of post-election fraud allegations.
Though if you look hard you can find scattered examples of Democrats talking about denying a victorious Trump re-inauguration on January 20, none of that chatter is coming from the Democratic Party, the Harris-Walz campaign, or a critical mass of the many, many players who would be necessary to challenge an election defeat. Election denial in 2024 is strictly a Republican show.
If Harris wins, she’ll oversee a divided government; if Trump wins, he’ll have a shot at total power
As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently explained, the odds of Republicans winning control of the Senate in November are extremely high. That means that barring a political miracle, a President Harris would be constrained both legislatively and administratively, in terms of the vast number of executive-branch and judicial appointments the Senate has the power to confirm, reject, or simply ignore.
If Trump wins, however, he will have a better-than-even chance at a governing trifecta. This would not only open up the floodgates for extremist appointments aimed at remaking the federal government and adding to the Trumpification of the judiciary, but would unlock the budget reconciliation process whereby the trifecta party can make massive policy changes on up-or-down party-line votes without having to worry about a Senate filibuster.
Overall, Democrats have more reason to fear this election, and putting on some fake bravado and braying like MAGA folk won’t change the underlying reasons for that fear. The only thing that can is a second Trump defeat which sticks.
I AM REASSURRED THAT THE ZI POL REFLECTS WHAT I SEE IS THE CLEAREST PICTURE ON THE ELECTION. WITH SOME POLLS GIVING KERRY CALIF WITH ONLY A 50-42% ADVANTAGE I SIMPLY DO NOT BELIEVE THEM. WHAT I DO SEE HAPPENING IS THE PUBLIC RESPONDING TO EITHER KERRY AND HIS PERHAPS DULL , BUT FORTHWITH SPEECHS THAT DEAL WITH THE ECONOMY AND IRAQ WHICH ARE INTERTWINED, OR THE WAY BUSH HAS DEALT WITH THE ADVERSITY IN IRAQ AND HIS RELUCTANCE TO ADMIT SOME A MOUNT OF FAILURE IN PROCESS. IN MY VIEW THIS IS BRINGING KERRY AND BUSH CLOSER TOGETHER CLOSER TO ELECTION DAY AND THE DEBATES WIL GO A LONG WAY IN DETERMINING THE WINNER.
I never believed bush had that 11 point bounce. They lied about WMD, social security, medicare, taxes, the economy, iraq, and everything else. Why should we believe rethug polls like gallup? “figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”
This may be off topic, but Survey USA strikes (out) again. Speaking as a resident of Maryland, I can say with some conviction that there is no way Bush is even with Kerry here. Other surveys taken just recently (during some of Kerry’s worst campaign coverage) showed Kerry up by 9-10 points. The GOP governor of MD said that Bush would be wasting his time and money campaigning here.
Of course, it’s always possible that SUSA is right and everyone else (myself included) wrong. But this is the same survey that showed Kerry up by only 4 points in Illinois last week and was promptly contradicted by other surveys that showed Kerry with a double digit lead. And that produced a California poll with more Republicans than Democrats that was not shared by other surveys.
Looking at SUSA closely, I find that they have a Democratic edge of only 44-35 among Maryland likely voters (about the same among RV’s) when party registration here is more like 57-30 Democratic (approximately). And Bush is said to be (barely) ahead among suburban voters–apparently they forgot to poll Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. And they have twice as many conservatives as liberals–accurate in many states, but not here.
SUSA is starting to resemble Gallup in its sampling. And I’m not sure about Zogby, either.
I remain highly skeptical of ZI polls, but maybe more wired states may provide more accurate interactive polls. States like WV however, which are less wired, may not work out as well. I mean c’mon, Bush with a double digit lead in WV? When they are handing out ice cream and Bibles in hell, maybe.
What has Zogby’s track record been in terms of accuracy in presidential polling? This latest batch of state news looks like great news for us…but it’s also a little out of line with some other polling data.