A relatively new term is popping up in articles on 2024 strategy for Democrats that I explained and explored at New York:
When you have a presidential candidate who is struggling to generate enthusiasm in the party base, it’s natural to look for some external stimulation. In the case of Joe Biden, the most obvious source of a 2024 boost is the deep antipathy that nearly all Democrats, many independents, and even a sizable sliver of Republicans feel toward Donald Trump. But in case that’s not enough, Team Biden is looking at another avenue of opportunity, albeit a risky one: the possibility of “reverse coattails” taking him past Trump on a wave of turnout that incidentally benefits the president of the United States.
That’s not the conventional wisdom, as the term reverse coattails makes clear: Normally, it’s the head of the ticket from whom all blessings flow, which makes sense insofar as presidential-election turnout dwarfs that of off-year and midterm contests in no small part because people who don’t necessarily care about the identity of their senator or governor are galvanized by the battle for the White House. But as Russell Berman of The Atlantic explains, this year is different:
“Faith in the reverse-coattails effect is fueling Democratic investments in down-ballot races and referenda. In North Carolina, for example, party officials hope that a favorable matchup in the governor’s race — Democratic attorney general Josh Stein is facing Republican lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, who has referred to homosexuality as ‘filth’ and compared abortion to slavery — could help Biden carry a state that Trump narrowly won twice. Democrats are also trying to break a Republican supermajority in the legislature, where they are contesting nearly all 170 districts. ‘The bottom of the ticket is absolutely driving engagement and will for all levels of the ballot,’ Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.”
In other states, high-profile ballot measures, particularly those aimed at restoring the abortion rights denied by conservative courts and Republican lawmakers, may generate bottoms-up enthusiasm benefiting Biden and embattled Democratic Senate candidates as well:
“In key states across the country, Democrats and their allies are planting ballot initiatives both to protect reproductive rights where they are under threat and to turn out voters in presidential and congressional battlegrounds. They’ve already placed an abortion measure on the ballot in Florida, where the state supreme court upheld one of the nation’s most restrictive bans on the procedure, and they plan to in Arizona, whose highest court recently ruled that the state could enforce an abortion ban first enacted during the Civil War. Democrats are also collecting signatures for abortion-rights measures in Montana, home to a marquee Senate race, and in Nevada, a presidential swing state that has a competitive Senate matchup this year.”
Berman notes that the reverse-coattails strategy is unproven. Voters, for example, who attracted to the polls by abortion ballot measures don’t always follow the partisan implications of their votes when it comes to candidate preferences. Red-hot down-ballot races are probably more reliable in attracting voters who can be expected to follow the party line to the top of the ticket. A positive precedent can be found in Georgia’s coordinated effort of 2020, when a powerful campaign infrastructure built by Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock clearly helped maximize Biden’s vote; the 46th president won the state by less than 12,000. Perhaps a strong Senate candidate like Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey could help Biden survive as well. As for the possible effect of ballot measures, it was once generally accepted that in 2004 a GOP strategy of encouraging anti-same-sex-marriage ballot measures helped boost conservative turnout in battleground states like Ohio, enabling George W. Bush’s narrow victory (though there are analysts who argue against that hypothesis). One reason it may work better today is the increasing prevalence of straight-ticket voting and the heavy emphasis of Democratic campaigns up and down the ballot on the kind of support for abortion rights that should help them take advantage of ballot-measure-generated turnout.
We won’t get a good idea of how either reverse-coattails strategy is working until late in the 2024 campaign when it becomes possible to measure new voter registrations, screen registered voters for their likelihood to participate in the election, and assess states where down-ballot contests are turning into a Democratic blowout. Team Biden would be wise to do everything in its power to lift the president’s popularity and build a favorability advantage over Trump that can reduce the number of “double haters” likely to stay home or vote for a change in the party management of Washington.
PEW and Andy Kohut had the race right on… with this pre-election prediction release…
check it out peoplepress.org
Not so much horse and buggy huh?
Mady..about Zogby, Kerry had a lead last week. Bush had a lead at the end of last week/ the beginning of this one. Now its tied. Indicates that the race is pretty stable right now in a tie.
