Movies Up Close

It’s time to talk about polls. Currently, most polling averages have Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by 1-2 points in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—three states that would probably combine to deliver her an electoral college victory. Most supporters of hers, though, won’t be very reassured by this, thanks to traumatizing memories of polling misfires in 2016 and 2020 that underestimated Trump’s eventual performance. Won’t the polls underestimate Trump once again? Doesn’t he always beat the polls?

Well, let’s dig deeper. First, let’s revisit 2016 (an admittedly unpleasant exercise). Barack Obama had just won two consecutive general elections, including outperforming the polls in 2012 to decisively beat a strong opponent, Mitt Romney. His sky-high margins with voters of color and steady performance with working class Whites seemed to represent an unbeatable coalition, promising endless Democratic victories into the future. Furthering this perception, the Republican party appeared in utter disrepair, having failed to prevent the nomination of a rambling, braggadocios billionaire with no political expertise, an atrocious record of scandals, a baffling soft spot for Vladimir Putin, and a penchant for melting down on Twitter in response to the slightest political criticism. Because of all this, a persistent media narrative emerged that Hillary Clinton was primed for a breezy victory.

The problem was that the polling numbers didn’t quite support this. In reality, the final national polls showed Clinton ahead of Trump by only 3.5 points on average—hardly a forecast of a blowout. In addition, Trump had made clear gains over the final two weeks, suggesting that, in the final days after all polls had concluded, he would stand to gain even further. Ultimately, Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.1 points, only a 1.4 points below what the last polls had reflected. But because the media had complacently ignored the warning signs for her in the data, a narrative emerged after the election that the polls had missed terribly, fooling everybody. So 2016 offers primarily a lesson in media unreliability, not poll uncertainty.

Despite this, you may correctly point out that a 1.4-point underestimation of Trump isn’t nothing, and the miss was larger in the crucial Midwest swing states that enabled his electoral college victory. What accounted for this miss?

The answer has to do with the fact that all polls “weight” their samples to ensure that their panels accurately reflect the true composition of the electorate. For instance, polls will apply weights to ensure the proper percentages of Black, Hispanic, and White respondents. This prevents high response rates by one group from dominating the numbers and skewing the poll. However, one trait that had not been weighted traditionally was college education. This was because it simply hadn’t been necessary: a college degree hadn’t been a major predictor of voting habits, so there was no reason to ensure proper percentages of respondents with and without degrees.

Trump’s populist campaign in 2016, though, changed that. Unlike prior Republican candidates (like Romney), much of his messaging appealed to less educated voters while repelling more educated voters. This caught pollsters flat-footed. Since they hadn’t weighted their samples for college education, their numbers were skewed toward college-educated voters, who are more likely to answer calls from pollsters. These highly educated voters disproportionately favored Clinton. Therefore, the polls’ results underestimated Trump, especially in states with large populations of non-college Whites who hadn’t been adequately represented in the data.

Pollsters realized their mistake and in 2020 duly corrected it by weighting all polls for college education. But here’s where things get strange. Because in 2020, the polling miss was actually larger than in 2016: averages generally reflected a national lead for Joe Biden of a healthy 8.5 points, but he ultimately won the popular vote by only 4.5 points, barely enough to win the electoral college.

What gives? The problem this time was more mysterious. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times wrote, the polls’ clear bias toward Biden even with proper weights indicated a much more fundamental problem with polling itself:

This is a deeper kind of error than ones from 2016. It suggests a fundamental mismeasurement of the attitudes of a large demographic group, not just an underestimate of its share of the electorate. Put differently, the underlying raw survey data got worse over the last four years, canceling out the changes that pollsters made to address what went wrong in 2016.

Essentially, although college education had now been weighted properly, a new problem had arisen: the types of voters who responded to polls were more likely to support Biden regardless of education or of any other demographic trait. So the polling practices were fine, but the data itself was flawed because the population was responding to polls in an asymmetric manner favoring Democrats.

There are several reasonable theories for why this would happen. Chief among them, once again, is Trump. He has fomented a blanketlike paranoia among his supporters, actively encouraging distrust of ostensibly neutral institutions like science, medicine, intelligence agencies, the judiciary, public schools, and even the post office. It’s hardly surprising, then, that his supporters would refuse to take calls from pollsters. Why volunteer personal information to a stranger who could potentially be a covert agent of the Deep State? That’s partly a joking hypothetical—but only partly.

Another potential reason for the 2020 polling misfire: the COVID-19 pandemic. As David Shor, a Democratic polling scientist, points out, in late 2019 Biden had a polling lead of 4-5 points, indicating a narrow electoral college advantage over Trump. But after lockdowns swept the nation in spring of 2020, Biden’s polling lead ballooned to 8-10 points, where it stayed until the election. Shor believes that, in retrospect, Biden hadn’t actually gained supporters over that timeframe. Instead, the pandemic had caused Democratic voters to be both more motivated and more available to take polls:

The basic story is that after lockdown, Democrats just started taking surveys, because they were locked at home and didn’t have anything else to do. Nearly all of the national polling error can be explained by the post-COVID jump in response rates among Dems.

Some may recall “The Resistance,” the groundswell of anti-Trump activism that reached a crescendo during Trump’s erratic handling of the pandemic. Shor is arguing, essentially, something unsurprising: that the resistors really liked being polled.

That brings us to 2024. The pandemic is no longer at hand, so the primary concern for pollsters carrying over from 2020 is the first dynamic I mentioned: the potential difficulty reaching Trump supporters who, almost by definition, don’t trust the outlets that aim to poll them. Pollsters have, to their credit, attempted to resolve this in various ways.

The first, applicable especially to state polling, is to weight by region. After all, it’s one thing to reach non-college White voters, it’s another to reach non-college Whites from rural regions of a given state. The latter will probably prove more fruitful in reaching Trump’s biggest fans.

Another is that some pollsters have begun counting respondents’ vote preference even if they fail to complete the entire poll. This change was made, apparently, because many Trump supporters would simply cut the pollster off early in the call, exclaim that they were voting for Trump, and hang up. Under previous guidelines, this wouldn’t have counted as a response. Now, pollsters, at least including the New York Times, have counted this as a Trump vote in the data. Theoretically, this could mitigate the problem of the “paranoid Trump voter,” proving more inclusive to respondents who may not be willing to volunteer information over the course of a multi-question poll.

