A series of polls of LV’s conducted September 19-22 by SurveyUSA show:
Kerry ahead by 10% in Michigan and 5% Washington State
Bush ahead by: 1% Maine; 4% Iowa; 13% Tennessee and 1% Oregon.
TDS Strategy Memos
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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, he’s 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 Trump’s attention. And it has, NBC News reports:
“Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he’s confident that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will pull more votes away from President Joe Biden than from him — a net win for the Republican’s candidacy.
“’He is Crooked Joe Biden’s 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 it’s generally assumed from his past performances that there is a lower ceiling on Trump’s support than on Biden’s; he needs to be able to win with significantly less than a majority of the popular vote, as one Republican told Politico:
“’If the Trump campaign doesn’t see this as a concern, then they’re delusional,’ Republican consultant Alice Stewart said. ‘They should be looking at this from the standpoint that they can’t afford to lose any voters — and certainly not to a third-party candidate that shares some of [Trump’s] policy ideas.’”
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 it’s in the interest of Team Trump to begin telling the former president’s sympathizers that RFK Jr. is actually a lefty, and that started happening recently, as the New York Times reported: “Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, pointed in particular to Mr. Kennedy’s views on climate change and the environment, writing on his social media site that Mr. Kennedy was more ‘radical Left’ than Mr. Biden.”
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 you’re Trump) or too far right (if you’re 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 they’d prefer to face in the general election, encouraging Republicans to flock to the supposed menace to progressivism. This kind of tactic — if deployed with some serious dollars — could have an effect on Kennedy’s base of support.
Certainly Trump seems to be considering it. With his usual practice of saying the quiet part out loud, Trump opined: “If I were a Democrat, I’d vote for RFK Jr. every single time over Biden, because he’s frankly more in line with Democrats.”
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:
“Kennedy’s campaign says it has completed signature gathering in seven other states in addition to Utah and Michigan — 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 they’ll go medieval on him without even a moment’s hesitation.
I understand that polling organizations cannot poll people who just use Cell Phones (young people that tend to vote towards Kerry). I have read that their are 40 Million people using just cell phones now. Is this correct?
Go Kerry!
Referees skew the outcome of games. Judges skew the outcome of trials. They don’t usually do it at the buzzer. No, they do it all along, especially early enough to beat down the side they want to lose, then let them come back up. It’s the way there are fixed outcomes in trials, in games, and in other places in life. I don’t approve of it, but it exists.
I believe what we are seeing is a concerted effort by some polls to impact the election with badly constructed polls which are designed to give Bush big leads. The data simply don’t support these polls as sound.
They are piling it on heavy now because the know at the end they will have to close the gap, just so they don’t look ridiculous. After all, no one can really prove they were wrong unless they badly miss the final number.
Look for the pro Bush polls to continue to show big Bush leads until the last week, then they will close it. But not until the day before election day, when they will still give Bush more points than he will have.
Some referees are dirty, some judges are dirty, and some pollsters are dirty. They’re names for hire.
Mike in Md — I agree that despite the discourses about cell phone use, I doubt it will have any decisive effect on the polling methodology on its own. I also think that the SUSA polls are not terribly bad news for Kerry. The election will not be held today and he is within striking distance in several states. Although I wish he were ahead in several states won by Gore, with the exception of Wisconsin, he is not terribly behind either.
As regards the state of Wisconsin, I really have trouble with a state that leans toward Bush because Kerry said Lambert Field instead of Lambeau. I certainly hope this is not the reason for the Bush lead! If the people of Wisconsin are willing to make voting choices on the basis of something so trite while Bush has so terribly mismanaged domestic and foreign affairs, then I think they deserve four more years of hell.
I’m skeptical of SUSA polls; as I have posted on here before, their result in my home state is totally out of line with anything else (including reality.) And the NJ result showing Kerry behing by 4 is also an outlier; that said, Kerry’s got some work to do there.
But the polling news cited before by Mr. Mankuch is not terrible for Kerry. Not great, but not terrible. Most of the polls cited are within the margins of error (in some cases one point) and I have not seen any other survey that shows Bush ahead in Oregon (most show Kerry ahead, but not by a whole lot.)
The Wisconsin one is most problematic from a Democratic perspective, though the one with Bush ahead by 14 points (the Badger poll) seems out of line; I noticed that Republicans had an 8-point margin among respondents, which seems unrepresentative. (Previous Badger Polls have constantly been more pro-Bush than others, as well.) But Kerry is probably still behind there, though maybe not by much. Again, he’s got to work harder there (and remember, it’s LamBEAU Field!) Democrats also should work hard at last-minute voter registration there; the state’s election-day registration may produce results that the polls don’t show. I’ve read that Minnesota’s registration is similar.
The increasing reliance on cell phones (especially by the young, one of Kerry’s best groups) may render the polls off by a point or two, but I doubt that that factor by itself explains Bush’s leads in several key states. Though several of them are extremely narrow, so anything could be blamed, including polling error.
I would just like to chime in that I feel in my bones that any poll that shows Bush winning Oregon is going to be proven wrong on Nov. 2. The intensity of the anti-Bush feeling in Portland and Eugene is absolutely unprecedented. You can go on a number of admittedly unscientific factors (anecdotal conversations, the Portland turnout for Kerry of 50,000 to 60,000 at the rally in August, a simply unbelievable amount of Kerry stickers and yard signs, the number of people I know who are actively involved in defeating Bush compared to 2000, Republicans I know who have switched to Kerry, etc.etc.). Portland and Eugene can and will outvote the Republican areas in the state. I don’t think it will even be close here.