ABC WaPo is easy. Look at their registered voter data. A huge change 3 days ago from a pretty even split to about a 6 point spread that is fairly stable over 3 days. Indicates to me a pretty big Bush outlier came on 3 days ago, and since then we’ve had 48-47 or so splits. When that big day rolls off, it’ll move closer to tied again. It’s a 4 day moving average, so I expect one more bad spread for us and then, bam, back to normal.
Mady –
One clear difference between the Washington Post/ABC poll and all other polls whose methods I’ve seen described in sufficient detail is that the Post/ABC poll does not weight respondents for Hispanic origin. Hispanics are, as far as I can tell, lumped in with whites.
I would expect that Hispanics with high school education or less would have an extremely low rate of participation in a poll, because of long working hours and language barrier. (Even if you speak a non-native language reasonably well, do you speak it well enough to feel like doing a 20-minutes telephone interview?) The non-participating low-education Hispanics are replaced, due to the weighting process, with low-education whites who (at least in the income-biased sample produced by polling methods) tend slightly toward Bush.
(Note that the ABC weighting method — I haven’t seen the details of the Post’s — is different from most other polls. I called it “cell-weighting” in an earlier post. The more usual weighting method, which I called “parameter weighting,” will also underrepresent low-education Hispanics in the final results, but they will be replaced by a mixture of low-education whites and blacks and more educated Hispanics. This, I would guess, will also bias results against Kerry, but to a substantially lesser degree.)
I think this will be remembered as the year when polls were shown to be living in the horse and buggy world, while the US had moved on to autos.
The polls are measuring a universe that cannot be measured by phone polls pressed into 2-3 day chunks of time in samples that total 1000 and don’t look remotely like the electorate.
Two items:
1. I was going to ask the same question as a previous post: why is the WP/ABC poll so different? Even on registereds, it showed a 7-point Bush lead today, I think…
2. Any idea how many new folks might come out in FLA on the minimum wage referendum? That’s a huge potential swing for Kerry, it seems to me…
Keep up the good work — love this site!!
eg
Yes.
What’s different is the intensity around the election – it’s so high. We Dems want the polls to reassure us, to give us a moment of hope, a moment of reprieve from this crushing Republican control of the Executive, the Legislative and seemingly the Judiciary.
We fear we will lose in Florida again. We fear that the Supreme Court will decide it all again. We fear that we’ll lose because we didn’t get that one more vote out in Minnesota or Ohio or New Mexico. The closeness of the 2000 election, the division in the country, the obsessive news coverage of the coverage of the coverage of the election and the pundits talking about the polls and the insane number of little instant polls and the blogs and the emails and the talk radio and and and . . . It’s hard to keep positive and to think all of our little-door-knocks and small contributions will add up to getting rid of a horrible, horrible president.
I mean – if Kerry wins, it will be the first time since Paul Wellstone won in Minnesota that I can say it was the work of all of us ordinary people doing what we can in the crevices of our work-a-day lives. That would be a pretty big wish come true –
It’s not that no one cared about Gore or Bush as candidates, no one really cared about the election – until, of course, that final day in Florida when it all blew up and then there was Kyoto and ABM and September 11 and Iraq and we all realized how wrong we had been not to work as hard as we could in Fall 2000.
Kerry in a landslide –
Two things:
First of all, I find it alarming that Kerry has not led at all in any recent Zogby polls. Yes, they do waver, but never to Kerry getting a majority percentage.
Also, could anyone explain the methodology of the Washington Post/ABC tracking poll, and why, in a time when very few polls show results that favor Kerry, but most show a quite close race, the Post has been showing Bush consistently at 50% or over. Today it shows, I think, 51 Bush, 45 Kerry.
Thanks,
Mady
Polling is definitely going through growing pains. You cite a number of reasons why polls vary (clearly, on election day most or all will have been wrong–if by wrong we mean to understand predicting the outcome).
I think the polls themselves may be part of the problem. We have respondent fatigue–not on an individual level, but as a nation. Look at those so-called “undecideds.” I find it odd that their numbers have not declined significantly since June. My guess is that they’re not measuring conviction so much as fatigue. It seems like something between 5-10% of every poll are undecided. Wouldn’t we expect to see that decline as the electorate gets to know the candidates? But it hasn’t. My guess is that this group has just had it with pollsters. They’re decided, but they ain’t tellin’ us.
Also, it’s odd that Andy would make the argument about voter volatility when he himself has measured how strongly convinced so much of the electorate is.