One of the underlying issues in the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard endorsements of Donald Trump is the bizarre claim that he’s a man of peace. I addressed that idea at New York:

Donald Trump is famously hostile to U.S. aid to Ukraine and to national security alliances generally, even such time-honored institutions as NATO. He has also been outspoken for years about his opposition to “forever wars” like George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. At the same time, he is one of the most belligerent men ever to occupy the Oval Office. He loves military pomp and circumstance, he pushed regularly for increased Pentagon spending as president, and his basic formula for peace is to terrify potential adversaries with his remorseless willingness to inflict unimaginable casualties while ignoring or violating every traditional principle of limited war. He is also very interested in deploying the U.S. military against migrants from Mexico, domestic protesters, and even criminal suspects. He models himself on Andrew Jackson, who similarly stood for a policy of strict neutrality in overseas affairs matched with a clearly announced determination to kill anything that moves if malefactors cross him or his country. Some observers call this posture “isolationism,” but it is more accurately described as unilateralism, in which national interests unmodified by treaties, alliances, or moral considerations justify any conceivable military action (or inaction).

So it’s interesting to watch ex-Democrats famous for their opposition to “militarism” embracing Trump as an antiwar candidate. These include former Democrat then independent-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, and 2020 Democratic-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. In his long and rambling speech endorsing Trump on August 23, Kennedy listed Trump’s willingness to end (presumably on Russia-friendly terms) the war in Ukraine as one of three “existential issues” on which the two men agree. Shanahan similarly called “antiwar” one of the key principles supporting a “unity movement” between MAGA and her own preoccupations.

In endorsing Trump on July 26, Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party in 2022 after calling it an “elitist cabal of warmongers,” said of the Republican that she was “confident that his first task will be to do the work to walk us back from the brink of war.”

The very idea of Donald Trump as a man of peace is problematic, but presumably if the only national-security issue you care about is ending U.S. support for Ukraine, he’s your guy. Yes, some “doves for Trump” credit him with a determination and willingness to reduce the risk of nuclear war, notwithstanding his opposition to the nuclear nonproliferation treaties that kept the Cold War from turning hot. But a more honest assessment of the 45th president’s posture is that he has perfected the so-called “madman theory” once embraced by his predecessor (in office and in spirit) Richard Nixon, which means keeping the peace through sheer terror at the president’s unpredictability and indifference to human life. You can argue that Trump might succeed in intimidating other leaders into accepting his policy dictates. You cannot genuinely believe he will make the world a less violent and more stable place.

There are, to be clear, other reasons for the conduct of these and other doves for Trump. Kennedy and Shanahan are clearly angry at Democratic efforts to keep them off the ballot and at establishment liberal mockery of their subscription to a vast range of conspiracy theories involving alleged corporate capture of government agencies (not that this is a concern of Trump’s). Gabbard has revived an old cultural conservative strain of her political career and is regularly blasting Democrats for “wokeness.” It seems unlikely that there is a reservoir of voters concerned principally with the power of the military-industrial complex and the resources devoted to national defense who look at Trump and see a comrade. If he stands up at one of his rallies and flashes a peace sign rather than the clenched fist of vengeance, maybe it would do him some good.

We all look at poll numbers, but it’s important to read them in a way that improves your knowledge rather than making you doubt they matter at all, as I tried to explain at New York:

With Democrats’ substitution of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden, it’s looking very much like the very close election we originally envisioned for November has returned. And why shouldn’t it have? There has been exactly one comfortably decided election in this century (Barack Obama’s 2008 victory over John McCain), the two major parties are in equipoise, and three-time Republican nominee Donald Trump has polarized American politics to an almost incredible degree.

Now, an increasingly attentive public is paying a lot of attention to the presidential election. It’s a good time to review some of the mistakes people tend to make in seeking to follow and interpret the polls.

Don’t get fooled by outliers.

When a poll favorable to one candidate or the other comes out, that “team” is very likely to hype the numbers as absolutely true and predictive of a great landslide to come (that’s particularly true of Trump’s MAGA fans; Democrats have been burned by poll-driven irrational exuberance too many times). Some pollsters are prone (deliberately or not) to partisan bias, but any one survey by any pollster can, for statistical reasons, turn out to be an outlier.