The most influential change, though, may be the newfound predominance of weighting by recalled 2020 vote. This practice entails asking participants whom they voted for in 2020 and applying weights to ensure that these percentages match the actual 2020 electorate. It might seem logical to do this, but such methodology is actually notoriously unreliable. Cohn has written about this extensively, but the most relevant problem is that, for some reason, a small percentage of poll respondents inevitably report that they voted for the winner of the last election when they actually voted for the loser. This causes an oversampling of those who voted for the losing party because some of them have essentially disguised themselves in the poll as voters for the winning party. This in turn causes the false appearance of voters shifting their preference toward the previous loser, when in fact many of these voters actually voted for the loser the first time, too. They just don’t want to admit it.

Cohn writes that nearly two-thirds of pollsters now weight by recalled vote, as opposed to less than ten percent in 2020. This would theoretically create a systemic polling bias toward Trump, and indeed, as Cohn shows in the table below, pollsters who don’t use recalled vote weighting have generally found a slightly more comfortable edge for Harris in the crucial Midwest states:

Furthermore, he speculates that this pro-Trump bias is the very point of using this weighting strategy: pollsters who obtain very left-leaning data want to avoid underestimating Trump drastically, as they did in 2020, so they weight by recalled vote to counter what they perceive as an inevitable anti-Trump bias. This is why, in the chart above, some results, especially the national average, are actually better for Trump without the recalled vote weighting: it’s because the pollsters with the most left-leaning data (often online national polls) disproportionately use the strategy. Their numbers start out very heavily Democratic, so they intentionally skew them back toward Trump because they don’t trust their own results.

To me, this all means that we’re in very uncertain waters regarding the real status of this election. On one hand, optimists for Harris could point out that pollsters are essentially handing points to Trump by adopting a debunked weighting practice that favors the last election’s losing party. On the other hand, Trump supporters could, with reasonable evidence, argue that polling itself is now heavily biased against Trump due to his supporters’ aversion to being surveyed—a bias that the new weighting methods could never hope to erase. (Recall the very large 4-point national miss in 2020.)

The big question, then, may be how much the COVID-19 pandemic truly impacted the 2020 polling. If the 4-point miss in 2020 was indeed mostly attributable to polling distrust among Trump’s supporters, then Trump is probably in good shape, since nothing has occurred to alter that dynamic. But if, as Shor theorizes, the 2020 miss was largely because the unique environment of the pandemic caused Trump-hating voters to disproportionately pervade polling panels, then Harris may actually be in significantly better shape than the polling indicates. After all, if pollsters have now adopted pro-Trump weighting methods only because he outperformed their numbers in 2020—but if that overperformance was actually due to 2020-specific factors that no longer apply—then we may see Harris, not Trump, outperform the polls this time.

Remember that in the 2022 midterms, with the pandemic effectively over and several Trumpian candidates running for office in swing states, the polls slightly underestimated…Democrats.

 

–Jim Andersen

In the previous update, I analyzed Kamala Harris’s relatively poor polling among Black voters. I concluded that, while she’s indeed likely to lose support among that group in 2024 compared to Joe Biden’s performance in 2020, there are several reasons to expect that it won’t be as damaging to her electoral college prospects as current national polls indicate.

In this update, I’ll move on to discussing another demographic with which she’s polling poorly: Hispanic voters. And to preview the upcoming analysis, my outlook here isn’t as optimistic for her.

Returning to Adam Carlson’s 2024 crosstabs aggregator, we can see that with Hispanics, Harris is currently polling an average of 10 points below Biden’s 2020 showing:

To me, what’s most concerning about this finding is that, unlike with Black voters, it comes on the heels of Biden performing quite badly with this subgroup in 2020. As you can see below, Trump gained a whopping 8% share (16 point net gain) with Hispanic voters in 2020 compared to 2016:

Plus, also dissimilar to Black voters, Hispanic voters weren’t substantially under-polled for Democrats in 2020. As I wrote in the last piece, Biden’s support among Black voters was underestimated in 2020 by about 10 points. His support among Hispanic voters was also underestimated, but only by a negligible 4 points:

This all paints a dark picture for Harris for multiple reasons. Firstly, Hispanics are the fastest-growing voting block in the nation. Secondly, certain swing states contain large amounts of Hispanic voters: the Arizona electorate, for example, was 19% Hispanic in 2020, and Nevada’s was 17%. In 2024, the figures in both states promise to be even higher. Even in Pennsylvania, 7% of the 2020 electorate was Hispanic. A 10-point loss for Harris among those voters in 2024 would lead to a loss of 0.7 points across the state, an unhelpful handicap given the thin margins expected there.

Why have Democrats plummeted so spectacularly with Hispanic voters since Trump’s ascendancy? The answer appears to lie in a massive political miscalculation made in the early and mid-2010’s. At that time, it was thought that taking a strong stance against illegal immigration at the southern border would alienate Hispanic voters—an undesirable outcome given their increasing prominence in American politics. Even though Barack Obama had dealt with illegal immigration fairly harshly while in office—deporting more undocumented migrants than any president in history to that point—Democrats adopted a practice of largely avoiding the issue, and their proposals on the matter often focused on offering amnesty to those who had already crossed the border.

So widespread was the political wisdom against too-strong anti-immigration rhetoric that Republican Party elites, too, adhered to it. They believed that Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 could partly be attributed to his having been forced to adopt an extreme (for that time) stance on immigration in the Republican Primary, thanks to pressure from upstart, populist-leaning candidates like Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Michele Bachmann. In one primary debate, Cain memorably suggested building a giant electrical fence across the southern border, which Romney let pass without criticism. (What a bad look for the party!) Later, Romney infamously proposed changing domestic policies in such a way as to incentivize undocumented immigrants to “self-deport.” With moments like these—so the thinking went—Romney had offended a critical constituency.

We now know that these political assessments were massively off base. That’s because, with Republicans in 2016 aiming to dial back their anti-immigrant rhetoric (perhaps by coalescing around amiable Florida governor Jeb Bush), political newcomer Donald Trump took a different tack. He instead ran a campaign focused almost solely on curbing illegal immigration and demagoguing the immigrants themselves. For this, he not only amassed a cultish following among rural White voters that persists to this day, but he suffered no penalty whatsoever among Hispanic voters, an achievement both parties had assumed impossible. Four years later, as we’ve said, he gained an unbelievable net 16 points among the demographic.

