I probably consume too mucn information, from too many sources, about politics, elections, and related. I used to justify doing so because I taught government and politics to high school students, and needed to be able to help them make sense of the welter of often conflicting information. Now in theory I could point at my role as one of 5 rotating presenters in the current events forum at the Continuing Care Retirement Community where my wife and I now reside, where I probably have more practical experience in and understanding of political campaigns and campaigning of about anyone in the community. So what I offer here will be personal, based at least in part on the consumption of massive amounts of information, including deep dives into internals of polling, watching too much bloviation on TV and reading too much coverage on main stream publications and social media. I am also well aware that much of what I offer here will at least in part have been covered by posts by others over the past few weeks. Make of what I offer what you will.
Let me start with a policy issue that I do not think most have truly focused on, and one that I believe has serious implications for employment and economics and the lives of seniors, and that is the threat posed to Social Security and Medicare by the Republican Party, Project 2025, and what we saw of the administration under Donald Trump from 2017 through January 20, 2021. Remember, I live in a community where all of the residents are at least 65, and people here range in age to those past a century of life. While some here have substantial resources to meet their financial obligations even without the two aforementioned federal programs, many do not. A place like this requires a substantial income, with out of pocket monthly costs for a person by themselves running over $5,000. Remove Social Security and/or Medicare, or limit the increases to less than the increases in cost of living and many here would find it difficult to remain, to have the security of being in a place that if they deteriorate their only increased costs would be going from one to three meals a day and the increased costs of medicine. Many of those in other communities might find that without those federal programs they could not afford to stay or to enter such communities. That might mean employees of those communities would lose their jobs. I do not know how many would be affected, but I suspect it is one reason that many in communities like the one where we reside are anxious at, or even panicked by, the prospect of Trump returning to power.
I personally find far too much of the coverage of the political contests distorted, first by viewing things through the lens of previous politics and then by the desire for clicks or eyeballs on coverage. On the latter, it is the desire to have attention that may lead to too much coverage of horse race items — and these are often very inaccurate because of not looking inside the details of polls, of which there are now far too many, and of these many are not real.
Quality polling is expensive and difficult. Increasing numbers of people do not have land lines, and with caller id many will not answer a call from an unknown number, and/or a number that might be marked as possible spam or as any kind of solicitation. Thus it is very hard to get a representative sample.
THen there are the questions of qualifying the responses. Does the person identify as registered, or are you getting info on who to call from registered voter lists? What if you are calling into a state which allows same day registration even on election day? Might your sample be excluding people motivated to become involved and voter by issues that are current, but who might not have been previous voters? If your poll is of “likely” voters, how do you screen? Do you screen out those who were registered but did not vote in the last Presidential, or did not vote in the Congressional two years ago? Does your screen exclude newly registered voters? Is the basis of how you screen transparent, that is, is it available to those who examine the results of your poll?
Are you reporting raw results, or do you weight the results in any way? For example, if you get a sample that is heavily for one party exceeding what you EXPECT to be the participation by party id, do you weight according to those expectations? Similarly, do you weight on demographics — age, race, income, etc.
If you are reporting results by subgroups of race or age etc, do you report the margins of errors for those subgroups, which will be significantly larger because of the much smaller sample sizes than the overall sample? If I have a poll that has 600 respondents, in theory if it is random my margin of error is approximately +/- 4%. If the sample of African Americans is 12% of that, then the sample size 72, which would be a margin of error of >11.5%, and therefore probably meaningless. If the overall sample size is not sufficiently large, reporting on the cross-tabs (subgroups) can be very distorting.
As far as the likely voter screens, there was one National pollster, TIPP, which recently had some strange results for their statewide poll for PA, which did NOT seem to agree with their national poll. Turns out the way they were screening for likely voters in PA, which was NOT the same as howtghey screen in other battle ground states, meant they excluded everyone from the city of Philadelphia from their likely voter poll. I do not think anyone believes that there will be NO votes from Philly, which just happens to be a jurisdiction whose votes will break heavily Democratic — 80%+.
What if I look at party identification? What if the sample is not weighted, and what is reported is 50% Republican, 30% Democratic, and 20% other? Is that representative? Perhaps in a heavily Red state like Wyoming, but certainly not nationally, or in a so-called battleground.
As a retiree adnd a data junkie I have the time to dig into details on polls where available. I am also aware of the track record of partisan bias in some polls. While I pay attention to some, I do not in general pay attention to polling averages that include what Simon Rosenberg rightly calls Red Wave pollsters whose purpose seems to be to change the averages in favor of the Republican candidates, and I am in general skeptical of averages because of the differences of methodologies and sample sizes.
On methodologies, if the order of asking about candidates is not rotated, there is a distorting affect that seems to favor the first candidate listed — this is one reason ballot position is important. If polling a state, it might be more accurate if that state has a statewide ballot order to poll the candidates in that order, although I am not aware of good research on whether this will correlate with results.
If within the same poll over time I see significant changes on how voters are responding to specific issues, I am inclined to give that more weight than the top line results — for whom the voters will vote. Top line polling results seem to tend to be lagging indicators of voter intent, whereas on issues that matter to them the response tends to be more immediate.
