New LA Times Polls, conducted 10/22-26 provide the following results for RV’s in 3 key states:
Florida – Bush leads 49-41 percent, 3 percent for Nader.
Ohio – Kerry ahead 49-45 percent in 2-way matchup.
Pennsylvania – Kerry up 48-45 percent head-to-head.
Kerry leads Bush among PA RV’s 49-46 percent in a Gallup Poll conducted 10/23-6.
Kerry leads Bush 48-47 percent of Iowa RV’s in a Gallup Poll conducted 10/22-25.
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 26: The Obama Coalition Revisited
It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris’s candidacy changes the 2024 presidential race more than a little, and I wrote at New York about one avenue she has for victory that might have eluded Joe Biden:
During her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Kamala Harris was widely believed to be emulating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy. She treated South Carolina, the first primary state with a substantial Black electorate, as the site of her potential breakthrough. But she front-loaded resources into Iowa to prepare for that breakthrough by reassuring Black voters that she could win in the largely white jurisdiction. She had the added advantage of being from the large state of California, where the primary had just been moved up to Super Tuesday (March 3). For a thrilling moment, after her commanding performance in a June 2019 debate, Harris seemed on track to pull off this feat, threatening Joe Biden’s hold on South Carolina in the polls and surging in Iowa. But neither she nor Cory Booker, who also relied on the Obama precedent, could displace Biden as the favorite of Black voters or strike gold in the crowded Iowa field. Out of money and luck, Harris dropped out before voters voted.
Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2024 without having to navigate any primaries. But she still faces some key strategic decisions. Joe Biden was consistently trailing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he was underperforming among young and non-white voters, the very heart of the much-discussed Obama coalition. Can Harris recoup some of these potential losses without sacrificing support elsewhere in the electorate? That is a question she must address at the very beginning of her general-election campaign.
There’s a chance that Harris can inject a bit of the Obama “hope and change” magic into a Democratic ticket that had previously felt like a desperate effort to defend an unpopular administration led by a low-energy incumbent, as Ron Brownstein suggests in The Atlantic:
“Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch …
“In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.”
Team Trump seems to believe it can offset these potential gains by depicting Harris as a “California radical” and a symbol of diversity who might alienate the older white voters with whom Biden had some residual strength. Obama overcame similar race-saturated appeals in 2008, but he had a lot of help from a financial collapse and an unpopular war presided over by the party of his opponent.
Following Obama’s path has major strategic implications in terms of the battleground map. Any significant improvement over Biden’s performance among Black, Latino, and under-30 voters might put Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina — very nearly conceded to Trump in recent weeks — back into play. But erosion of Biden’s support among older and/or non-college-educated white voters could create potholes in his narrow Rust Belt path to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
These strategic choices could definitely affect Harris’s choice of a running-mate, not just in terms of potentially picking a veep from a battleground state, but as a way of amplifying the shift produced by Biden’s withdrawal. Brownstein even thinks Harris might consider following Bill Clinton’s 1992 example of doubling down on her own strengths:
“The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. ‘I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down’ with Whitmer, [Democratci consultant Mike] Mikus told me. ‘I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.’ I heard similar views from several consultants.”
Whitmer’s expressed disinterest in the veepstakes may take that particular option off the table, but the broader point remains: Harris does not have to — and may not be able to — simply adopt Biden’s strategy and tweak it slightly. She may be able to contemplate gains in the electorate that were unimaginable for an 81-year-old white male incumbent. But the strategic opportunity to follow Obama’s path to the White House will first depend on Harris’s ability to refocus persuadable voters on Trump’s shaky record, bad character, and extremist agenda. Biden could not do that after the debate debacle of June 27. His successor must begin taking the battle to the former president right now.
10,000 Voters in PA just had their polls moved. And they don’t know.
The Republican Board of Elections in Lackawanna County just changed voting locations for 21 precincts.
And the voters don’t know.
10 to 15,000 PA voters could show up at their regular polls, find them closed, and not know where to vote.