Trump’s astonishing success with Hispanics proves that the parties greatly miscalculated how these voters felt about illegal immigration. Firstly, keep in mind that, despite what Elon Musk would have you believe, undocumented immigrants can’t vote, so there’s no direct political benefit to catering to them. Still, circa 2010-2015, both parties seemed to believe that Hispanic citizens would largely identify with the undocumented migrants, taking their denigration as a personal attack on their communities. Of course, for many or even most Hispanic voters, this may have been correct; after all, Democrats still poll ahead of Republicans with the group overall. But for a very large portion of Hispanic voters, it wasn’t. For these Hispanics, in fact, it seems that the opposite was true: they were uniquely averse to allowing illegal immigration to continue unfettered.

There’s ready logic available to explain this. If someone undertakes the arduous process of legally immigrating to the United States from Mexico or Central America, it stands to reason that they prefer, for whatever reason, the environment of United States to that of their original country. These voters, then, may react with particular alarm to Trump’s warnings that heavy migration threatens our national identity. For example, his wild and untrue statements about undocumented migrants murdering and raping people at high rates may concern immigrant families who associate their country of origin with higher rates of violent crime. In other words, for White people, Trump stirs up xenophobia, a powerful force. But for some Hispanic voters, he stirs up an even more powerful and more chaotic one: intergenerational trauma.

Of course, many “Hispanics” aren’t from Mexico or Central America. Many are Puerto Rican, so they aren’t immigrants at all. On what basis, then, would we expect them to feel particularly compelled to defend those who have immigrated illegally from the South? This is to say nothing of other Hispanic groups in the US such as Cuban-Americans, who broke strongly for Trump in 2020, helping him win Florida with ease. Cubans, of course, have little cultural or geographic connection to activities at the border, so it’s hardly surprising that they haven’t adhered to media expectations of Hispanic voters. All in all, the census designations of “Hispanic” and “Latino” have proven less politically meaningful than the parties seemed to anticipate in the early 2010’s. Trump has been able to exploit that error for tremendous political gain.

Let’s return to the troubling data for Democrats. If they were to lose 10 points among Hispanics nationwide, as Carlson’s aggregator reflects, they would incur a loss of about 2 whole points in Arizona (where Biden won by only 0.3 points in 2020) and Nevada (where Biden won by 2.3 points). Could Harris overcome those blows?

Nevada may seem friendlier, since Harris starts from a better 2020 benchmark. The 2-point loss among Hispanics, if every other demographic held steady, would still allow her to eke out a win in the state. But I’m still pessimistic about it. The problem in Nevada is that only 16% of the electorate is classified as “suburban,” far below the national average of 51%. Instead, most of its electorate falls under the designation of “urban” due to the overwhelming population of Las Vegas compared to that of the rest of the state. Thus, the White, college-educated suburban voters who’ve comprised so much of the Democratic gains over the past decade are, in Nevada, a rare breed. No wonder that in 2020, Nevada was one of only seven states to swing toward Trump compared to 2016. Biden still won there, but the trend looks dicey. A large rightward swing among Hispanics plus a small rightward swing among Blacks—without a compensatory leftward swing among suburban Whites—could spell doom for Harris in the state.

This is only one person’s forecast, though. Surprisingly (to me), Harris has actually polled relatively well in Nevada this cycle. She currently leads by 1.1 points there in the FiveThirtyEight average. Believe who you like. But Nevada is a notoriously difficult state to poll, and, polling aside, I don’t like the look of it.

Arizona poses a more complicated picture. That’s because despite the large and growing Hispanic population there—a likely source of Democratic losses in 2024—it also boasts a healthy and growing suburban population, thanks to the Phoenix metro area, a likely source of Democratic gains. Which shift will dominate the trend in 2024? Two data points may provide encouragement to Harris supporters:

1. In the 2022 midterms, Senator Mark Kelly won reelection in Arizona by a comfortable five points, demonstrating impressive strength in the Phoenix area—indicating that leaning on the suburbs may be a winning strategy in modern day Arizona politics, even amidst losses in other subgroups.
2. In 2020, Biden improved in Arizona by 3.8 points relative to Clinton in 2016 despite the aforementioned net loss of 16 points among Hispanics nationwide. So there’s already precedent for gains among White suburbans outweighing sharp Hispanic losses in the state.

While these points are compelling, I remain skeptical. Arizona, after all, is the only swing state that actually lies on the southern border, meaning that its voters of all ethnicities may be more captivated by Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric. This may apply especially to this cycle, in which Trump has attempted to brand Harris as personally responsible for much of the problem on the border. Indeed, Arizona has been Harris’s worst swing state in the polling so far: she trails by 1.0 in the FiveThirtyEight average.

To her credit, Harris seems to recognize the obstacles facing her. Last week she visited the border for the first time and delivered a speech that, for a Democrat, was surprisingly forceful on illegal immigration. In particular, she emphatically tied Trump to the failure of a bipartisan immigration bill that he convinced Republicans to reject last year in an apparent attempt to keep the issue alive for his 2024 run. Will this message sway any skeptics? Or is it too little, too late?

Unfortunately, it looks to me like, all things considered, the more likely outcome is the latter.

 

–Jim Andersen

In my previous two posts, I concluded on positive notes for Kamala Harris. In the first, I pointed out that Democrats’ most recent electoral gains have come in whiter, more northern districts—exactly the types of communities that could help deliver her the Midwest swing states in November. In the second, I examined the Democrats’ increasing edge among White, college-educated voters, especially in the recently purple states of Georgia and Arizona, and also pertaining to a potential 2024 flip state: North Carolina.

Despite these encouraging trends, though, polls show a very close race in 2024. What’s holding Harris back?

Analyst Adam Carlson maintains a publicly available spreadsheet that compiles polling “crosstabs”: the responses of specific demographic subgroups in general polls. Crosstabs typically include too few respondents to function as statistically significant mini-polls by themselves. But by compiling the crosstabs across several major polls, as Carlson has done, a holistic view of the polling data across various demographics can be seen. Here’s what the data says as of late September:

The column to the far right is the important one: it shows Harris’s current polling status compared to Joe Biden’s performance with the designated group in 2020.

