July 28: Some Basic Realities For Democrats on Voting Rights
Watching an intra-Democratic argument on voting rights strategy intensify in Washington, I offered some advice to both sides at New York:
There has been an underlying disagreement within the mostly Democratic coalition favoring voting rights that was nicely captured in this New York Times report on Friday:
“A quiet divide between President Biden and the leaders of the voting rights movement burst into the open on Thursday, as 150 organizations urged him to use his political mettle to push for two expansive federal voting rights bills that would combat a Republican wave of balloting restrictions … In private calls with voting rights groups and civil rights leaders, White House officials and close allies of the president have expressed confidence that it is possible to ‘out-organize voter suppression,’ according to multiple people familiar with the conversations.”
Both sides in this argument are partly wrong. Those who expect Joe Biden to force the For the People Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act through the Senate via some major revision in the ability to filibuster are probably expecting the impossible. Yes, perhaps if Biden personally and insistently and abrasively lobbied Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema to abandon her very consistent defense of the filibuster, up to and including encouragement of a primary challenge to her when she is up for reelection in 2024, she might decide her current and very insistent independent-maverick “branding” isn’t going to keep working for her. But Joe Manchin? He would be thrilled to get attacked by a Democratic president or Democratic advocacy groups for insisting that he won’t support voting-rights measures unless at least some Republicans support them. His state is so very red that the threat of a primary challenge to the sole remaining successful West Virginia Democrat is a laugher.
Short of a nuclear attack on West Virginia, it’s hard to identify anything Biden might do to Manchin that wouldn’t run a high risk of backfiring. And he does need Manchin on the reconciliation bills Democrats are using to get around the filibuster to enact Biden’s social and economic agenda. It’s just too bad voting-rights bills don’t qualify for reconciliation.
Yes, it is intensely frustrating that Biden cannot bring himself to come out forthrightly for filibuster reform, but it probably doesn’t matter since it is not happening unless the Democratic Senate Conference gets bigger, making senators like Manchin and Sinema irrelevant on the subject. So at some point voting-rights advocates need to focus on that goal.
At the same time, White House claims that Democrats can “out-organize voter suppression” are partially wrong as well. Yes, restrictive provisions like voter-ID requirements, limits on voting by mail, and even voter-roll purges can be countered and perhaps overcome by intensive efforts to educate and energize the voters Republicans are trying to keep from the polls. But you cannot out-organize a partisan gerrymander, or a law that lets election officials or state legislators overturn the outcome of an election after votes are cast.
Voting-rights advocates will eventually have to play the cards dealt to them by the system as it currently exists. That means refraining from too much anger aimed at Democratic pols who have little choice but to concede defeat on some legislation and concentrate on legislation (i.e., those reconciliation bills with many items vital to the people whose voting rights are also under attack) they can enact with no margin for error in the Senate and little in the House. At the same time, Biden and his staff and Democratic “pragmatists” in Congress should never for a moment be cavalier about the legislative obstacles they face in defending democracy itself. They may have to accept a tactical defeat on voting rights in this Congress. But they should never, ever, give up on making it happen later if not sooner.
Possibly the most interesting part of this poll is the poll on Party ID (i.e. shoring up your base). Bush’s early advantage in the polls was due largely to his partisan advantage among republicans versus weaker support among Democrats for Kerry. Notice the erosion of support for Bush and break toward to Kerry, especially among Democrats. Clearly due to Kerry standing up for himself and hammering Bush in the debates:
Numbers read Bush/Kerry +/- Bush
poll dates: 9/17-21 9/22-26 10/1-3 10/15-19
Republican 91- 4 90- 3 90-3 89-7 -1
Democrat 8-85 10-81 9-85 7-88 -2
Indep. 40-41 46-38 42-39 43-43 +1
Notice that Democratic support of Kerry has equaled Republican partisanship for Bush (89% Rep. vs. 88% Dem.). If we assume an overall Democratic Party ID advantage on election day similar to 2000, Bush is in bad shape. Notice also independent undecideds breaking +4 (39 to 43) for Kerry to +1 Bush (42-43) since just prior to the debates.
In past elections, the Republicans had higher partisan loyalty than Democrats, but party ID advantage sometimes gave Democrats the victory — if their base turned out (as in 1992 and 1996) but victory to the Republicans if their base turned out in greater numbers (2002).
