Thread by @RachelBitecofer

🚨 My final election analysis: who will win?

Dude, Where's My Man Wave?!

Its Starting to Look Like America Understands the Assignment

We’re humans, we like certainty.

In fact, we crave certainty of event outcomes that probabilistic models and horserace polling simply can’t give us.

Whether a single poll, many polls aggregated together, or many polls aggregated together and then combined with other important components of elections (forecasting “models” like 538, Silver Bullet, etc) statistics can only take us so far in predicting election outcomes.

Why?

Well, because even as Nate Silver would tell you, low probability events still occur (think Trump 2016) and because horserace election polling is constrained by unavoidable errors and biases even when done well, including the margin of error, that prevent us from being able to say with certainty which way a race that will be decided by 1 or 2% will end up actually breaking

This is why my own work relies on what I call “hard” data like registration data, fundraising data, volunteer data, early turnout data, and field infrastructure, combined with soft data insights culled from quality polling data (public, likely voter sample, n at least 800) to assess the overall electoral environment.

Now that the election is next week and average Americans are finally paying attention for the first time to an election you’ve been following for 2 years we have a good bit of hard and soft data to assess to help us anticipate the outcome.

And what we see in these data is overwhelmingly positive for Harris.

As I have documented in previous posts, the Trump Team’s theory of the 2024 case was that since Dobbs was political kryptonite for Trump, they would build their strategy around men.

It probably took being a woman political scientist to fully recognize the folly that is designing your entire electoral strategy around getting men who don’t normally vote, to vote.

During football season, no less.

Here’s how it’s going:

Now, to be clear, the gender gap we see in early vote and registration data is not dissimilar from what we saw in both 2020 and 2022. But Democrats didn’t need an even bigger gap, it was already huge and Joe Biden won with that gender gap.

What Democrats needed was to maintain that advantage in the face of 2 years and millions in investment from Trump and Republican superPACs to drive more men to the polls to maximize their own gender gap to offset ours.

And there is not one iota of evidence that suggests they have been successful in this effort.

And don’t forget: the Man Wave strategy was not without costs for the Trump campaign, Trump further isolated a key part of the voting universe: college educated whites.

Sneer at the White voters all you want but you should know there is one group of White Americans who actually like multicultural, pluralistic democracy, and every cycle Democrats have made additional inroads with them: college educated White voters.

Now, The Nates will tell you that there are too few college educated voters to offset the losses from the GOP’s shrewd grievance campaign to woo non-college educated White voters which is true when you consider the overall American adult population of around 270 million people.

But its not necessarily true of the electorate, which cuts that number roughly in half.

Anyone polling the electorate, especially out of voter file sample, will tell you that college educated respondents make up a majority of the sample and nowadays, most pollsters weight on education to look make it more reflective of the state’s college education population.

We will find out on Tuesday how much this affected the polling, if at all.

But there are strong signs that Democrats will continue to make inroads among college educated White voters, as they have every cycle since Trump ascended down his golden escalator to debut his special brand of hate politics.

But this cycle, the Harris campaign specifically targeted these voters with messaging designed to break their brand loyalty to the Republican Party.

As far as the Selzer poll shows, its working.

Now, recall what you’ve learned in previous posts: party identification explains almost everything about an individual’s vote choice, even among most so-called independents.

Most Independents “lean” towards a party and pollsters now include those leaners with “admitted” partisans in their survey analyses.

Doing so with 2020 exit poll data we find that as usual, party loyalty was almost perfect for both parties in 2020, 96% for Democrats and 94% for Republicans.

What is exciting about the Selzer poll and its trusty methodology is that it shows two things right before the election: Harris is winning among actual (pure) independents, but also party loyalty for Trump among Republicans is atypically low, coming in at 89% for Republicans.

If that holds and is reflective of swing state voter behavior, its game over for Donald Trump.

Where statistics stop, the gut begins. Nate’s gut says Trump. My gut says Harris.

All gas, no breaks.

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