Taking into account the numbers in that column, the problem for Harris is clear: she’s polling well behind Biden’s 2020 voting shares of Black and Hispanic voters. With White voters, she’s actually outperforming Biden, which fits with the analysis in my first update. In particular, she appears to be outdoing him with college-educated White voters—fitting with the further analysis in my second update. Among Black and Hispanic voters, though, she appears to have lost an alarming amount of ground.

We’ll dedicate this piece to analyzing data pertaining to Black voters. Although Harris leads them by a substantial 66 points, this represents a marked decline over 2020 Biden, who won the demographic by 83 points. This apparent 17-point shift, if it were to actualize in November, would be devastating to Harris’s chances in several swing states: in Georgia, for example, where Black voters comprise 29% of the electorate, it would cost Harris about 5 whole percentage points. (In 2020, Biden won the state by only 0.2 points.) Even in a predominantly White state like Pennsylvania, where Black voters comprise only 11% of the electorate, such a shift would cost Harris 1.9 points, enough to erase Biden’s victorious margin of 1.2 points in 2020 (although this loss would be more than offset by Harris’s apparent gains with White voters).

Harris’s poor polling with Black voters has already been subject to much media speculation and hand-wringing. Right-wing pundits have largely hailed the phenomenon as a rejection of “woke” identity politics, especially among Black men. Progressive analysts, meanwhile, have characterized it as an inevitable consequence of Democrats’ broken economic promises to the Black community. Even Trump himself has weighed in, musing with typical denseness that his criminal trials have endeared him to Black people (who, according to this theory, are culturally familiar with being federally prosecuted for fraud, stealing classified military information, and attempting to overthrow American democracy).

I don’t believe either of the first two theories are correct, and I won’t even humor the third. Actually, I already hinted at my theory about Democrats’ dwindling Black support in my first update. To summarize what I implied in that post, it seems to me based on the available data that nonwhite voters, especially Black voters, have been repelled by the the Democratic Party over the past four years due to perceptions about its permissiveness toward violent crime—particularly in specific media markets such as the New York City area (which alone accounts for 5-10% of Black people nationwide). Secondarily, the emergence of religiously sensitive issues like abortion and transgender rights as important features of the Democratic platform may be turning off some evangelical Black voters.

If my analysis is correct, especially regarding the importance of regional crime coverage, Democrats may detect a silver lining. In particular, this would suggest that their losses among Black voters may be geographically concentrated in areas that are unlikely to impact the electoral college.

Indeed, the polling seems to support this. Consider that Harris is currently polling ahead of Trump in New York state by an average of about 13 points. That’s a comfortable lead, but Biden won there in 2020 by a much larger 23 points. This apparent 10-point gain for Trump in the state, which would be consistent with the drastic Democratic midterm losses there that I wrote about in the first update, would represent a gain of a staggering 850,000 votes—but these votes would be utterly useless to Trump, since he’s poised to lose the state regardless. In fact, a swing of this magnitude in New York would lessen his electoral college advantage by a full 0.5% alone. In other words, whereas Biden needed to win the popular vote by 4% to win the electoral college in 2020, Harris would only need to win by 3.5% in 2024 if this shift in New York held—and, again, this is only taking into account a change in one state.

Relatedly, the latest poll of California shows Harris ahead by 22 points. As with New York, she’s in no danger of losing the state. But in 2020, Biden carried California by a larger 29 points. If Harris were to win by only 22 points there, that would afford Trump an enormous 1.2 million votes in the total count compared to 2020; unfortunately, again as with New York, he would be essentially flushing these votes down the toilet. Their only effect would be to further reduce his electoral college advantage by about 0.8%. Combining New York and California, then, Trump is already looking at a potential 1-1.5% reduction in his electoral college margin from 2020.

So it seems to me that the Democratic losses among Black voters are real, but not as damaging as they might initially appear, thanks to the electoral college. Yes, Harris would lose a devastating 5 points in Georgia if she lost 17 points of Black voting share compared to Biden in 2020. But it seems to me that she’s more likely to suffer a disproportionate loss of Black voters elsewhere—specifically in NYC, LA, Houston, and Miami, where Democrats performed poorly in the midterms and have polled poorly this cycle. By contrast, in swing state metros like Atlanta, as I wrote about in the second update, Democrats in the midterms actually over-performed, suggesting that Black voters there haven’t been subject to the same discontentment with the Democratic Party as those in, for instance, New York City.

As I’ve previously speculated, this, to me, can only be explained by sensationalist coverage of violent crime in these specific media markets. And it also makes sense to me that Black people may be more alarmed by this coverage, since Black people are more likely to live in the neighborhoods that the news characterizes as dangerous. Thus, in contrast to Trump’s fatuous theory that Black people sympathize with and relate to criminality, the opposite is true: they perceive it as a more urgent political problem, since it poses a more immediate and concrete threat to their communities’ safety.

Another factor in Harris’s apparent underperformance with Black voters might be a general, systemic underestimation of Black support for Democrats. I’ve done some aggregating of my own, examining the final national polls in the 2020 cycle. These are the crosstabs for Black voters among those polls:

As you can see, Biden’s final polling average among Black voters put him ahead of Trump by a sizeable 73 points. But that was actually a significant underestimation, as he ultimately won the demographic by 83 points (despite the polls overestimating him elsewhere). So there’s reason to believe that the current polls may be underestimating Harris with Black voters, too. One possible reason for this could be flaws in the way polls identify “likely” voters. Consider that many polls gauge likelihood of voting by simply asking the respondents how likely they are to vote. The pollsters then use this information to weight their data to better reflect the likely electorate. That’s a reasonable strategy, but it doesn’t work with certain demographic subgroups: young black men, for example, have been statistically shown to vote at sub-50% rates even after telling pollsters that they will “definitely” vote. Older Black women, on the other hand, almost always vote if they tell pollsters they will. Trump’s best subgroup among Black voters? Young Black men. His worst? I think you know the answer.

