Bush leads Kerry 50-45 percent of nation-wide RV’s, with 2 percent for Nader, according to an ABC News/Washington Post Poll, conducted 10/1-3.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 26: Evaluating Trump As a 2022 King-Maker
Now that we are into the 2022 primary season, it’s time to lay down some markers on how to evaluate Donald Trump’s candidate endorsement strategy, which will inevitably get attention. I offered some preliminary thoughts at New York:
Ever since he became president, Donald Trump has made a habit of endorsing a lot of candidates for office. According to Ballotpedia, as of today, he has endorsed a total of 497 primary- or general-election candidates, 192 of them since leaving the White House. Trump, of course, claims his endorsements have been a smashing success. A day after his attempt to get revenge on his Georgia enemies failed spectacularly, he was boasting of his prowess on Truth Social:
“A very big and successful evening of political Endorsements. All wins in Texas (33 & 0 for full primary list), Arkansas, and Alabama. A great new Senatorial Candidate, and others, in Georgia. Overall for the “Cycle,” 100 Wins, 6 Losses (some of which were not possible to win), and 2 runoffs. Thank you, and CONGRATULATIONS to all!”
But is Trump actually a midterms kingmaker? The answer is a bit trickier than simply checking his math. The former president has been furiously padding his win record by backing unopposed House incumbents in safe seats, so the numbers don’t tell us much. Instead, let’s look at the objectives behind his aggressive midterms enforcement strategy and how well he’s meeting each goal.
Trump wants to keep the focus on himself.
Everyone knows Trump is self-centered to an extreme degree, but there is a rational motive for him wanting to enter every political conversation: It keeps his name in the news and his opinions on people’s minds. This requires some effort given Trump’s loss of key social-media outlets and of the levers of presidential power.
He’s meeting this objective well so far. It’s a rare 2022 Republican primary in which Trump’s support or opposition is not an issue of discussion. He has endorsed 16 gubernatorial candidates, 17 Senate candidates, 110 House candidates, 20 non-gubernatorial statewide elected officials, and even 18 state legislators and three local elected officials. That means a lot of jabbering about Trump and a lot of speculation about who might win his support. And even where his candidates have fallen short, the signature MAGA themes of immigration, “election security,” and “America First” have been on most candidates’ lips. Arguably, Trump nemesis Georgia governor Brian Kemp ran a MAGA campaign.
Trump wants to get revenge on his enemies.
Some of Trump’s endorsements are meant to settle old scores with Republicans who thwarted his efforts to reverse his 2020 loss or supported one of his two impeachments. In addition to punishing figures such as Representative Liz Cheney, Trump hopes withholding his support from disloyal Republicans will serve as deterrent to anyone who might disobey him in the future.
This is why the victories of Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in Georgia were so damaging to Trump’s brand: These two men (especially Raffensperger, who not only mocked Trump’s election-theft fables and defied his orders to “find” votes for him but wrote a book about it) stood up to the boss on an important matter and didn’t lose their jobs over it. That could be dangerous for Trump if it continues.
Trump wants to show he still runs the GOP.
Trump demonstrates his power through his ability to instruct Republicans on how to vote and by making his good will the coin of the realm for Republican aspirants to office. From that point of view, the ideal primary for the former president was probably Ohio’s Senate contest on May 3. All but one of the candidates spent months seeking his favor, and the lucky beneficiary of his endorsement, J.D. Vance, surged to victory on the wings of MAGA support. Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Trump managed to get multiple Senate and gubernatorial candidates to dance to his tune before settling on Doug Mastriano for governor (a win) and Mehmet Oz for the Senate (a possible win; his duel with David McCormick has gone to overtime with a recount and a court case).
Trump didn’t do so well in instructing his voters in Idaho, Nebraska, and Georgia, losing gubernatorial primaries in all three. But he barely lifted a finger on behalf of Idaho lieutenant governor Janice McGeachin against Brad Little, and you can’t really blame him for his Nebraska candidate, Charles Herbster, being accused of groping multiple women (though you can certainly blame him for not only sticking with Herbster after the allegations emerged but also advising him to deny everything and fight back).
Here, again, the results in Georgia were devastating for Trump. Voters in the state emphatically rejected Trump’s repeated and incessant instructions to vote again Kemp and Raffensperger; in the gubernatorial race in particular, there was no doubt about his wishes. Yet Kemp won with nearly three-fourths of the vote. That level of voter disobedience hurts.
Trump wants to get in front of the Republican victory parade.
If we assume Trump is running for president in 2024, then it makes perfect sense for him to attach his name to a midterm Republican campaign effort that, for reasons that have nothing to do with him, is likely to be successful. Getting in front of a parade that is attracting larger and more enthusiastic crowds is a surefire way to look like a leader without the muss and fuss of having to make strategic decisions, formulate message documents, raise money, or plot the mechanics of a get-out-the-vote campaign.
