I first took 318k interviews from UCLA + Democracy Fund's "Nationscape" poll to measure average levels of racism and sexism over time. Those scales avg Qs like whether voters think slavery still harms black Americans & whether there's racism against whites into a single measure.
I then compared how racism & sexism correlated to support for Trump in 2016 with how they correlate in 2020. It turns out that racism is MORE predictive of support for Trump now — IE that voters are more polarized by racial attitudes — even though RACE itself is less predictive.
This growing disconnect between how *racial attitudes* predict support for Trump or Bide and how self-described *race* do presented to me what at first to be a paradox. If non-col whites are most racist, what explains the shift?
The poll has answers:
According to Nationscape, average levels of racial resentment in the electorate have fallen over the last year. (Pew finds the same). That's both bc 2016 voters have gotten less racist since Trump's election & bc new voters are less racist. True overall & for non-college whites.
This means that there are fewer voters with high degrees of racism for Trump to court before November.
Sexism also plays a big role. In 2016, male discomfort with a female nominee could have cost Clinton the WH. But since Biden is a man, attitudes about gender are less salient v 2016; voters who score highly on the sexism scale are less likely to vote for Trump this time around.
The final piece: since non-college whites are by far the most racist and sexist voters in the electorate, at least by this measure, this means that the shifting roles of each in predicting support for Trump most impacts their votes, rather than for BIPOC voters (esp women).
Here's the chart, and don't forget to read + share the piece!
NEW Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll out this AM. We find cuts to Medicaid deeply unpopular (58% oppose to 14%), Trump underwater on most issues (-16 net approval), Democrats ahead on the generic ballot by 6 points, and Harris leading a 2024 rematch
Full results in this thread
Full poll write up is here, including link to topline and methodology.
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Trump approval is 40% vs 56% disapprove among all adults, with 42% saying they "strongly disapprove" of the job he has done as POTUS. Notable that the strong disapprove response is higher than the cumulative approve response.
Some early vote Qs: What % of 2020 early voters have voted so far in 2024? Does that differ by party? What about E-day voters?
Now that we have a substantial number of votes — above 10m in the swing states, or around 37% of likely voters in those states — we can start tracking:
This is the % of 2020 ABEV voters who have voted in 2024, as of yesterday
AZ 39% of Ds, 39% of Rs
GA 58%D 66%R
MI 43%D 45%R
NC 44%D 47%R
PA 40%D 35%R
WI 35%D 36%R
(No data in NV because our voter file vendor, L2, has been lagging there, and Clark County returns have been weird)
Other big caveat is that in MI, WI and GA, party registration is based on a model, so comes with a lot of potential measurement error. Partisan splits here may be less indicative of an advantage than in, say, AZ, NC or PA.
📊Today 538 is releasing an updated set of our popular pollster ratings for the 2024 general election! Our new interactive presents grades for 540 polling organizations based on their (1) empirical record of accuracy + (2) methodological transparency. 1/n abcnews.go.com/538/best-polls…
There’s tons to say but I’ll hit a few main points. First, a methodological note. For these new ratings, we updated the way 538 measures both *empirical accuracy* and *methodological transparency.* Let me touch on each. (Methodology here: ) abcnews.go.com/538/538s-polls…
(1) *Accuracy.* We now punish pollsters who show routine bias toward one party, regardless of whether they perform better in terms of absolute error. We find that bias predicts future error even if it’s helpful over a short time scale.
if you want to understand polling today, you have to consider *both* the results and the data-generating process behind them. this is not a controversial statement (or shouldn't be). factors like nonresponse and measurement error are very real concerns stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/resear…
given the research on all the various ways error/bias can enter the DGP, if your defense against "polls show disproportionate shifts among X group. meh" are "well X group voted this way 20 years ago," i am going to weight that pretty low vs concerns about non-sampling error
at the same time, if a critical mass of surveys is showing you something ,you should give it a chance to be true. interrogate the data and see if there's something there. i see tendencies both to over-interpret crosstabs and to throw all polls out when they misfire. both are bad
There is good stuff in this thread, and I’ve been making the first point too for some time. But remember a lot can change in a year, and some of the factors that look big now may not actually matter. Uncertainty is impossibly high this far out.
I took a look yesterday at how much Dem state-lvl POTUS margins tends to change from year to year. It’s about 7pp in our current high-polarization era. That’s a lot! With 2020 as our starting point simulating correlated changes across states, you get p(Biden >= 270) around 60%.
that is obviously not a good place to start if you are team Biden. But the range of outcomes is laughably large—a landslide for either party is more than plausible. So there is a pick your own adventure element to analyses like these: Dobbs, Jan 6 help Ds; Economy, Biden age hurt
Lots to share, but for now I'll just say FiveThirtyEight was one of the outlets that inspired me to be a data journalist. Nate Silver did great work & the team he led changed political journalism for the better. We will be iterating on that, but we start with a strong foundation.
2/3 ABC and I have been in talks for 6 months to ensure there will be as little disruption as possible in transitioning from the aggregation + forecasting models Silver is taking with him when his contract expires to our new in-house methods, developed w input across ABC & 538.