None of this is to say that Harris will avoid any losses of Black voters in swing states in 2024. Data since 2012 shows that Trump has made gradual gains with Black voters in each cycle on the ballot. Specifically, he’s managed to gain about 6 points with Black voters every four years (by taking 3% more Black voters while the Democrat correspondingly loses 3%).

I predict that he’s likely to make a similar gain in 2024 in most areas. To be sure, this will help him in swing states, especially in Georgia and North Carolina. However, those gains may be offset by losses among White voters, especially those with college degrees. As a hypothetical exercise, imagine that Trump were to gain 6 points with Black voters in Georgia but lose 4.5 points there among college-educated Whites, as Carlson’s aggregator reflects. That would lead to a net gain for Trump of only 0.5 points in the state. That’s theoretically enough to reverse Biden’s 0.2 point margin of victory in 2020, but this is before factoring in additional growth of the Atlanta suburbs since that time.

So all in all, the trend for Democrats among Black voters is bad, but there are reasons to hope that the damage won’t be as bad as the national polls currently show. And even nationally, there are signs that Harris will close strong. Consider the trend in Black support for the Democratic ticket over time using Carlson’s polling aggregator:

• June (Biden at top of ticket): 30 points behind 2020 support
• July 21-Aug 18 (in aftermath of Harris replacing Biden): 25 points behind 2020 support
• Aug 19-Sept 10 (post-DNC): 21 points behind 2020 support
• Sept 11-Sept 30 (post-debate): 16 points behind 2020 support

Harris appears to be clawing away. Will it be enough?

If I’m correct that a large percentage of the stickiest losses are coming from a handful of metro areas that lie outside of swing states—and if the polls are underestimating her support with Black voters, as they did Biden’s in 2020—then it just might be.

 

–Jim Andersen

In my first update, I examined political shifts around the country from 2020 to 2022. I concluded based on the evidence that Democrats made surprising gains during that period in predominantly White, suburban areas in the northern US—with the exception of the media market of New York City, where Democratic performance fell sharply, a likely result of that media market’s sensationalist coverage of increased crime in the wake of the pandemic.

But the aforementioned areas of Democratic gains in 2022 were only the most extreme examples. In these districts, Democratic candidates impressively overcame a 7%+ nationwide turnout shift toward Republicans. In other pockets of the country, Democrats also outperformed the national average, except by smaller margins. For example, some districts saw a 2 or 3% shift toward Republicans, indicating that, taking into account the GOP turnout advantage, Democrats had actually succeeded, on balance, in persuading voters to their side. Many of these areas appear to lie in or around major cities—with the exceptions, as previously noted, of New York City and Los Angeles.

Potentially helpful in illuminating why Democrats performed fairly well in these sprawling metro areas is the table below from Catalyst, which compiles statistical post-election reports by verifying voter data with publicly available voting records.

The data here may be surprising given how the national media has covered national elections involving Donald Trump. As you can see, Trump has actually made steady gains—3% each cycle—among Black voters from 2012 to 2020. Among Hispanic voters, he held steady in 2016—a shock to many pundits who assumed his rhetoric would alienate or offend that group—then made drastic gains (8%) with them in 2020.

Yet overall, Joe Biden in 2020 still improved on Hillary Clinton’s 2.1% popular vote margin in 2016. He defeated Trump by 4.5% and won the electoral college. This table shows us precisely why: Biden made significant gains with college-educated White voters compared to Clinton. Although he only improved by 1% among non-college Whites, his large gain of 4% among college Whites enabled a rounded 3% gain in the overall White voting share compared to Clinton, which proved decisive. In fact, this was the best performance of a Democratic candidate among White voters since 2008. Although the media has tended to emphasize Trump’s supposed appeal to White voters, the results in 2020 didn’t match that narrative.

The reasons for Trump’s worsening performance with college-educated Whites hardly need enumeration. Suffice to say, though, that he has repeatedly doubled down on populist rhetoric ostensibly designed to appeal to rural and less educated voters. This strategy worked for him in 2016: he improved among non-college Whites by a sizable 4% relative to Mitt Romney in 2012 and won the presidency. However, he wasn’t able to continue these gains with non-college Whites in 2020. Furthermore, their share of the electorate is gradually declining nationwide, meaning that Trump’s advantage with this demographic becomes less valuable with each successive election.

The question for Kamala Harris is, then, where can college-educated White voters be found in large numbers? After all, it stands to reason that, with Trump on the ballot once again, college Whites may continue their abandonment of the GOP. Big pockets of these voters may represent areas for potential continued growth for Harris, even relative to Biden in 2020.

The answer, as you would expect, is that college-educated Whites are most heavily represented in large suburban communities. Thus, if we locate these communities throughout the country, we should obtain a sense of which states are most fertile for Harris to make electoral gains. Most fertile of all, though, will be the states with large and growing suburban areas, since these are subject both to the aforementioned positive trends for Democrats among college-educated White voters and also to an increasing raw number of those voters, compounding the effect.

Where are these areas? Well, here are the national metro areas that grew most in population in 2021 and 2022 combined:

1. Dallas-Forth Worth, TX
2. Houston, TX
3. Atlanta, GA
4. Phoenix, AZ
5. Orlando, FL
6. Austin, TX
7. Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL
8. Charlotte, NC

Judging by our analysis so far, the states with these exploding suburban areas are likely to show recent heavy swings toward Democratic candidates. And indeed, Texas shifted 10 points leftward from 2012 to 2020, turning from deep red into…reddish purple. Georgia and Arizona, meanwhile, each shifted 9 points leftward during that window, both flipping blue in 2020—to Trump’s raging disbelief. (Florida hasn’t shifted leftward since 2012, but this is probably because its suburban growth is uniquely attributable to migrating retirees rather than, as in the other states, highly educated younger people relocating for job opportunities in sectors like tech.)

What about in the 2022 midterms? Did these areas, especially Atlanta and Phoenix, continue to swing left? Or did they revert somewhat rightward, potentially indicating that their dramatic blue shifts were related to election-specific issues like Trump’s handling of the pandemic in 2020 or his inflammatory immigration rhetoric in 2016?