Trump’s success in making himself the face of the 2022 Republican comeback will, of course, depend on what happens in November. At least three of his endorsed Senate candidates (four if Oz prevails in the Pennsylvania recount) are already Republican nominees in top November battlegrounds. He has also endorsed Senate candidates in future 2022 primaries in Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Nevada, and Wisconsin, which should be close and pivotal races in November. If the Senate candidates Trump has handpicked underperform (e.g., Georgia’s Herschel Walker, whose personal and business backgrounds have come under scrutiny) or, worse yet, cost the GOP control of the upper chamber, you can bet Mitch McConnell and many others will privately or even publicly point fingers of angry accusation toward Mar-a-Lago. The same could be true in states holding crucial gubernatorial elections.
Portraying himself as the leader of a Republican midterm wave may conflict with some of Trump’s other goals. For example, he may need to put aside his thirst for vengeance against Kemp to back the GOP’s crusade against Democrat Stacey Abrams (whom Trump once said he’d prefer to Kemp). More generally, if Trump makes himself too much of the 2022 story, he could help Democrats escape the usual midterm referendum on the current president’s performance. In that case, 2022 could serve as a personal disaster rather than a bridge to his 2024 return to glory.
Georgia’s primaries presented multiple danger signs for Trump’s 2022 strategy of aligning himself with winners, intimidating his enemies, and remaining the center of attention. But despite his recent setbacks, there are no signs Trump is shifting tactics, and it’s a long way to the final reckoning in November.
There are significant methodology differences between the Washington Post and New York Times polls. The Times poll weights for Hispanic status as well as race; the Post poll weights only for race.
I would expect low-income Hispanics to vote strongly Democratic and be particularly underrepresented among poll respondents. Failure to adjust the sample for income, Hispanic status, or any proxy for these variables will impart a Republican bias to the results. (Education is not a proxy for income this year — the Post shows no trend of voting with education, and the latest Pew poll even shows Kerry support rising with education level.)
The Times poll also weights for whether the respondent lives in a Democratic, Republican, or swing county; the Post poll does not. This variable may function to some degree as a proxy for income — although as I noted out in my posting on the Times poll, the weighting is based on 2000 turnout and thus partially cancels out increases in Democratic registration. This weighting functions in some ways as a weaker version of party-ID weighting.
It seems to me that these methodological differences could easily explain much or all of the Times poll’s tendency to show Kerry doing better. It’s really unfortunate that none of the polls seem to publish any of their demographic weighting coefficients (except that we sometimes get numbers from which the party ID coefficients can be calculated) — it would be very helpful to know how significant and how stable the weighting coefficients are.
Ok,
Buhrabbit, I’m not referring to ANY conspiracy theory. They don’t hide anything in any manner whatsoever. Fox does their propaganda in the open. CNN has tried to be fair lately, but they are under enormous pressure from Fox to be just as un-journalistic. CBS is numbed (due to their own failure, largely). NBC has the same problems as CNN. And everyone who claims Washingtonpost and NYTimes are liberally biased is just a freeper. There’s just the LATimes and the magazines.
The rest what’s going on is reported on Media Matters. It’s bad enough.
RKC,
1. Gore’s reputation of being a nerd is part of the spin put on him. I have heard people talking of genuine affection to him. He’s known to be a interesting and interested fellow when the lights are off. He had problems to show this. I agree that he failed miserably in that first debate. But hey, that guy on the other side was even harder to bear..
2. The media hasn’t been any fairer to Kerry! That’s just bogus, with all due respect. What’s happened is that the left has learned a few lessons. They see what’s coming, they anticipate. There is a blogosphere, there is moveon.org. There is an increasingly unpopular war and a higher misery index. But that’s about it. The media went for more than a month with a campaign built on PLAIN LIES, for Christ’s sake!
3. Scepticism of polls? The bad September polls had a devasting effect on the Democratic electorate, much worse than four months of bad polls on the Republicans.
4. The registration efforts are good signs, and I’m glad for them. But the Reps have learned one or two things from the late surge to Gore in 2000. We’ll see if they can match us.
Listen, I don’t want to be gloomy. On the contrary, I’m all giddy since the debate. But this is an uphill struggle, and the opponent is not just the administration. I’m absolutely devasted of the things going on in the media, these days. We’ll need 20 years and more to reestablish some sort of decent journalism.
That’s all. But I hope that my pessimism is nuts.
Solving for party affiliation (minimizing RMS error against WP data), I get the following breakdown in party affiliation in the WP poll: (36%D/38.2%R/25.8%I).
If renormalized to the 2000 results of (39%D/35%R/26%I), the WP/ABC poll yields the following prediction:
Bush: 49.1
Kerry: 48.2%
Nader: 0.5%
The mean RMS error for my fit was 0.46%, within the 0.5% rounding error but just. Why doesn’t their poll supply party affiliation sample percentage, anyhow?
