2024 Projection: Not Going Back

 

This is the most difficult little projection that I can remember doing because the polling industry seems broken. I'll get to why in the polls section below. But first, I think Kamala Harris is winning, and as I've told a few reporters this week, on track for perhaps a "comfortable" win. Let's talk about why.

Kamala

June 28-July 21 of this year was just about the most fascinating period of party politics I've ever lived through, rivaled only by the 2008 Obama-Clinton primary, or 2015-16 Trump vs. Everyone in the Republican party primaries. But Joe Biden's terrible debate was almost more interesting because there was no schedule, no rhythm to it. In those party nomination contests there's a cycle of polls-fundraising numbers-nomination contest-polls-etc. that was absent here. This was just Democrats working behind the scenes to determine who was their best chance to win the election.

I was shocked by what I saw from Biden in the debate, and even though I usually resent ageism in public discourse, it was immediately clear that the ageist attacks Biden was going to face were going to land because of his inability to rhetorically defend himself. Even worse, he totally flubbed the two most important questions in the debate: January 6 and abortion. I'll take about abortion in the next segment, but it was uniquely terrible for Biden in two ways, 1) he couldn't talk about it, 2) he's never been a good messenger on abortion. Biden is a Catholic, white man in his 80s, who as recently as 2012 was expressing concern over abortion rights. 

Replacing Biden with Kamala Harris immediately invigorated the campaign AND armed the campaign with an effective messenger on both January 6 and abortion. She tactfully dismantled Trump in their only debate, leading him into a number of rhetorical traps like an attorney cross-examining a witness.

I'm not convince this is a wave election because of two things. 1) Inflation is a bitch. In the post pandemic period the incumbent parties in a number of major democracies like the UK or France have been voted out or struggling, not because they engineered what has been a global economic phenomenon, but because voters don't like the results and need someone to blame. I'm in one of the most liberal parts of the country and can't quite believe how an egg on toast is like $14, but here we are. Economics is the fundamental issue and voters still don't seem to like this one all that much. So if she wins it'll be a function of her ability to distance herself from Biden on this, which she has had some trouble with, and is admittedly a difficult task. 2) Polling is as unreliable as ever, and Trump has demonstrated success with HS-educated voters who are hard to poll. In 2020 I didn't see any projections that Trump would gain with Latino voters, but he did, so it's hard to know what we don't know. More that later.

Trump himself

Trump's performance this cycle is a reminder to me why parties usually do not nominate losing candidates. Most voters have already made up their mind about them. And yes, Trump has been making gains with younger men, and Black men, and Latino men this cycle, but none of those groups is considered high propensity voters. And Trump has rarely, if ever, had the support of the median voter. Trump may be the only candidate capable of uniting the Republicans current anti-immigration, anti-establishment, pro-tax cuts, pro-protectionist economic policy coalition out there, but I bet Republican Senators will be kicking themselves for not banning him from electoral politics with the 2021 removal vote follwing his impeachment for January 6. That was their chance. 

Abortion

As far as why Kamala will win, this is the first general election since the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating a Constitutional right to abortion in the United States. In the day-to-day of the campaign, that decision can feel like old news, but this is the first opportunity for many voters in the US to register their approval with the parties for producing this outcome, and I would expect the voters to punish Republicans for this decision. Particularly how extreme it is. There was reporting that Chief Justice John Roberts wanted to replace Roe by eroding the right to an abortion, say to 16 weeks or so, but the conservative majority way overshot that standard where some states now effectively have a total ban. 

The whole episode shows why interest groups politics matters. I wrote in 2019 how it was clear that anti-abortion rights groups were convinced that Trump's court would overturn Roe, and the untimely death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg accelerated that timeline and emboldened the groups. In that blog, I mentioned how Susan Collins was convinced that Justice Brett Kavanaugh wouldn't do that and it was an early harbinger of the current dynamic in the Republican party. Elected Republicans that have to face voters are not as eager to restrict abortion as the key interest groups on the issue, or the Supreme Court justices that no longer have to answer to anyone. In this cycle, Trump has been running away from his record on abortion, and even contradicted his VP pick JD Vance during the debate that he would sign a national abortion ban. 