Okay, enough on all that. Where I do I think the race stands now, and why? How confident am I?
Let’s start with this — even a week is a lifetime in politics. There can be things that scramble the results. Except, there are a LOT votes already being banked. As of when I write this, more than 32 million have already voted either early in person or via mail ballots received (I am in the latter group). That represents around 20% of the total vote from 2020. While by party registration (where available) we may be seeing a higher percentage of Republicans in the mix than in 2020, it is worth noting that htis “early” vote is heavily female especially in battlegrounds, in some states by margins greater than 10%. While one should be cautious in drawing conclusions, I view this as favorable to Harris.
There are also the mechanics of overseeing elections within the states. Of the 7 battlegrounds, only GA has all 3 key positions — Gov, AG, SecState — in the hands of Republicans, and at least last time the Gov and SecState of GA refused to illegally tilt things towards Trump. NV has a Republican governor but he does not seem to be exceedingly MAGA. PA has an appointed R as SecState but he was appointed by the Dem governor and is very much of a straight arrow. Dems have control in AZ, WI, MI, and NC (although the Secretary of State in Wisconsin, Sarah Godlewski, who is an acquaintance, does not directly control the mechanics of election). All of this demonstrates that Dems can win statewide races in all 7 of the battlegrounds, even if legislatively some of those states are very much gerrymandered in favor of Republicans.
Then there are the possible impact of statewide state office races on the Presidential. in AZ it is the Senate race, where the Republican candidate is still denying she lost the gubernatorial race two years ago. In NC, the R candidate for Gov may be the current LG, but all indications are that he will be blown out by the Dem candidate who is the AG. In addition, the R candidate for overseeing the public schools is a home schooling mother who does not really believe in public schools and who has called for Barack Obama to be executed by firing squad on pay for view tv, although she later said she was joking.
So where am I on the race? Remembering that we elect by the electoral college, it does come down to whether either candidate can get 270 electoral votes. I expect, as of now, that Harris will get there. Of the 7 battlegrounds (AZ, NV, MI, WI, PA, NC, GA plus NE-02) I think that Harris will win at least MI, WI, PA, NE-02, and NC. That adds up to 286 EVs. Of the rest, I am still trying to figure out the impact of voter suppression in GA. I view Harris as slightly favored in AZ. I am struggling to figure out what is going on in NV given that the first few days of early voting in the state has been very different than previous cycles, but I believe that the machine Harry Reid built and that is executed by unions should help Harris. In addition, the Repubs have pulled out of spending inthe House races and it looks like Mitch McConnell’s leadership group is no longer spending in the Senate race. Thus I still, as of now, believe the state will remain Dem.
Adding it all up, Harris should win at least 286 EVs, probably 303, and maybe 319. Harder to read the popular vote margin. I think more people will vote this time, and the additional voters will break somewhat for Harris. Biden won by around 7 million votes, 4.5% margin. I think Harris will have at least that kind of margin, probably somewhat larger, perhaps 6%, approaching 10 millions votes.
Are there things that could change it? Of course. What will Netanyahu do with respect to Iran? Could there be more bad stories breaking on Trump? There is a lot floating around now — will Ghislaine Maxwell drop the goods on Trump? Is there a video of Trump groping the teenage daughter of a contributor? On the latter, we saw some MAGAites saying there was going to be a “deep fake” coming out about Trump. There are others in the Trump inner circle saying they expect one or possible bombshells to break in the last week. Will they? If they do, will it be covered sufficiently by main stream media to break through? Could something like that simply go viral on social media? Might Musk attempt to throttle or block transmission on X? Are there still more deep faces coming out of Russia against Harris and/or Walz?
So far the attempts to use the courts to distort the election have been failing. It is highly unlikely to get the state legislatures do try to change the elections — Dems control in PA and MI, AZ is almost equally divided, and there are key Rs in WI who would not go along with such an attempt. Then what again in Congress on January 6? For one thing, the Electoral Count Act has been changed. It will now take 20 Congressmen and 20 Senators to get to suspend and go into separate session to consider challenges. There are key current Republican Senators who would NOT go along with that — I would put both Murkowski and Collins in that camp. and I suspect McConnell would not be willing to overturn the clear results of the election — he did not support the challenges last time.
And then of course there is the President of the Senate who presides over the joint session, who just happens to be Kamala Harris.
I am what I would characterize as of right now as reasonably optimistic about the Presidential. I am more optimistic of winning the House. The Senate is tougher, but I am seeing good signs in both TX and NE, and have not yet written off Tester in MT. That effectively Rs have chosen to run people who can be characterized as out of state millionaires in WI, MT, and PA gives me what I would view as grounds for optimism.
Finally, current levels of enthusiasm clearly favor Democrats.
And then there is the abortion issue, which I believe is NOT being accurately reflected in the polling, as is was not in either KS or OH. Looking at how DeSantis is reacting to the initiative in FL tells me how much Rs do NOT want that issue to drive the election.
Counting today, about a week and a half. In politics that can be a lifetime.
Can we all stay sane until then?
Peace.