There are two simple ways to avoid the temptation to overreact to individual polls: (1) utilize polling averages, which tend to greatly reduce the importance of outliers, and (2) look at trends in the results found by specific pollsters over time.

This year, there are a host of polling averages available. Some (notably RealClearPolitics and, to a lesser extent, Decision Desk HQ) use simple arithmetical averaging without any adjustments or weighting of results, while others (FiveThirtyEight, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and FiveThirtyEight founder and now independent analyst Nate Silver) have sophisticated methodologies that seek to place a premium on higher-quality and more recent data. I personally prefer FiveThirtyEight’s averages, which are easy to navigate and aren’t quite as loaded with junk polls as RCP’s. But any of the above averages are a lot better than reliance on any one pollster or any one result.

Pay attention to margins of error and other methodological issues.

In close races where small swings in polling results can seem huge (particularly those in which the lead, however small, changes hands), it’s easy to forget that every reputable poll is accompanied by a “margin of error” reflecting the size of the sample and thus the likely range of possible underlying numbers (which, in turn, is modified slightly by a “confidence interval,” which is typically 95 percent). A recent national poll from Emerson College showing Harris leading Trump by a 50-46 percent margin had a margin of error of 3 percent, which means the results for either or both candidates could be off by that percentage. Thus a relatively robust Harris lead is actually “within the margin of error” (amounting to 6 percent in terms of the difference between the candidates) and could be misleading. To put it another way, no really close lead is safe and could represent an illusion.

The margin of error can become really large in subsamples of particular parts of the electorate (e.g., voters under 30, voters with or without a college education), which some pollsters compensate for with “oversamples” of particular groups of interest. When you see a poll with a finding that seems really odd (such as Trump leading among young voters or ringing up 30 percent of Black voters), always look for the size of the sample and the margin of error. This is why large-sample polls (all else being equal) are generally more reliable and why state polls are typically less accurate than national polls.

Until fairly recently, there was a very strong preference among polling experts for surveys based on live telephone interviews, until (a) cell phones began replacing landlines in households and (b) the unwillingness of Americans to respond to phone-poll solicitations began making it very difficult (and expensive) for old-school pollsters to get a representative sample. Now there remain “gold standard” pollsters (e.g., New York Times–Siena or Ann Selzer’s Iowa poll) that rely almost entirely on live-caller surveys but that now pay extra attention to the design and weighting of samples (e.g., by comparing them to verified voter files from the most recent election). There are also perfectly reputable polls that utilize refined, online voting “panels” and other methods. Pew found after the 2022 midterm elections (when pollsters had an excellent record) that “17% of national pollsters used at least three different methods to sample or interview people (sometimes in the same survey), up from 2% in 2016.”

FiveThirtyEight’s database of pollster ratings remains an essential tool for separating good from bad polls, based not just on accuracy but on transparency (pollsters who won’t tell you how they reach their results should not be trusted). But in general, you should beware of small-sample, one-day polls that are clearly designed to grab headlines.

Don’t confuse poll release dates with survey dates.

For varying reasons, pollsters (or, more often, the media outlets that pay for and sponsor polls) don’t always release polling data the minute it’s collected. So it’s possible a “new” poll will represent old data. For example, some media folk jumped on a Fairleigh Dickinson poll of the Harris-Trump race that was released the day after the Democratic National Convention ended and that showed a “post-convention bounce,” even though much of the polling was conducted before the DNC began. Keeping in mind the gap between the surveying and the reporting of results is important any time people look for a “bounce” from some significant event (particularly a candidate debate). Indeed, it’s wise to wait a few days after such an event to look for polling data since much of the impact is likely to come from secondary coverage rather than live viewership.

Pay attention to respondents’ likelihood to vote.

