John Kerry leads George Bush 50 to 41 percent of New Hampshire LV’s, according to a Center for Applied Public Opinion Research Poll conducted 10/18-21 for Franklin Pierce College. The poll scored Bush’s approval rating at 45 percent.
John Kerry leads George Bush 50-48 percent of Florida LV’s, according to a SurveyUSA Poll conducted 10/22-24.
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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.
phatcat — thanks for the statistical analysis. That kind of work is beyond my abilities. I intend to savor the salt of a Kerry victory long after November 2.
KerryWillWin — thanks for raising the obvious question. You do a better job of supporting my suspicious question, which centered on the strangeness of undecideds breaking for Kery in New Hampshire but not elsewhere.
Matt: If undecideds are supposedly breaking to Bush at 5:1, how come Kerry’s lead is GROWING there this week after last week it was declared a tossup.
Take the undecided voter issue with several heaping handfuls of salt. The report makes the case that undecided voters in NH (7.9% of the sample) are leaning heavily Bush, and that the Bush campaign should be heartened that this is really a close race.
Not only does this not pass the common sense test of the Incumbent Rule, it doesn’t pass the survey analysis integrity test. If 7.9% of the respondents are undecided voters, that translates to an undecided sample size of 36. That’s an extremely small sample size, and prone to ridiculous levels of sampling error (+/- 16). Strangely, the report mentions strong Bush approval ratings among undecideds, but doesn’t publish the actual number. In any case, if Bush polls a 60% approval rating, all we know is that his actual approval rating is somewhere between 44% and 76%, which is hardly enlightening.
With sample sizes this small, drill downs become nonsensical and I’m very surprised they tried to use the undecideds to make a case that Bush has hope in this poll. If anything, the poll is even worse than it appears for Bush, since the sample overrepresented Republicans by 5 points (unless the results were weighted, but they make no mention of it). If the results were weighted to reflect actual party ID patterns, Bush would be down even more.
I agree with Green Dems assessment also. I think Kerry republicans will get the ball over the net for our guy on Nov. 2. The dynamics of the race haven’t changed that much for several months despite poll gyrations: Democrats are highly motivated and they are all in Kerry’s court. Republicans are split. Christian conservatives and rural republicans will vote for Bush come hell or high water, but common sense republicans will split three ways: 1) hold their noses and vote Bush, 2) hold their noses and vote Kerry, or 3) stay home. Factor into this mix the liklihood that first time voters and independents are trending to Kerry, and you have a Kerry win. Actually, I think the only unanswered question at this point is – will it be a Kerry squeaker, or a solid Kerry win. The proof of this can clearly be seen watching Bush yesterday begging his base to get out and vote.
Clinton showed the way, that Democrats who seek to represent Middle Class Americans are the ones who get a chance to help lesser Americans.
We didn’t invent the DLC merely for the hell of it. You have to plow that middle ground to win.
I therefore agree with Green Democrat’s assessment about the chance for new alliances. Assuming a Kerry victory, the Republican party implodes. While success has a thousand fathers, failure is a bastard, and everyone will be looking for THAT baby’s daddy.
Meanwhile, the Repubs who are annoyed at the rightwing freakazoids will clamor to Arnold, McCain, and Rudy to retake the party for 08.
Need to drill down in the New Hampshire poll. Undecided voters are breaking for Bush by a ratio of 5 to 1. Is the undecided vote breaking to Bush in any other state?
Kerry’s strength in libertarian-leaning New Hampshire suggests (not surprisingly) that more fiscally conservative and culturally laissez faire Republicans may be trending Dem. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention, of course. This is not your father’s Republican Party anymore. The GOP of limited government, individual liberty, and personal resposnibility is finished, replaced by a big government, fiscally irresponsible Christian conservatism at home and a belligerent and messianic interventionism abroad.
I suspect that collaboration between Democrats and moderate libertarians could prove enduring, but I worry that the so-called war on terror combined with the GOP’s new love of populism could put white working class voters solidly in their column for a generation, and draw in enough Hispanics with such an agenda to make it a lock. Although, with Kerry doing so well among independents (and apparently now new voters) that might just be paranoia…
Is this the same SurveyUSA that has a 22 point lead for Bush in Tennessee? I’m not sure I trust that outfit. I think Rasmussen’s Florida Bush trend makes more sense–steadily dropping from a high of a little over fifty and flatlining at 47 or so. (Or about where he was six weeks ago.)