For the purposes of the current election, I just think there's a silent majority of sorts on abortion. Many times that abortion rights questions have been on the ballot, they have overperformed expectations. This is only compounded by the fact that Democrats now have an effective party leader on the issue that they lacked with Biden. 

Polls

Looking back at my projections in this space, shows the evolution we've went through the polls. In 2020, I was apprehensive about Biden's chances, even with sterling poll numbers. And even though he won, the polls proved to be faulty, even worse than 2016 on a national basis. I wrote at the time that pollsters were using increasingly "aggressive" weighting steps to correct for the 2016 miss (particularly weighing on education), but it apparently wasn't enough.

In 2016, like nearly everyone else, I was blindsided by Trump's performance in the polls, particularly in the "blue wall" of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. It's hard to understate just how far off the polls were that year, but as a reminder here's the NYT's roundup of that. What's interesting is that the national polls weren't a disaster, but the state polls (particularly the blue wall) certainly were.

"Expert" predictions on the eve of the 2016 election.

According to these polls, Evan McMullin had a better chance in Utah than Trump did in PA or MI.

In 2012, I wrote about how there were lots of polls, and I put faith in the averaging procedure.

This cycle the polls have just felt off to me. In particular, they don't seem like they've been variable enough for as crazy of an election cycle it has been *see the below figure from the economist.

The explanation for this from pollsters is that they've been weighing their respondents by recalled 2020 vote. The function of this is to make sure there's enough Trump supporters to approximate his final vote in 2020 of 47%. As this figure from Seth Masket shows, the result of this procedure has been to change the intercept of Trump's support since the start. Is this wrong? We won't know until Wednesday at least, but my take is that the polls have likely been capturing the ceiling of Trump's support, and he's still rarely hitting the median voter in the battleground states with these numbers. 

While there's methodological concerns with this approach pre-dating the Trump era, I think what it has done is make the polls too close to the pollster's expectations. I wouldn't be surprised if the individual pollsters register a smaller miss than in 2020, but the process of averaging polls drawn from random-sampling (and the noise that can create) is no longer useful. Look at this collection of averages from about October 17, they're all putting the same, potentially garbage data in and getting the same output. 

There's a few pollsters out there still using telephone based random sampling, and a light touch at weighing the data, like Ann Selzer in Iowa. She caused quite a stir predicting Kamala +3. In any other year, a reasonable response to that would be, oh just toss it in the average, but because there's been such a paucity of data this year that doesn't look like a dead heat, it made serious waves. So I've been saying that I think this election will end up in three buckets: close Trump win, close Harris win, or comfortable Harris win, and I've landed somewhere between close and comfortable Harris win. I do think the issues in the southwest with Latino voters (who can have different abortion views than the swingy white voters that Selzer found in Iowa), may manifest in a Trump win in Nevada. 

Congress

With polling skepticism this year, one of the other qualitative data points I'm leaning on is that the close watchers of US House races think there's a decent chance that Democrats take the House, even with a Trump win. Such as Cook Political Report saying they think it could be GOP +5 up to Democratic +10, with four seats being enough to take the house. In 2016 it was a fait accompli Republicans were winning the House, even when we thought Clinton was going to win, so that's where I think it's going, a Democratic house.

The US Senate on the other hand appears to be more static. As usual, Democrats have a brutal map (it makes you wonder how every cycle is brutal for Democrats, but that's a discussion for another day), with a guaranteed loss following Manchin's retirement. I also think Jon Tester is in trouble in Montana. Those races alone give Republicans control of the chamber. So unless something wild happens with big statewide elections in FL or TX, or easily overlooked candidates like Dan Osborn in NE or Katrina Christiansen in ND, the chamber likely goes into Republican hands. However, in line with my rosy prediction for Harris at the top of the ticket, I think Democrats will be okay in tough races for Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Gallego in AZ, Rosen in NV,  Baldwin in WI, Slotkin in Mi and Casey in PA. The abortion stuff discussed earlier is very relevant in these races. 

I haven't been following the Governors races close enough to say much beyond it looks like a Kelly Ayotte victory in NH.