It obviously matters a lot whether the people polled and reported as favoring one candidate or another actually turn out to vote. But it’s not always easy to separate the participating sheep from the nonparticipating goats until fairly close to Election Day. This is why most pollsters stick with samples based on registered voters until they conduct a “switchover” to likely-voter surveys shortly before early voting begins (others, like Times-Siena, offer both registered-voter and likely-voter results much earlier).

There are different forms of “likely-voter screens” with different strengths and weaknesses. Some focus on stated voter intentions, which can overestimate turnout because people don’t like to admit they might find something better to do on Election Day than fulfilling their civic obligations. Others emphasize past voting behavior, but that obviously doesn’t work for newly eligible voters and may miss surges in turnout among voters who did not participate earlier (this has been one factor frequently cited as contributing to the underpolling of Trump voters in 2016 and especially in 2020). Likely-voter screens are especially important in non-presidential elections, when turnout is often low and variable.

Much higher percentages of registered voters participate in presidential elections, making assessments of likelihood to vote somewhat less essential. In the past, the application of likely-voter screens has often produced improved numbers for Republican candidates since they were disproportionately drawn from segments of the electorate most likely to vote (e.g., older voters). That may be less true in the Trump era, in which Democrats have improved their performance among both highly educated and older voters, while Republicans are doing better among non-college-educated voters who aren’t quite as likely to vote.

Finally, it should be noted that some polls (typically “issue polls” that don’t measure candidate preferences and some job-approval or favorability polls) don’t even screen for voter-registration status but use samples of “adults.” These results should be taken with a few grains of salt.

Be aware of polling errors.

One by-product of this era of close elections and partisan balance is that polls can get the outcome “wrong” even if they are reasonably accurate. It’s also important to note that national presidential polls estimate the national popular vote, not the results in the Electoral College (both George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 won the latter while losing the former, and in 2020 Trump came within a whisker of winning while pretty decisively losing the popular vote). So, for example, in 2016 the final polling averages at RealClearPolitics showed Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 3.2 percent. She won the national popular vote by 2.1 percent. That’s a pretty small error. But sparse state polling gave no hint that Trump was going to win the historically Democratic states of Michigan and Wisconsin — and thus the election. So when Trump did win by the equivalent of an inside straight, a lot of shocked observers felt betrayed by the polls, and some concluded they were worthless. They weren’t — at all — but they were, of course, not flawless.

Polling error was actually more evident in 2020. RCP’s final averages showed Biden leading Trump by 7.2 percent; he actually won the popular vote by 4.5 percent, a margin small enough to get Trump within reach of another inside straight in the Electoral College. Postmortems of this relatively poor showing didn’t reach any clear conclusions, but explanations often focused either on the pandemic conditions that greatly affected both polling and voting or on a continued problem pollsters were encountering in identifying Trump voters. Either explanation was consistent with the excellent record of the polls in 2022, when the pandemic had subsided and Trump wasn’t on the ballot. So there’s no reason to assume the polls will be right or wrong in 2024. But Harris supporters will pray that she is far enough ahead as voters vote that she can win in the Electoral College. And a big win might also reduce the very high odds that Trump and his supporters will again fight against certification of a defeat.

Like a lot of Democrats, I’m exhausted at the end of this exhilarating week, but did want to offer my insta-reaction to Kamala Harris’s big speech in Chicago that I wrote for New York:

Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech was relatively simple, almost stripped back, but laser-focused on a few objectives: introducing herself with autobiographical details that other speakers have been citing all week; defending herself forcefully against the attacks to come on her intelligence, strength and common-sense policy objectives; and making a clear and concise case against Donald Trump. She did not bother to defend the Biden administration’s record, and presented herself as focused on the future. It will not be easy for Republicans to depict this tough-sounding, highly articulate woman citing traditional American values and speaking to a crowd of flag-waving delegates as a “communist” or a “radical leftist” or unintelligent, as Trump has often done. And while she did not descend into wonkiness, she did describe enough of a policy agenda to create a real debate with Trump and his party.

