Intrepid poll-watchers have been waiting for the much-revered Field Poll to come out before laying any bets on next Tuesday’s California Democratic presidential primary. It’s now out, and I wrote about the findings at New York as soon as it was available.

Clinton has led in all 18 public polls of California taken this year, and still leads in the RealClearPolitics polling average by six points (49-43). But the much-awaited final poll by the Field Organization, probably the most respected public-opinion operation in the country, shows Sanders pulling to within the margin of error, with Clinton hanging on to a 45-43 lead.
The coalitions put together by the two candidates are very familiar to anyone following the Democratic race. Sanders is running up big margins among under-30 voters (75-15) and to a lesser extent registered independents (54-27), while Clinton is dominating among over-65 voters (56-28) and holding a healthy lead among registered Democrats (49-40). Clinton’s traditional strength among minority voters is ebbing a bit; she leads among African-Americans (57-36) and Latinos (46-42), but trails Sanders among Asian-Americans (34-47), who represent a higher percentage of the likely primary electorate (11 percent) than do black voters (9 percent). Clinton actually leads overall among non-Latino white voters 44-43, probably a tribute to the relatively advanced age of white voters. There’s the usual gender gap as well, and it, too, is strongly influenced by age: Sanders leads among under-40 men by 71-19, while Clinton leads among women over 40 by 57-29. Regionally, Clinton is ahead in Los Angeles County and the Central Valley, while Sanders’s top regions are the San Francisco Bay and the Central Coast.
Since Field showed Clinton’s lead in April at a slim 47-41 margin, there aren’t any big late trends apparent, other than a Sanders surge among Asian-Americans. Of the 23 percent who reported having already voted by mail by the last week of May, Clinton has a nine-point (47-38) lead, which is almost certainly explained by the higher propensity of older voters to vote by mail. Field estimates that two-thirds of the vote will ultimately be cast by mail, which is actually a bit less than in the 2014 primary.
Overall, Field’s two-point Clinton margin matches that of another late-May poll released Wednesdayday, from NBC-Wall Street Journal-Marist; PPIC had the same finding last week.
Certainly the perception is that Sanders has the momentum, although you have to wonder if his heavy dependence on younger voters makes further gains difficult. And there’s really zero evidence that Bernie is on the brink of the kind of big landslide victory he needs to cut deeply into Clinton’s pledged-delegate lead.

The two big takeaways from recent polling of California are this: despite all the talk about HRC’s strength among nonwhite voters and Bernie’s strength among white voters, the two candidates are running just about dead even in both categories, basically because age is dominating every other demographic “split.” And so long as they are running pretty much even, a win for Bernie Sanders won’t cut much ice except as a matter of symbolism.

There’s been some buzz in connection with Hillary Clinton’s big speech tomorrow on foreign policy that she may aim her pitch at “responsible Republicans” who fear entrusting Donald Trump with the nuclear codes, much less putative “leadership of the free world.” But there’s a problem with the usual centrist strategy in this particular year, as I discussed today at New York:

The rapid and overwhelming consolidation of the Republican rank and file behind Trump is the first big story of the general-election campaign to come, and the most obvious reason for his suddenly strong standing against Clinton in early general-election trial heats. Unlike other “noises” from such polls, this isn’t a finding anyone should necessarily dismiss as “too early.” After all, self-identified Republicans are the voters most likely to have paid close attention to Trump and what he does and does not stand for during the primary season. Yet for all the high-profile (if quickly shrinking) elite Republican resistance to Trump, actual voters seem to be emphatically over all that.
The degree of rank-and-file consolidation behind Trump was nicely dramatized today by Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight, who compares Trump’s level of support (excluding third-party candidates) among self-identified Republicans to that of other non-incumbent GOP candidates a month after they secured the nomination. Trump’s at 85-7 against Hillary Clinton. That’s slightly better than George W. Bush in 2000 (83-7), and significantly better than Poppy Bush in 1988 (81-13) or Bob Dole in 1996 (79-18). But here’s the shocker: Trump’s doing better initially among Republicans than St. Ronald Reagan in 1980 (74-14)! The only nominee with higher early GOP support than Trump is Mitt Romney (87-6), who also benefited from the hyperpolarized atmosphere of the Obama presidency.
The general consensus of analysts is that Hillary Clinton has lost her polling lead over Trump because he’s already unified the GOP, while she’s still struggling to put out the Bern. If so, does it make a lot of sense for her to devote a major speech to exploiting a rift in the Republican ranks that no longer exists? I don’t think this strategy is terribly consistent with what she needs to do to unify her own party, particularly Sanders supporters who are not comfortable standing on the common ground Clinton shares with “responsible Republicans” (which once included, lest we forget, support for the Iraq War).
Maybe the Clinton campaign has unpublished evidence that she can reopen the divisions of the competitive Republican primaries via her own efforts. If not, she might want to avoid any conspicuous “move to the center” toward a party united in antipathy toward her and her party, particularly since any overt maneuvering could reinforce doubts about her honesty and constancy that are probably her biggest problem.