If partisan loyalty is really equal in this race as this poll indicates, then that is very bad news for Bush indeed, UNLESS you assume that party ID has shifted by about 4 points to the Republicans since 2000 because of 9/11 (as Gallup states to justify their poll weighting). We’ll have to see after the election who’s right.
I don’t know how accurate this poll is overall, but this clearly shows a trend to Kerry and also indicates a very tight race – actually a dead heat. Not at all what is being promoted on CNN & Fox News.
By the way, can anyone figure out what Pew means by a “battleground” state? They say they’re using a new group of them, but I couldn’t find what states they’re talking about.
Ben Ross — thanks for the analysis. I couldn’t figure out why, after having what seemed to me consistent and believable results over the last few months, Pew suddenly diverged from other polls and its own prior results, showing a 7-point lead for Bush. That had me worried more than Gallup and the others, which tend to be all over the place anyway. Your focus on the volatility among the low-income and lower-educated is interesting and probably explanatory.
This is a promising result, although Pew Center polls have yo-yoed around in ways hard to explain. Still, the trend seems at the moment to mostly be pointing in our direction, although it’s so close it’s hard to ascertain what changes are real and which are statistical “noise”.
Andy— There are LOTS of polls, and surely some put Kerry down in the battlegrounds. For example, if the spreads of the latest Zogby internet poll were the spreads on election day, Kerry would be in trouble. Matthews is not a pollster, and seems to pick his polling data in a haphazard manner. Moreover, he uses broad summaries of the numbers to support whatever story he thinks fits as the narrative of the race.
My take is that Kerry is up in the battlegrounds, and the last round of Zogby internet polls were the only datapoints I have seen that contradict this view.
Matthews is a total chameleon. Actually, he is worse than
O’Reilly because he pretends to throw a few more bones to the dems. I can’t believe this guy was employed by Thomas P. O’Neill. Look at his lineup! Andrea Mitchell? I haven’t heard her say a positive thing about Kerry in months. Red Sox win and now Kerry wins!!
The education breakdowns on this poll are extraordinary. The college-educated and some college categories have been quite stable while the high school or less category has fluctuated wildly. The entire change from the last poll is due to high school or less going from 47-37 Bush to 46-41 Kerry. The pattern for income is similar, although less extreme, with the greatest fluctuations in the less than 20,000 category. I suspect that this labile behavior is due to small sample size because of the difficulty of reaching low-income respondents which increases both the sampling error and the estimation error of the weighting coefficients.
Note that since the last poll Kerry improved by 2% among whites and by 1% among non-whites, yet he imrpoved 3% overall. Thus much of Kerry’s improvement is caused by the latest sample containing more non-whites.
It would appear, based on these observations, that in the polls Sept. 22-26 and Oct. 1-3 polls that showed Bush ahead, low-income pro-Kerry voters were underrepresented among the low-education respondents. The Sept. 17-21 and Oct. 15-19 polls that show a strong Kerry lead among voters with less than $20,000 income probably are much closer to the reality throughout the period.
This is striking evidence of the problems caused by the lack (for good practical reasons) of income-weighting of respondents in a year when voting behavior is very income-dependent, and education is not usable as a proxy for income because voters of the same income and different education levels vote very differently. See my posting on the new Wisconsin poll.
Only because the Pew poll gives more detail than other polls can we criticize it in such detail. I suspect that looking at other polls would turn up similar anomalies.
Andy Knox, have you been watching the same Chris Matthews on Hardball as I have?? The bias for Bush is unbelievable!! I gave up on Matthews when he constantly was crowing over how Cheney really got Edwards good, when he said he never met Edwards until the debate. Even after it was shown that Cheney had met Edwards several times, Matthews was still saying Edwards really got kicked by Cheneys’ statement.
I noticed that Bush had been enjoying a significant lead among white Catholics in the previous three Pew Research Center Polls. In the most recent poll the results are almost reversed with Kerry up 7% among white Catholics. Is this just an anomaly? If not, what accounts for the improvement? Was it the last debate?
Can someone please explain to me why these polls all have Kerry in the lead yet when I watch Hardball tonight they are saying Kerry is down in BGround states?
Please don’t say Hardball is a conservatively skewed show, I think Mathews really does a good job of keeping an even hand.
But out of curiosity why is it that many shows list Bush as having these leads yet when I go to Liberal leaning websites they all list Kerry. Which one do I believe?