“So how is any pollster supposed to correct for the skewing that happens due to these effects? I don’t think there is any acceptable methodology to do this now.”
I believe that on Election Night, when the electoral map begins to turn blue in state after state after state the pollsters were calling red, they will have to face up to this problem or they will lose all credibility.
One point about the cell phone issue: I completely agree that this invalidates a lot of polling, but I wonder if that is the case equally in every state. Not to sound like David Brooks, but I wonder if “Red America” has the same degree of the cell phone/no land line phenomenon? Where I live, in Seattle, it seems hardly anybody youngish has a landline, or if they do, they screen their calls. And they aren’t home much anyway. I imagine that in Alabama it might not be quite this way yet?
Yes DanF – I think the cell phone effect is going to prove to be a major thorn in the side of pollsters in this election and going forward. I think there has already been a plethora of evidence that the samples in most of these polls seem to be heavily skewed towards Republicans. Anyhow, I’ve heard the # of cell phones is something like 160 million – and I think we can all give annecdotal evidence that supports the notion that a huge proportion of young urban dwellers are heavily reliant on their cells. Also, the other day I posted my experience of Gallup Poll hanging up on me, and someone suggested that it was probably because their dialing progran detected my caller ID – I don’ t know if that is in fact the case, but likewise, I think caller ID elimination is a further skewing problem.
So how is any pollster supposed to correct for the skewing that happens due to these effects? I don’t think there is any acceptable methodology to do this now.
Don’t like these poll results much either, but hopefully they will change in our favor after the fine week Kerry’s had. Check out Ras – better news and perhaps more reflective of the change in Kerry’s campaigning style.
Ruy – thank you for the screening system!
What is WH?
Speaking of trends, Rasmussen’s tracking poll today shows Kerry just 0.9% behind Bush — quite an improvement from the 4-point spread of the last three days.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/Presidential_Tracking_Poll.htm
Some key battleground states with among the worst-maintained voter lists (lots of erroneously purged voters), according to a recent study by Scripps Howard News Service, are Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Missouri.
This from an eye-popping article in the current, October issue of The American Prospect, “2000, The Sequel”, by Joshua Kurlantzick, on how the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in ’02 by Congress may have made things even worse.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleID=8544
A few other points may have particular pre-Election Day relevance:
*NY PIRG says it is illegal for local election boards to tell poll workers not to accept a student ID as proof of ID. U Wisc and Penn State Students for Kerry in particular, do you copy? A recent study in NY found that election officials in only 18 of 45 counties even understood voter-ID requirements.
*Some states simply do not count “provisional ballots” at all (which may be cast by individuals not permitted to vote by election officials on Election Day). HAVA established no national guidelines on when to count them. Which suggests just a few questions for state and local election officials and newspaper editorial boards.
*Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) and others became so concerned about huge problems with the touchscreen machinery in many states that they drafted an amendment to HAVA that would require touchscreen machines to have a paper record. Bob Ney, Chair of the House Administration Committee, has not allowed Holt’s legislation, offered in May 2003, out of committee. House and Senate Republicans have introduced “smokescreen” versions of Holt’s bill that contain similar provisions for verifiable voting–by 2006.
*Major White House footdragging on setting up the Election Assistance Commission, created under HAVA to disburse money to states to upgrade voting systems, issue guidelines, and hold hearings to help make voting as fair as possible. Shockingly enough it is now too late for this Commission to do much of what it was supposed to do for this year’s election.
1) Love the new posting policy.
2) I have oodles of anecdotal evidence, but would like to know if there is a way to confirm the number of people in urban and rural areas who have abandoned their “land-lines” in favor of cell phones. Most of the people I know my age (39) or younger who live in metropolitian areas either completely rely on cell phones or will only answer their cell phones without first screening (caller ID/answer machine) as they know that the only people who can call them on their cell are people that they have given their number to.
This might account for the Republican skew in the polls. If you can’t reach the Deomcrats who live in the cities, you can’t poll them. My feeling, and anecdotal evidence, is that rural folks keep their land-line as phone coverage isn’t that great outside of the cities.
Is SurveyUSA a bunch of Republicans? as ElectoralVote.com points out, this Oregon result is a bizarre outlier.
It’s good to see focus on the state races, because they’re all that matters. Unfortunately for the challenger, this poll brings terrible news. He has to pick up states (as compared to 2000) to win, but instead, he’s losing six.
States and his deficit:
ME -1
IA -4
OR -1
NJ -4
WI -14, -10 in the two latest polls
MN -2, in the latest poll
Certainly there’s still time for change, but as of this snapshot it’s 331-207. Let’s say Senator Kerry picks up ME, MN, NJ, and OR, and it’s still 295 -243.
I wouldn’t pay much attention to SUSA polls. They always lean way Republican. I remember they did back in 2000.
Ruy,
Thanks for giving the lie to these lazy, superficial poll stories about usually non-existent “gaps”. We can call it Gapgate.
Also If you haven’t done so already check out “King of the Polls” on http://www.zogby.com
It ‘splains why he’s da best!
Keep up the good work.
VJ