I found myself thinking that evaluations of Trump are just a reflection of our assumptions about whether Trump's shtick works.
Trump was just Trump in the debates. If you thought that was a joke in '16, he was a joke. If now you take it seriously, now it looks effective
Or put differently, if you went through all of 2016 assuming the Trump act was an electoral catastrophe, you would have undoubtedly come away thinking he had blown it yet again. If after the 2016 result you revisit that assumption, you'd undoubtedly reinterpret the debate as well
And at this point, I do think it's fair to say that many people have internalized an assumption that the Trump act works, because it has before. The polls say something very different. But it's part of how you get people sure he's going to surge because of Kenosha and so on
Anyway, I think the outcome of '16 totally colors everything about how people analyze the superficial dimensions of politics, particularly for Trump. I don't think the reevaluation is 100% wrong, but the polls certainly suggest that there's danger in overcorrection
That you assume Trump's shtick is extremely effective, bc it seemed to work last time, when it doesn't seem to be working at all this time
There are signs that Trump's Electoral College is fading. In our current average, there's just a .7 point gap between the popular vote and the tipping point state nytimes.com/2024/09/25/ups…
Our national Times/Siena polling this year shows a very 2022-like pattern by state.
This pattern holds (if a bit noisier ofc) in our three Harris-Trump polls.
I do think it's worth cautioning how tenuous Harris' EC-PV gains are - any meaningful error in MI/WI/PA would quickly restore much of Trump's advantage. This is not a robust edge (unlike Trump '16/20, where he still would have had a big edge even if WI, for ex, was D+5)
One question I've seen throughout my replies: does a seemingly strong result for Harris in PA signal a 2020 polling error repeat?
That's obviously hard to say, but I want to flag one thing that caught my eye: our polls do not show Harris doing well with the white working class
In PA, it's Trump 61-Harris 34; nationally, it's Trump 67, Harris 30. In each case, that's >= 10 points worse than our final pre-election polls four years ago. It's also worse than the estimated Biden '20 finish with these groups.
This doesn't rule out a polling error, whether by chance or bias. The polls entered the field immediately after a debate; this is a classic environment for response bias (notably, she leads PA bc of gains with college educated whites, who may be most likely to react to news).
The NYT/Siena poll is far from perfect - and in general I worry more about people expecting it to be perfect than I worry about it getting insufficient credit.
But the poll is very different from the others - and the differences help explain its record
Staying on the LV question: from its inception until last week's CNN/SSRS state polls (give them applause), the NYT/Siena poll was the only public poll incorporating self-reported vote intention and a model of turnout based no vote history
(in our data, someone's history of voting = more predictive of turnout than self-reported turnout intention -- though blending the two does best of all)
FiveThirtyEight released a new model today, showing Harris with a 58% chance to win. But it's clearly a very different model and I think it's important to hear more about the differences
The previous model made Biden the favorite bc it gave 4:1 weight to fundamentals > polls -- a view that would make Trump stronger today and perhaps still ahead.
Now it gives 4:1 weight to polls > fundamentals -- which would have made Trump a large favorite before
Importantly, the methodology page implies that the model would give more weight to polls > fundamentals all along, so this isn't a function of being one month closer to the election
Kamala Harris puts the Sun Belt back in play, with the race tied across AZ, NC, NV, GA
AZ: Harris 50, Trump 45
GA: Trump 50, Harris 46
NV: Trump 48, Harris 47
NC: Harris 49, Trump 47 nytimes.com/2024/08/17/us/…
The poll basically shows the race returning to "normal," with Harris obtaining far larger margins among Black, Hispanic and young voters, propelling her to nearly a 10 pt gain across the four states nytimes.com/2024/08/17/ups…
I probably wouldn't focus too much on the exact results by state. Individual state polls are a little noisy, and we were bound to get some head-scratchers eventually after conveniently getting identical 50-46 results in each of PA/MI/WI
That said, it is worth noting that the sample does look a little blue. It's about a net-1 pt more Democratic, Dem-leaning and 2020 'Biden compared to the last time we polled these three states in May. This could be an indication of a shift in response patterns, though it could indicate change in attitude as well
I do think the idea of a 'real' 1 pt change in Dem PID/Biden recall, etc., to be fairly plausible. Not only is that a fairly small shift, but no one can deny that the national political environment hasn't changed in a huge way over the last few weeks