Judging by the New York Times map of House district performance in 2022, we can see that it’s the former. As the screenshots above show, the Atlanta and Phoenix metro/suburban areas both shifted marginally rightward in 2022 but less so than the national shift of 7.2%, indicating that Democrats largely continued to succeed in persuading suburban voters (despite predictably losing ground overall due to a turnout disadvantage while their party held the Presidency). Accordingly, Democratic senate candidates in both states won reelection, a surprising result to some pundits who predicted a “red wave” given Biden’s unpopularity as President.

So it seems that, barring an unforeseen political shift from 2022 to 2024, Democrats can continue to expect gains in the still-growing suburbs of Atlanta and Phoenix. Whether these gains may be offset by other developments in Georgia and Arizona is a subject for another post.

For now, though, I’d like to return to something I deliberately skipped over before: the presence of Charlotte, NC on the list of rapidly burgeoning metro areas. It may be puzzling, given this ranking, that Democrats have not made major gains in North Carolina in the past decade. North Carolina, after all, has similar racial demographics to Georgia, with 60-65% of the electorate identifying as White and 20-30% identifying as Black. Yet Mitt Romney won the state by two points in 2012, and Trump still won by a point in 2020. Why this lack of improvement for Democrats?

Part of the answer is that much of the Charlotte metro area actually isn’t located in North Carolina. The city of Charlotte sits right on the border with South Carolina, meaning that several of its largest suburban communities, such as Fort Hill, are actually in South Carolina. Plus, Charlotte simply isn’t as massive as Atlanta or Phoenix and may therefore not be as ideal for exploding suburban growth. Consider that in the 2020 election, the percentage of Georgians who were classified as “suburban” voters was 61%. Whereas in North Carolina, it was only 40%. Unfortunately for Democrats, Charlotte has a smaller suburban sprawl than Atlanta or Phoenix—and its relatively small sprawl sits, to a large degree, in a neighboring state.

What democrats need in North Carolina, then, is for 1) a boom in population in the suburbs and 2) for those gains to take place in the suburbs actually located in North Carolina, not South Carolina. Since 2020, has this finally happened? Will North Carolina be this year’s Georgia/Arizona?

Let’s look at this map from the University of North Carolina, which demarcates population change by county from 2022 to 2023, the most recent data available. I’ve starred the state’s two biggest cities: Charlotte and Raleigh.

You’ll notice that the highest percentage increases in population don’t seem to be occurring in the two cities themselves. Instead, they’re occurring just outside the cities—in the suburban sprawl. In fact, some of the counties adjacent to Charlotte and Raleigh increased in population that year by a whopping 3%. Compounded over four years, that’s a ~13% increase in those suburban areas. For comparison, the average yearly population growth nationwide over the last decade has been about 0.5%, compounding to about a 2% gain over four years.

I won’t get too hasty with predictions. But if I were the GOP, those numbers—in a state with razor-thin margins over the past decade—would greatly concern me…

 

–Jim Andersen

 

This will be my first post covering the 2024 Presidential Election. To be upfront, I’m a supporter of Kamala Harris (as you might have inferred from my last post). I don’t, however, plan on using these updates to celebrate or promote her candidacy. Rather, I aim to provide neutral, data-driven analysis about the race, especially geared toward predicting the eventual winner.

I’m not a poll denier. I value political polls as a critical tool in gauging candidate support. However, I’m even more interested in voting results and how they reflect changing voting patterns among various regions and demographic groups. By following these trends, I hope to make better sense of the polls—and even speculate on what the polls may be missing.

To that end, I’ll start by citing the map below, taken from the New York Times 2022 House of Representatives election coverage. Essentially, this map provides a visual representation of where Democrats and Republicans overperformed and underperformed in the 2022 midterm election relative to their performance in the 2020 Presidential Election. Longer red arrows represent bigger GOP shifts; longer blue arrows represent bigger Democratic shifts. (Link to the NYT site here.)

In my opinion, this is among the most useful information possible for looking ahead to 2024, since several major political events occurred between 2020 and 2022. These include the January 6th insurrection, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a historic bump in inflation, and the initiation of prosecutions against Donald Trump. The best way to gauge how these events and others affected voters is to look at the political shifts during that period.

The first thing to highlight about the map is that, as usual for midterm elections, the nonincumbent party (the party not holding the office of the Presidency) got more votes—although in this case, by a weaker margin than many had predicted. Republicans candidates for the House of Representatives votes won more votes overall than Democratic candidates by 2.7%. That represents a 7.2% rightward shift from the 2020 Presidential Election, when Joe Biden won the popular vote over Donald Trump by 4.5%. The reason for most of this rightward shift—again, as usual for midterm elections—was that the nonincumbent party (Republicans) had higher turnout than the incumbent party (Democrats).

Given this 7.2% turnout-related advantage for Republicans compared to 2020, it makes sense that most of the lines on the map are red, indicating a rightward shift in those House districts. However, some red lines are abnormally long, indicating a more severe rightward shift. Meanwhile, some lines are small and difficult to see, indicating that only a small shift occurred from 2020 to 2022—and that, by extension, Democrats overperformed in these districts relative to other parts of the country, since the average change was 7.2% toward Republicans. Finally, some lines are blue, meaning that Democrats actually improved in those districts from 2020, a major overperformance given the national environment.

Using this data, then, we can get to the important questions: Since 2020, where are Republicans getting stronger, and where are Democrats holding their own?

The answer to the first question is made obvious by the map: the strongest Republican gains from 2020-2022 were concentrated in three states: New York, California, and Florida. In particular, they occurred in the large metro areas of New York City and Los Angeles. Some cities in other states also incurred a heavy shift toward Republicans, including Houston, Minneapolis, and Portland, Oregon, although the suburban districts surrounding those cities didn’t also shift strongly rightward, as did those near NYC and LA.

How to make sense of these mysterious findings? To me, the pattern can be explained with the following summary: GOP gains occurred in large, racially diverse media markets that disproportionately emphasized urban crime and violence.

With this framework, the pieces fall into place. New York City and Los Angeles are the two most enormous media markets in the country, if not the world, and during the period of 2020-2022, in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives matter protests of 2020, coverage of heightened crime dominated news coverage in those markets. This doesn’t mean that crime was truly worse in those areas compared to others. In fact, other cities that experienced more serious problems with post-pandemic crime, such as Detroit, Baltimore, and Milwaukee, didn’t shift strongly toward the GOP during that period. Rather, it means that the media coverage was responsible for the political shifts. How else to explain that the two cities with the most powerful media machines saw such large shifts in voting patterns, while other cities with similar demographics and similar crime statistics saw none?