I’ll probably have my own card-carrying “centrist” credentials pulled for saying all this, but that’s how I see it at this moment. Another year might be totally different, and it’s also possible Trump will do something so egregious as to squander the rank-and-file GOP unity he currently enjoys.

Was your world rocked by the State Department IG’s report on Hillary Clinton’s email? I didn’t think so. But interpretations varied, and not innocently, as I observed at New York yesterday:

For Republicans and other Hillary haters, it was a huge, shocking blow to the already-reeling presumptive Democratic nominee, portending a long slide toward ignominious defeat in November. Indeed, Donald Trump thought it was such a big deal that he started speculating that Democrats would soon dump her for Joe Biden. For most left-leaning observers who aren’t Hillary haters, it was, in Josh Marshall’s eloquent assessment, a “nothingburger.”
But then there are the reactions of supposedly objective major media organizations. The New York Times‘ Amy Chozick offered this reaction to the IG report:

[A]s the Democratic primary contest comes to a close, any hopes Mrs. Clinton had of running a high-minded, policy-focused campaign have collided with a more visceral problem.
Voters just don’t trust her.
The Clinton campaign had hoped to use the coming weeks to do everything they could to shed that image and convince voters that Mrs. Clinton can be trusted. Instead, they must contend with a damaging new report by the State Department’s inspector general that Mrs. Clinton had not sought or received approval to use a private email server while she was secretary of state.

Now, as it happens, there is at best limited evidence that voters don’t care about Hillary Clinton’s policy positions because they are transfixed by her lack of trustworthiness. Voters who don’t like a candidate for whatever reason are usually happy to agree with pollsters and reporters who offer negative information about the candidate as an explanation. So what Chozick is doing is arguing that her perception of perceptions about Clinton make every bit of news about the email story highly germane and more important than all the policy issues in the world.
A somewhat different reaction to the IG report came from the Washington Post, which editorially hurled righteous thunderbolts at Clinton:

The department’s email technology was archaic. Other staffers also used personal email, as did Secretary Colin Powell (2001-2005), without preserving the records. But there is no excuse for the way Ms. Clinton breezed through all the warnings and notifications. While not illegal behavior, it was disturbingly unmindful of the rules. In the middle of the presidential campaign, we urge the FBI to finish its own investigation soon, so all information about this troubling episode will be before the voters.

This is beneath a headline that reads: “Clinton’s inexcusable, willful disregard for the rules.”
Words like “inexcusable” suggest that Clinton has all but disqualified herself from the presidency. But if the FBI disagrees, as most everyone expects, then the Post will have done yeoman’s service for that other major-party presidential nominee, and his effort to brand Clinton as “Crooked Hillary.”
Concerns about Donald Trump rarely if ever descend to the level of digging around in hopes of discovering patterns of “reckless” behavior or “willful disregard for the rules.” That’s because he’s reckless every day, and willfully disregards not only “the rules” but most other previously established standards of civility, honesty, and accountability. Yes, voters don’t entirely trust Clinton. But a bigger concern ought to be that Trump fans credit him for “telling it like it is” when the man is constantly repeating malicious gossip, lunatic conspiracy theories, ancient pseudo-scandals, and blatant falsehoods.
Yet we are drifting into a general election where important media sources seem to have decided that Clinton violating State Department email protocols and Trump openly threatening press freedoms, proudly championing war crimes, and cheerfully channeling misogyny and ethnic and racial grievances are of about the same order of magnitude. And that’s not to mention the vast differences between the two candidates on all those public-policy issues that Amy Chozick thinks voters have subordinated to questions of “trust.”
This is the kind of environment in which it becomes easy for a candidate like Trump to achieve “normalization” even as he continues to do and say abnormal things.

