Michigan looks bad now:
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4469508-trump-tops-biden-by-2-points-in-michigan-survey/
But Israel is not Putin. Netanyahu does not have the lasting power of Putin. It will be resolved before election. Biden can claim at least a draw if not a win. And things will settle down. We send money to rebuild Gaza, eventually.
Fox News poll, though. And at that, still only two points in favor of Trump — within the margin of error — and they introduced a leading question about Biden’s mental fitness.
Cards on the table: I’m pretty much discounting pre-convention polling data. Too many confounding factors, and too many ways to tilt the table in favor of news-making outcomes.
Fox News’ polling operation is actually pretty well respected.
The polls themselves mean nothing now, but the fluctuations week to week reflect news events.
Re your last post: If there were week to week fluctuations, more than are explainable by inevitable sampling variation, that would be highly significant, as it would mean voters were uncertain and persuadable.
Okay, then 10 points? After all, he’s invincible. Nothing can touch him.
Thanks for making that point, Leaper.
…
I agree with Jim Geraghty here: from today’s Washington Post (paywalled):
There are plenty of Republicans who want an alternative to Trump — 49 percent of those who showed up for the GOP Iowa caucuses, a bit more than 45 percent in the New Hampshire primary. They’re not a majority, but they’re a large enough minority that they can’t be ignored or dismissed.
Thought about this some, and there is one assumption in the OP not favorable to Democrats: That overall turnout will be less than in 2020.
Just opinions, but I think these strategists are on to something regarding an apparent erosion in Trump’s support:
[The outcome of the South Carolina primary] is a sign of Trump’s structural weakness, Rick Wilson, co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and a former Republican political strategist, argued on Monday.
“I don’t think there’s much he can really do to bring Haley people over at this point,” he said. “Trump will be a weaker candidate in the general election than most Republicans believe.”
Multiple polls have shown Haley to be the stronger candidate against President Joe Biden in a general election. And former Trump White House official Alyssa Farah Griffin, now a political strategist, called Haley’s support in South Carolina a new emergency for the Republican Party.
“Donald Trump is running as a former President with near universal Name ID and he’s losing as much as 40% of GOP Primary voters. That’s a 5-alarm fire for the GOP if they want to win in November,” she wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
All of this, as well as some (but not all) of the arguments in the OP, make sense to me.
But I still can’t get past the current polls. I don’t believe they could be as wrong as they would have to be to match up with what the reality seems like it should be.
The only things I can figure are: polls are somehow getting messed up in their weighting, or lots of folks are signaling their dissatisfaction with Biden via the polls but will come back to him when the election is on the line.
For option one, I do wonder if you may have a situation where lots of MAGA voters no longer identify as Republican. This would swing the “Independent” portion of the polls towards Trump, and if the pollsters are trying to balance based on GOP/DEM/IND splits they would get some wonky numbers. Most of the latest general election polls have Trump winning independents by healthy amounts, when he lost them by 13% in 2020. If most of those “Independents” are really MAGA GOP voters, that would make a bit more sense. There is some evidence of that here: Independent Party ID Tied for High; Democratic ID at New Low
For option two, one repeated feature of current polling is Trump getting 10%+ of self-identified Democrats. This makes very little sense: he got 5% of Democrats in 2020 and certainly hasn’t done anything particular to endear himself to Democrats since then. This feels like “protest votes” by young voters. The question is, will they really come home or is their really a groundswell of support from MAGA from today’s youth?
I put a good bit of weight into your option 2, @Jas09 . Your option 1 gives me some food for though – it’s probably not a huge factor, but a few percentage points in this thing is still pretty impactful.
EDIT: I also believe that “people likely to answer polling calls” strongly slants older and conservative. Not sure how this would be executed … but I’d love to see polls somehow limited to people who would NEVER respond to cold-call pollsters. First thought is paying poll respondents, but involving money would also be a major confounder.
Trump has underperformed polling in every primary so far. I wonder if the pollsters are taking into account the current, active effort to purge anyone that is not 100% MAGA loyal from the party? They are literally ex-communicating voters that they’ll need to win any sort of state wide or national election going forward. It’s inevitable with cults like this though, eventually they turn on each other and eat their own.
It’s mostly the second one. It’s too early to expect much accuracy from polls, the candidates are technically not even set right now.
Not by very much though, to be fair.
Final average in SC was 61.6% to 34%. Final result was: 59.8% to 39.5%
In NH, polling average was 53.9% to 36.3%. Final result was 54.3% to 43.2%.
In IA, he was at 52.7% in the polling average and got 51% in the voting.
You’re basically seeing what may be true of the general election polling - Trump polls at or near his ceiling. He gets very few of the undecided voters. If so, that’s generally a good sign for Biden as well, with the caveat that it’s one thing for an undecided GOP primary voter to vote for DeSantis or Haley and another thing for an undecided General Election voter to vote for Biden.
It is interesting to me that a former president only getting about 50-60% of his party’s primary voters is seen as unstoppably strong. Democrats would be falling over themselves to make Biden drop out if he were doing that poorly in the primaries.
That used to be reliably true, but starting in 2016, higher turnout can (in key places, at key moments) favor Republicans (well, Trump, anyway) — obviously, when the higher-than-expected turnout is among white trash rednecks* (and, sadly, increasing numbers of Latino Americans who live in the same milieux).
*Sorry, but I’ve spent the last seven years tiptoeing around the nomenclature for Trump voters. Time to get back to facts. White trash.
To update this with one more data point, we didn’t have many polls for the MI primary, but the only two since DeSantis dropped out had Trump at 79% and 76%. It seems like he actually got about 68%.
So there is definitely some softness in his support that is not being picked up in polls, even GOP primary polls. It would seem his supporters are more likely to be included in polling samples than they should be as a percentage of the actual voting cohort. At this time, at least.
How many Republicans will full-blown refuse to vote now that it is Trump again? Or will throw there vote on a third party?
I think there is a real number of these.
I believe there is no doubt of this – indeed, it is the basis for assumption #3 in the OP. And we don’t need to rely on guesswork, denialism, or faint hope: the specific numerical outcome of the Republican primaries has been at least an oblique indication of lessened (again, not to say ‘cratered’) support for Donald Trump among his 2020 voters.
I am pessimistic at times since they went with Trump, but part of my brain puts Biden at an 85% or so chance to win.
Assuming everything stays the same. I think even the Muslim population in Michigan will remember that Trump is full blown racist against them and come around.
Agreed. A conversation with my brother and SIL on Saturday underscores this.
They are Evangelicals and sadly voted twice for DJT. They were very adamant there is no way they are voting for him this time.
I don’t see any way they will vote for Biden and they said they were considering RFK Jr. I was about to explain why they shouldn’t do that and then remembered they live in Texas. I ended up telling them they should convince any of their friends who are unhappy with DJT to do the same.