(This doesn’t necessarily explain the strong rightward shift across Florida, but I think most readers can accept that Florida is a unique case given its unusual demographics, highly self-selecting population, and, in 2022, popular Republican governor up for reelection. Still, I wonder whether the close ties of many Florida residents to the NYC area played a role.)

Another giveaway is that, as I mentioned, the districts surrounding New York City and Los Angeles—including, for instance, suburban districts in New Jersey and Connecticut—swung rightward as much as, or more than, the cities themselves. This indicates that the experience of crime was not as influential as the coverage of crime during that period. It makes sense that stories from huge NYC- and LA-based news sources influenced voting patterns over a large radius, even into very low-crime areas, while suburban areas near less powerful media markets didn’t shift strongly toward the GOP. In fact, even cities geographically nearby to NYC and LA, such as Philadelphia and San Francisco, didn’t see major rightward voting shifts, even though their post-pandemic increases in crime were equal to or worse than their larger counterparts. The only possible explanation is that voters from those smaller cities formed different perceptions due to their engagement with less sensational media coverage.

To be fair, some cities probably did shift rightward in the context of particularly extreme experiences with violent crime. This can be seen with the long red arrows over Minneapolis and Portland, which notoriously experienced heightened violence and turmoil during the Black Lives Matter protests. These events, although occurring before the 2020 election, surely left a lasting impression on the electorate that likely impacted 2022 voting behavior more than in 2020, since the polarizing Trump was off the ballot. But the GOP-favorable shifts in these cities only prove that crime is the driving factor: why did Portland shift rightward, but not Seattle or Tacoma? Why did Minneapolis veer sharply Republican, but not St. Paul? I can think of only one salient issue that would separate these otherwise highly similar areas: crime.

Few pundits are highlighting crime as a dominant issue in recent voting shifts, as I’ve just done. This may be because it contrasts with polling data, in which voters consistently cite inflation and the economy as their top political issues, with crime typically cited as a much lower concern. I don’t necessary think these poll respondents are lying (although some of them may well be): perhaps inflation is their primary concern, hurting Democrats across the map. But I do posit that, judging by the House results in 2022 (when inflation was far worse than now), inflation is not driving changes in regional political alignment. This makes sense: inflation has occurred everywhere, yet only residents of Long Island watch the New York nightly news. Thus, only the latter could be expected to cause a geographically focused political change that might influence the distribution of votes across the electoral college.

We now arrive at the flip side of the coin: where did Democrats over-perform in 2022 relative to 2020? The easiest way to answer this is to search for the small pockets of blue arrows on the NYT map. These districts, after all, shifted leftward from 2020 to 2022 despite a 7.2% Republican turnout advantage. That’s quite an accomplishment for Democrats in those races.

From the map, we can see that these pockets are concentrated in the northern US, especially in the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and, sneakily, Alaska. Identifying the common thread between these regions is a bit more difficult than for those of the GOP-shifting areas, but it can be done: these are overwhelmingly White districts that are economically and culturally northern. By “economically northern,” I mean that, unlike White-dominated areas in other regions of the country, these areas are unlikely to rely on agriculture as their primary industry. And by “culturally northern,” I’m highlighting the various social differences of White voters from these regions compared to those from other regions. Not to put too fine a point on it, but, for one, White voters from these northern states tend not to be descended from members of the Confederacy.

But why would voters from these northern districts be specifically likely to change political preferences toward the Democratic Party? Well, it may suffice to summarize that the factors that have spurred GOP gains elsewhere don’t apply to them. For instance, being so far from the southern border, these voters aren’t likely to be motivated by Trumpian rhetoric on immigration. (In fact, being “culturally northern,” as I designated them, they may be repelled by Trump’s racial dog whistles, which have found welcoming White audiences elsewhere.) And they don’t live near the NYC or LA media markets, so the influence of news coverage regarding crime in those areas doesn’t reach them. The absence of these factors in turn might leave them more receptive to recent Democratic attack lines against Republicans—including regarding abortion rights and the events of January 6th, 2021.

It may still seem suspicious, though, that Democrats’ biggest gains from 2020 to 2022 came in overwhelmingly White areas. Why is Trump’s racial rhetoric only costing his party votes from White people, while the GOP appears to gain votes from the ethnicities of the people their leader most commonly denigrates?

For starters, Democrats already enjoy a huge advantage among Black voters—typically winning 85-90% of that demographic. So relatively few opportunities exist for Democrats to gain support there. But besides this, I can think of a few reasons why the GOP may be making incremental gains among Black voters, even outside of the New York City and Los Angeles areas:

1. Black people are disproportionately clustered in New York City and Los Angeles. So even Black voters who don’t live in those metro areas may be getting much of their news, via social media, from Black-run outlets or programs in those areas. This means that the effect of dramatic crime coverage in NYC and LA may influence Black people more broadly across the country (although not to the extent of local Black people), while influencing White people only if they actually live in those regions. (This theory finds potential support in polls finding that GOP gains have come from younger Black voters, since this age group is more likely to rely on social media for news.)
2. Democrats’ aggressive rhetoric on polarizing issues like abortion and transgender rights may be costing them Black votes. To be sure, Black people support Democrats’ positions on those issues at higher rates than White people. But even a small percentage of Black people who find these stances intolerable could lead to GOP gains. For instance, 75% of Black people may support re-instituting Roe v. Wade, more than White people, but that’s a smaller percentage than Democrats’ usual support with Black voters—so it could actually lead to defections. Meanwhile, Democrats could make gains with White people simply because this demographic began as less likely to support them.

I’ll cover Hispanic voters in a different post, since few Hispanics reside in the northern districts highlighted here and therefore don’t significantly impact the politics there.

Overall, we’ve arrived at a coherent (albeit oversimplified) look at where party shifts occurred from 2020 to 2022. GOP gains came from major media market areas that covered post-pandemic crime as a dramatic storyline, while Democratic gains came from whiter, less diverse communities that, due to cultural and geographic factors, were relatively uninfluenced by media- and GOP-driven narratives about crime and immigration—potentially leaving them more likely to focus on unpopular GOP positions on abortion and voting rights.