As for her delivery, the contrast between Harris’s crisp, forceful, coherent and succinct presentation and Trump’s rambling screed in Milwaukee will be grist for the mill for some time. Indeed, this should make Democrats savor the upcoming debate, where there is every prospect for Harris to show up her opponent as the narcissistic would-be tyrant she spoke of in this speech. It was a fine start for the short sprint to November 5, and it showed she is not complacent but is determined to fight for swing voters while keeping her base excited.

Now on to the debate!

One of the odd subplots of this strange election cycle is the possibility of an electoral vote being purloined by Nebraska Republicans, as I warned at New York:

If you like to play with interactive maps laying out a host of presidential-election scenarios, you may be acutely aware that two of the 50 states award an electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district rather than allocating them statewide. These would be Maine, which adopted the practice in 1972, and Nebraska, which started splitting electoral votes in 1992. Until 2008, when Barack Obama snared an electoral vote from deep-red Nebraska’s Omaha-based Second Congressional District, it was all kind of academic. Then in 2016, Donald Trump won the Second Congressional District of Maine even though Hillary Clinton was the statewide winner. In 2020, both Nebraska and Maine split their electoral votes, essentially canceling each other out.

It was the general expectation that the same thing would happen this year in a Biden-Trump rematch. But then in April, Trump activist Charlie Kirk came to Nebraska and ignited a MAGA grassroots effort to convince the state’s Republican governor and legislative leaders to change the state back to a winner-take-all system to keep Democrats from again winning the Second District’s electoral vote. With a special legislative session focused on property-tax issues already pending, Governor Jim Pillen offered to go along only if he could be assured the votes to overcome a certain Democratic filibuster. Meanwhile, these developments were being monitored in Maine, where Democrats control the legislature and the governor’s office. Maine Democrats threatened to take countervailing action to deny Trump a shot at an electoral vote in their state if Nebraska fired first.

Things quieted down after Pillen decided against including the electoral-vote issue in the call for a special session. But then the presidential race retightened after Joe Biden handed off the Democratic nomination to Kamala Harris, who proceeded (though there’s no evidence the Second District issue was at all a factor) to choose native Nebraskan Tim Walz as her running mate. For whatever reason, the Trump camp is again putting pressure on Pillen to call a second special legislative session in September to ensure the 45th president gets all the state’s electoral votes, as the Nebraska Examiner reported:

“Nebraska Republican Party Chairman Eric Underwood confirmed what state senators have told the Examiner privately, that the issue is not dead for 2024, and Pillen and legislative Republicans are waiting for the right moment to bring it forward. …

“’It’s a delicate opportunity,’ Underwood said. ‘When we’re ready to go I’ve connected with the Trump Force team. I’ve connected with Turning Point Action. … When this opportunity presents itself, what we need to do is to be the support network for those individuals because this will be a national change.’”

In deciding whether and when to pull the trigger on this effort to rig Nebraska’s electoral votes for Trump, Republicans will presumably want to make sure Maine is not in a position to carry out its earlier threat to retaliate. Maine’s legislature has been out of session since May.

Does a single electoral vote really matter? It seems far-fetched, but there is a very common scenario in which Democrats win the “blue wall” battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin while losing the Sun Belt battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina. That would give them 269 electoral votes — with the Nebraska Second District vote putting them over the top. That’s a bit less likely with Kamala Harris, who seems stronger in the Sun Belt states than Biden, heading the ticket, but it’s still feasible.

It’s certainly worth noting that Tim Walz is headed to Omaha for campaign appearances this very weekend. This could present Nebraska Republicans with a red flag (or perhaps more appropriately a blue flag; the Second District is often called “the blue dot” in the red map of Nebraska) that motivates them to act, or perhaps just a vivid Harris-Walz demonstration that the heartland does not entirely belong to Trump.