It’s Friday before election day and postcards announcing the change won’t be in the mail until tonight. What if they don’t arrive? Or don’t get read? One smallish ad is running on Saturday in one local paper. What if no one notices?
The Democrats are organizing a volunteer effort for people to stand at the old polls and give directions to the new. But the polls are open in PA from 7am to 8pm. It’s 21 precincts. They need a lot of people.
But this is easy, significant GOTV for people who were uncomfortable with traditional doorbell ringing or phone calling. All you have to do is stand there and give directions.
Scranton PA is only 90 minutes from NYC.
To help, e-mail AlanEGross@aol.com or Calyndha@aol.com. Put “POLL GOTV” in the subject line.
What meaning, if any, can be ascribed to Novak’s (i.e., Rovian) claim today (see excerpt) that Zogby is now essentially calling the race for Bush based on the latter’s current read of the polls?
WASHINGTON — Pollster John Zogby surprised the political world back in April with a long-range prediction that John Kerry would defeat George W. Bush for president. On Monday this week, Zogby told me, he changed his mind. He now thinks the president is more likely to be re-elected because he has reinforced support from his base, including married white women.
That conclusion would be a surprise for frantically nervous Republicans and cautiously upbeat Democrats entering the campaign’s final days. In fact, nobody, including Zogby and all the other polltakers, can be sure who will win this election. Yet, it is clear that President Bush’s strategists have succeeded in solidifying his base to a degree that makes it much harder to defeat him next Tuesday.
Thanks, Ruy, for this and Memory Lane.
It does much to lighten the burden of an oppressed and lifelong Dem.
I personally don’t believe the LA Times poll on Florida, nor do I believe the alleged 9-point lead for Kerry from the suppressed CBS survey (a 4-point lead for Kerry seems reasonable, though a bit high on the Kerry side.) Both results seem implausible (though of course either could be right.), so why not release all the polls? We politically knowledgeable folks can sift through them and root out the clearly wrong-looking ones. Unfortunately, the media doesn’t always do the same (Exhibit A: Gallup.)
Incidentally, I read that Kerry’s lead among likely voters in the LAT’s Ohio poll was 6 points, larger than the RV margin. In fact, that also seems too large to be believed.
I’m starting to think the polls are even more UNreliable than I first thought… Great piece in the WP today… Refusals, caller ID, etc. are making it incredibly difficult to actually reach a random sample of Americans…According to the story, “less than one in five calls produces a completed interview — raising doubts whether such polls accurately reflect the views of the public or merely report the opinions of stay-at-home Americans who are too bored, too infirm or too lonely to hang up…”
If Gallop has Kerry leading in PA by 2 and in Iowa by 1, then he must really be up by 5 or 6, judging by their previous accuracy.
Kerry in a Landslide!
Transparency International publishes a Corruption Perception Index for countries. It may be worthwhile to publish something similar for state election processes. Consider: very few people are fretting at the moment about transparency or reliability of voting in Utah or Maine. The idea of 60,000 absentee ballots vanishing is almost inconceivable. In Florida or Ohio, on the other hand, the lack of transparency and likelihood of hanky-panky is practically a given. In worst-case situations, like voting in the Soviet Union, the certainty of the vote rises to 100% and the trustworthiness of the vote as a measure of actual voter desires approaches zero.
Is there a statistical methodology that can be applied in addition to standard polls that would anticipate for fraud? Or at least, like in moral hazard questions, quantify the susceptibility of particular voting arrangements to abuse?
absentee ballot link= http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6346293/
Have you heard anything more about the supposed CBS/NY Times Florida poll (discussed on both MyDD and Atrios on Wednesday) that had Kerry up by 8 or 9 and was returned for further investigation due to the “implausibility” of this scenario. (A further version of this rumor was that the new, adjusted results still had Kerry up 4 … but there’s been nothing yet released.)
What are the internals on that Florida poll? Strange that a CBS poll showing Kerry up 9 in Florida is suppressed while a Gallup and LA Times poll showing Bush up 9 is published. Both are equally wrong – Florida is ties and turnout will determine the winner.