Where does that leave the 2024 Presidential Election? Who’s going to win?

That’s for another post, but consider that three states that can deliver Kamala Harris a victory in the electoral college are Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

 

–Jim Andersen

Until now, all political attempts to undermine the MAGA movement have failed. To the confusion of both political experts and casual observers, MAGA’s supporters have remained undeterred by unshakeable evidence of the movement’s disregard for morality, patriotism, and even conservativism. This is because none of these principles actually relate to the main premise of MAGA. Its true guiding theme is not a value or principle at all, but the dark spirit of male sexual frustration.

From the beginning, MAGA has invoked sex as a central rhetorical focus. Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign by referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and has never trailed in GOP primary polls for three election cycles afterward. Since his ascendency, Republicans have largely ignored traditional politics and have instead focused bizarrely on instances of perceived sexual perversion. They accuse their opponents without evidence of sex trafficking and pedophilia. They viciously and persistently attack transgender people, a tiny group with little representation in powerful circles. They embrace QAnon, an online conspiracy that theorizes that pedophiles control the government and Hollywood.

And their preoccupation with sex always carries overtones of rage and resentment. Consider MAGA supporters’ most infamous and identifying insult: deriding non-MAGA men as “cucks”—short for cuckolds. Such language conveys that MAGA men view mainstream culture and politics as not only emasculating but as sexual dead ends, as routes to celibacy. For them, MAGA is the solution to a sexual problem, not a political one. Its actual political stances (where they can be found) lie downstream from this. Take its push to restrict abortion rights, a thinly veiled effort to restrict young women’s sexual behavior. Or its notorious animosity toward illegal immigration: as Trump’s original “rapists” comment indicates, MAGA perceives immigration as a sexual threat—or, more accurately, a scapegoat for lived sexual dissatisfaction. Conservative media outlets regularly parrot dubious claims about immigrants raping and attacking young women. Never do they run stories about immigrants usurping low wage jobs. Thus, the mantra that immigrants are “stealing American jobs,” already factually questionable, can and should be interpreted as a euphemism for sex. Even if taken generously at face value, sexual paranoia looms large: women prefer men with jobs.

The rise of MAGA coincides with the dual explosions of internet pornography and Instagram. The media has highlighted the negative impacts of these developments on female body image and self esteem. However, it has not yet appreciated the corresponding impact on men, for whom the gap between sexual ambitions and reality has now become, for much of the population, outrageously wide. Some coverage has been dedicated to “incels” and violent offenders who lament sexual failure, such as school shooters. This coverage has characterized such individuals as belonging to a fringe. Perhaps. But a fringe of what?

Trump himself is the perfect avatar of sexual frustration. He regularly degrades women. He has been divorced several times and has been credibly linked to embarrassing affairs, all of which have the flavor (if not the formality) of prostitution. His wife shows him no affection, let alone desire, and she is rarely present at his events. Her frostiness toward him passes with no comment from pundits, who consider the subject out of bounds, but their courteousness blinds them to the crucial dynamic at play. That his wife detests him is the secret ingredient to his popularity. And it helps explain the failure of his copycats, who unknowingly torpedo their own appeals by flaunting (or at least feigning) healthy relationships with their wives.

Beyond the rhetorical and aesthetic evidence, simple intuition can easily discern the true heart of MAGA. Any outsider can recognize its atmosphere as dysfunctionally male. Trump and his acolytes are boorish, tense, and insecure. Few young women would wish to find themselves alone with one. In fact, several MAGA leaders including Trump have been accused or even convicted of sexual assault, which, far from disqualifying them, serves as a stamp of authenticity. At Trump’s rallies, to his supporters’ delight, he jeers powerful women and their male enablers. These events have an increasingly ritualistic feel: missing only are the witches burning at the stake.

A subset of women, of course, identify with MAGA, but their devotion is zealous, cultish, and unrelated to its premise. They revel in the cultural fervor of MAGA, not its ideas. MAGA men allow women to participate so long as they reject femininity, either by masculinizing themselves (a la Marjorie Taylor Greene) or playing the prostitute (a la Lauren Boebert). A relatively healthy female role model has no place in MAGA, as Ivanka Trump’s departure and Nikki Haley’s political flop exemplify. Indeed, to date, Ivanka’s main contribution to MAGA has been her role in resurfaced old videos in which her father awkwardly expresses unfulfilled sexual desire towards her. These clips, despite heavy play from Democrats, did not dampen the enthusiasm of his supporters. It is at least possible that they boosted it.

Eight years after Trump’s unexpected presidential victory, the Democratic Party may finally be coming around to the true nature of its opposition. Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz has characterized MAGA as “creepy” and “weird,” and this branding has resonated across the political spectrum. Far from being shallow or reductive, it pegs the movement more accurately than anything before it. When footage emerged of Walz’s counterpart, JD Vance, deriding childless women as selfish and miserable “cat ladies”—a rant soaked in MAGA sexual rage—Walz’s labels afforded Democrats the appropriate shorthand they had previously lacked. Vance has been accordingly helpless to stop the media shellacking. Trump, seeing this, has uncharacteristically reduced his profile, possibly hoping that Vance will discover a counterattack for him to borrow before being similarly tarnished. But the hope is futile: Vance, dumbfounded, can only double down on his angry, judgmental persona, the only political posture he has ever known. With every appearance he digs himself deeper into the hole that Walz has made for him.

Is this the end for MAGA? Not quite. The social trends that fueled its rise remain active, and the potential antidote—a mainstream, non-moralizing confrontation of men’s mental health struggles in an increasingly digital world—is not on the horizon. Black men, a longtime Democratic bastion, have begun to drift rightward, to the puzzlement of pundits who had theorized racism as the main pillar of MAGA. Trump himself may be fading, but one worries about his replacement. He has always been limited by his deficiencies and failures as a man—which, paradoxically, comprised his qualifications to lead the movement. But what if his successor is less limited? What if the next Trump, blood-related or otherwise, not only embodies sexual frustration but has the ability to marshal it towards its natural conclusion?

It could well again be time again for the witches to burn at the stake.

 

–Jim Andersen