The more we look at the kind of voters who seem to be returning to the Democratic banner under Kamala Harris, the more it seems she could become the real “change” candidate, as I explained at New York:

When Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential contest and endorsed his vice-president as his successor, Kamala Harris enjoyed as quick and thorough a coronation to become party nominee as anyone could have imagined. All the talk of an “open convention” or a “blitz primary” that would find some ideal candidate without Harris’s perceived shortcomings vanished almost instantly as every party faction and every interest and constituency group dutifully, and soon enough joyfully, embraced the long-time heir apparent. All the comparisons of Biden’s situation to that of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 fell apart upon the realization that totally unlike LBJ’s veep, Hubert Humphrey, Harris would be in an unassailable position going into her party’s convention. And in addition to a united party, she inherited Biden’s formidable campaign organization and sizable treasury.

But it has gotten even better than that for Harris: Because Biden’s age and deteriorating vigor and communication skills had become an even bigger problem than dissatisfaction with his record or policy platform, the substitution of Harris for the 78-year-old president felt like the arrival of a fresh breeze, and not just to Democrats worried about a loss to Donald Trump. A grim rematch between two unpopular old white men, which much of the country seemed to dread, was reset overnight by this relatively young, multiracial woman who offers a very different option.

Or does she? Harris isn’t an AOC or a Pete Buttigieg, signaling a millennial wave finally sweeping away boomer pathologies. She’s 59 years old, and this is her seventh race for public office (she’s climbed from district attorney to state attorney general to U.S. senator to vice-president). Her refreshing running mate, Tim Walz, is another boomer, a year older than her and often described as everyone’s favorite grandpa. Neither Harris nor Walz has been a conspicuous dissenter from any of Biden’s policy decisions or issue positions; indeed, Harris has been universally praised for the intense loyalty she displayed toward Biden as he slowly came to recognize the need to pack it in.

So potentially the Harris-Walz ticket can enjoy the best of two worlds, leading a united incumbent party without all of the baggage of the incumbent president. More importantly, Harris can offer something Biden obviously could not: a way out of the political era symbolized by both Trump and Biden, for which there was a sizable constituency just waiting to be mobilized. It was an absolutely poisonous symptom of Biden’s basic problem that for the first time in living memory, Democrats were hoping for a low-turnout election while seeking to blow-torch non-major-party options like the independent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to which voters unhappy with the Biden-Trump choice might resort. And much as Kennedy’s own claim that Democrats and Republicans are an indistinguishable “uniparty” is completely absurd and dangerous, there’s not much question that voters were becoming equally tired of the octogenarian leadership of both major parties. It’s probably not a coincidence that Harris’s advent has been accompanied by a decline in support for Kennedy.

Republicans may grumble that Harris cannot avoid responsibility for the unpopular aspects of Biden’s record, particularly on issues like immigration and inflation where voters mistakenly but clearly think Trump had the more successful presidency. But Harris’s sudden appearance at the top of the Democratic ticket is presenting them with a real dilemma: Do they simply treat her as Biden 2.0 and continue the 2024 campaign as originally planned (without all the references to a senile or puppetlike opponent), or do they acknowledge Harris’s distinct persona by focusing on politically vulnerable positions she took during her brief 2020 presidential campaign, or in the Senate, or as a state official in wicked California? It’s looking more and more as though they will take the bait and depict Harris as far more of a radical leftist than Biden, if only they could get their own candidate to lay off the blatant racism and sexism and nursing of stupid grievances long enough to point at Harris and yell: “Communist!”

Perhaps this old-school McCarthyism will work once again to distract persuadable voters from Trump’s and the GOP’s own extremism. But it could also help free Harris from Biden’s shadow and allow her to stand for a political future full of possibilities that Trump would destroy instantly in a self-absorbed second term dominated by vengeance.

If we hear more and more about “the future” in Harris’s communications going forward, it will be clear she’s aiming at voters who are less interested in “making America great again” than in putting the past firmly in the rearview mirror. Her novelty as a presidential candidate has already turned around a Democratic campaign that was floundering on the very edge of viability. If she can take shrewd steps to avoid being McCarthyized (which she will be free to do given her party’s unified determination to take down Trump) and take advantage of the fresh start she has come to represent, then she can win over voters who had written off Joe Biden entirely. And what was looking to be a teeth-grinding effort to convince the country that anyone would be preferable to a vindicated 45th president could remain joyful and upbeat right up to and beyond November 5.