A new Morning Call/Muhlenberg College poll has Kerry up by 5 in Pennsylvania among RVs (48-43). The poll shows PA voters turning against the Iraq war, undoubtedly a factor in Kerry’s current lead.
Speaking of swing states, here’s some useful weekend reading. First, check out a new feature on The American Prospect website, “Purple People Watch“, which they say they will post weekly. It’s a roundup of political developments, polls, etc., from the swing, sometimes termed “purple”, states. It looks like it should be quite useful, though it seems oddly hard to find on their website. I also noticed that, in a state or two, the poll they cite is not actually the latest one. Still, a very useful feature and I recommend it.
And, if you haven’t already, you should scoot over to the DLC’s website and check out Mark Gersh’s article on “The New Battleground“. Gersh, the data guru to countless Democrats, has an interesting take on which of the swing states are most truly in play and, commendably, figures into his assessments how a given state has changed demographically since the last election. I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s food for thought in all cases.
TDS Strategy Memos
Latest Research from:
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.
Andrew Sullivan is gloating about this FoxNews poll which claims Kerry is trailing “Shrub” in the battleground states by 37% – 43%
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120492,00.html
Ruy doesn’t normally comment on reader feedback, but I would appreciate his views on this subject.
MARCU$
I’m just finishing a trip to southern Arizona. While Tucson and the southwest corner of AZ are the most Democratic parts of the state, I’m encouraged by some of the conversations I had with Democrats and Republicans.
A few things to note:
* McCain swallowed his pride in ’00 and supported Bush. But in ’04 many Republicans here are not happy about the treatment that McCain has received from the Rovians. That could turn into a backlash.
* I talked with several Republicans who were disillusioned with the war. These would probably fall into the group of voters who sit out the election.
* For what it’s worth, many of the MPs in the Abu Ghraib scandal were trained in southern AZ and people here aren’t happy about that. My guess is that there’s some defensiveness and embarrassment, but over time it will be an even worse issue for Bush here.
I’m pretty optimistic about AZ.
–Dan
I think his analysis of Ohio has missed one point. As chronicled in the NY Times magazine article (The Multilevel Marketing of the President), the president’s campaign committee has a massive GOTV operation going on here. This operation is targeting the exurbs that Gersh mentions as susceptable to GOTV efforts.
The moribund Ohio Dem party has no chance of mounting an effort to counterbalance this in the urban areas much less in the rural southeast. Kerry’s campaign HQ in Columbus wasn’t fully staffed as of a month ago (I don’t know about now.)
Statewide polls continue to show Ohio to be tight. The election here will almost certainly be decided by turnout. On this score, Bush’s GOTV efforts could neutralize his negative poll numbers here.
Shorter version: Kerry needs to get off his arse and organize Ohio.
Mr. Gersh’s article also seems a pretty dated in one respect. He says Bush’s approval rating hovers around 50 percent. In the last several weeks, his approval rating has ranged from 42-48 percent; that’s not “around 50 percent.” BTW, the only poll that shows Bush’s approval higher than 46 percent is Fox, which has it at 48.
I agree with Patrick. Illinois is among the ten states most likely to go Democratic in November. So are California and New Jersey, recent outlier polls to the contrary notwithstanding. Various organizations including Gallup and Faux News have identified a group of 15 to 17 battleground states. Illinois, California, and New Jersey are not on any of their lists. I can’t believe that Bush will put resources into any of them.
The most contentious thing I saw in that article was labeling IL as a “leaner.”
If you look at the primaries this year, the election results in 2000 and 2002, IL is as much a gimme as most of New England when it comes to state-wide elections.