Solving for party affiliation (minimizing RMS error against WP data), I get the following breakdown in party affiliation in the WP poll: (36%D/38.2%R/25.8%I).
If renormalized to the 2000 results of (39%D/35%R/26%I), the WP/ABC poll yields the following prediction:
Bush: 49.1
Kerry: 48.2%
Nader: 0.5%
The mean RMS error for my fit was 0.46%, within the 0.5% rounding error but just. Why doesn’t their poll supply party affiliation sample percentage, anyhow?
-Fe Wm.
A least-squares fit on the WP/ABC data for party affiliation (why don’t they just provide this?) is as follows:
D= 35.99%
R= 38.21%
I= 25.8%
If the data is rescaled to Gore’s D39% R35% I26% model, we have, for the presidential race:
Bush: 49.1%
Kerry: 48.21%
Other: 0%
Neither: 0.65%
Would Not Vote: 0.26%
DK/No Opinion: 0.65%
Not a perfect fit on the thing – mean RMS error of 0.46% (still within the 0.5% rounding error, but just) – maybe I miskeyed some data, or something. Still, close race.
-Fe Wm.
This poll has weird sampling.
In the internals, for 1169 likely voters you get:
Bush 12%D 92%R 47% Ind = 51% of the total
Kerry 86%D 7%R 47% Ind = 46% of the total
Nader 0%D 0%R 2% Ind = 1% of the total
Using this information, you can solve backward to find out how many Ds, Rs and Is were likely voters. Here’s what I came up with:
A party ID of 24% Democrat, 27% Republican and 50% Independant out of likely voters. That seems to be an absurdly high number of independants as well as oversampling Republicans. I guess the most important thing to notice from this poll is they are running even among independants. Also, Kerry improved his status with independants by 4% from the last poll.
In response to Frenchfries’ comments, consider the following:
1. In 2000, even those who supported Gore generally considered him an unlikeable nerd. In 2004, while the flip-flop label has stuck amongst Republican partisans, most democrats know that it’s spin and consider Kerry a man of integrity.
2. In 2000, the media was totally unfair in its treatment of Gore. In 2004, the media has been largely unfair to Kerry, but he’s been treated a little better than Gore in 2000.
3. In 2000, all the polls right before the election showed Bush ahead, which should have discouraged Gore supporters from turning out. We don’t know what the polls will say right before the election this time, but we have learned to be more skeptical of polls and therefore are less likely to be discouraged by them.
4. In 2000 Gore did not have a massive voter registration drive in his favor. I’d guess that with Gore in 2000 and Bush in 2004, there was little participation in the primaries because the nominee was never in doubt. In 2004, we’ve had two waves of voter registrations: First, for the democratic primary process, in which there was a record level of participation, and second for the general election, and signs are that the democrats are way ahead in registrations.
My point is this: Even with everything against him, Gore still won the popular vote in 2000. This time, Kerry has the same things going against him that Gore did, but he has several advantages in his favor that Gore did not have. That suggests to me that Kerry still has a good chance of winning, even if he is behind in the polls on election day. I think the opposite of Frenchfries’ point is true: Bush can only win if there is a surge to HIM.
When the Newsweek poll came out showing Kerry ahead, the Kerry campaign downplayed it, saying they’ve had questions about that poll in the past. I think that’s the right approach: Whether we’re up or we’re down, we should downplay the polls. Remember, if Kerry is ahead in the polls on election day, there is a risk that Kerry voters won’t show up, assuming that they don’t need to. IMO, the message from the Democrats should be: Never mind the polls, whether we’re up or we’re down, just GET OUT AND VOTE.
I hope its clear from my post re: Zogby that I am not referring to a conspiracy theory. My beef is that at some point the media’s definitions of “fair” has ceased to be about truth finding, but instead is about speed. Also, there is their need to convince the right that they are balanced so they often will entertain ideas no matter how factually incorrect. I have a question for example, with no only the polling issue, where a 2 pt Bush lead is a lead, and a 2 pt Kerry lead is a tie (as I said do a google search), but also with a media that can’t say that Kerry’s Global Test is not the same as what Bush is saying on the stump. They have a very clear point of reference to make this judgement- namely what Kerry said in the debate- yet no mention is made of this. How much sense does this make if you are going to go with your lead story being about the global test. This goes beyond theories of laziness, it goes to theories of fear of not appearing balance, and as a result, not actually being balanced. Here, the solution should have been not just repeating Bush’s lie, and then saying Kerry says my opponent is lying about what I said (which confuses the point) but to add this is Kerry’s statement in the context of the debate. This way neither the right or left could claim unfair treatment- yet the way they choose to do it- clearly is unfair treatment. I think its just poor reporting for ourside that’s hurting us a lot. I am not certain what can be done about this in this cycle but we need to address this.
I highly highly doubt Bush is up 5 after the first debate.