One of the great abiding mysteries of this campaign cycle has been what exactly to make of the self-identified independents who have been giving lopsided margins to Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and caucuses. They don’t seem to be the centrist indies of yore, which hasn’t kept some analysts from warning they might tilt Republican in November is Sanders isn’t on the ballot.
As I noted today at New York, FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten has lifted the veil on this subject with some analysis of Bernie’s indies that should be encouraging for Democrats who worry about Hillary Clinton’s general election prospects:

Who are the self-identified independent voters Bernie Sanders is carrying so heavily in primaries and caucuses? Are they swing voters who might well swing to Donald Trump in a general-election contest with Hillary Clinton, or stay home in large numbers?
According to the Gallup data Enten is looking at, no, they’re not.

Sanders’s real advantage over Clinton is among the 41 percent of independents who lean Democratic, with whom he has a 71 percent approval rating as opposed to HRC’s 51 percent. Among the 23 percent who do not lean in either party’s direction — the stone swing voters — Sanders’s approval rating is 35 percent, virtually the same as Clinton’s 34 percent (both are much better than Trump’s 16 percent).

But aren’t a lot of the leaners swing voters, too, particularly if their favored candidate does not win the nomination? Probably not:

In the last three presidential elections, the Democratic candidate received the support of no less than 88 percent of self-identified independents who leaned Democratic, according to the American National Elections Studies survey. These are, in effect, Democratic voters with a different name.

Yes, Clinton may need to work on this category of voters, but the idea that they are unreachable or likely to defect to Trump doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. These aren’t left-bent voters who have lurked in hiding for years, waiting for a Democrat free of Wall Street ties or militaristic tendencies, and they’re not truly unaffiliated voters who will enter the general election as likely to vote for a Republican as a Democrat. They’ve been around for a while, and in fact they are being affected by partisan polarization more than the self-identified partisans who have almost always put on the party yoke. So while a majority of these Democratic-leaning independents clearly prefer Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee, they represent a reservoir of votes that are ultimately Hillary Clinton’s to lose.

A major source of angst for many Democrats the last couple of weeks has been the advent of several general election polls showing Donald Trump catching up with Hillary Clinton after earlier polls showed him in very bad shape. I addressed the challenge of dealing with such polls at New York today:

Most political junkies realize there are some polling outlets that have what is known as a “house effect” — a more or less systematic tendency to show results bending one way or another to an extent that makes their surveys consistent outliers. Few Democrats, for example, will panic over an adverse Rasmussen poll. But some “house effects” are the product not of partisan or candidate bias, but of deployment of methodologies that over time tend to produce outlier results. I really don’t think Gallup in 2012 was shilling for Mitt Romney, even though its polls regularly and significantly inflated his odds of winning; the venerable organization made transparent and earnest efforts after the election to analyze and correct its errors.
It’s also clear that some phenomena — high cell-phone usage, declining response rates, and the increased expenses of live interviewing — are making polling more perilous and less scientific than most of us realize. All of this explains why the experts tell consumers of public-opinion research to rely on polling averages, not individual polls, to understand what’s going on politically, and to examine trends rather than absolute numbers. When it comes to polls about distant events, like the November general election, significantly more caution is in order. Some would argue that a general-election matchup poll prior to the party conventions is pretty much useless.
So the current hype about Trump more or less catching Clinton in general-election support should be taken with a shaker of salt and perhaps active disdain.
In a New York Times op-ed today, political scientists Norman Ornstein and Alan Abramowitz discuss all of the problems with such general-election polls and the methodologies they deploy, and then add this important observation:

When polling aficionados see results that seem surprising or unusual, the first instinct is to look under the hood at things like demographic and partisan distributions. When cable news hosts and talking heads see these kinds of results, they exult, report and analyze ad nauseam. Caveats or cautions are rarely included.

That’s particularly true if these “cable news hosts and talking heads” find validation for their point of view from outlier polls. The fact that Republicans and Bernie Sanders-supporting Democrats have a common interest in showing Clinton doing poorly against Trump adds to the noise, to the point where it’s the only thing many people hear.
Maybe these polls will turn out to be accurate, but we just don’t know that now. As Ornstein and Abramowitz conclude:

Smart analysts are working to sort out distorting effects of questions and poll design. In the meantime, voters and analysts alike should beware of polls that show implausible, eye-catching results. Look for polling averages and use gold-standard surveys, like Pew. Everyone needs to be better at reading polls — to first look deeper into the quality and nature of a poll before assessing the results.

Alternatively, just be careful about jumping to conclusions.

There’s plenty of time before the general election to look at data with some perspective.