John Kerry and George Bush are tied at 45 percent nation-wide RV’s, with 1 percent for Nader, according to a Pew Research Center Poll conducted 10/15-19. The Poll also found that Kerry leads in “battleground states” 49-43 percent and Bush’s approval rating is 44 percent.
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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.
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?