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50 thoughts on “Presidential race tightens slightly”

    1. RZM

      Yes, but Nate Silver's gut says it's Trump.
      Of course he also goes on to say that "It’s surprisingly likely that the election won’t be a photo finish" that one of the candidates wins by a biggger margin than polls are showing right now. So, if that's true how likely is it that Trump will outperform his past numbers which had a ceiling of about 46% ? I kniow there are murmerings that some black and Latino men will defect to Trump but will it outweigh the many women, black, white or anything else that come out to vote for Kamala Harris ? As for Nate's gut he's been hanging out an awful lot with tech bros, professsional poker players and other people who are not exactly representative of the average voter so perhaps his gut should not be trusted.
      In this instance I find the always volatile Mr Carville to be more presuasive.

      1. RZM

        And lest we forget, there are now some Republican voters who pulled the lever for Trump last time who will not this time. The Cheneys and Romneys and other old style conservatives may not be a big number , but there don't have to be many voters like that to make Mr. Trumop toast. In fact, I've met a few just in the past month.

        1. Atticus

          I am part of that camp. Never voted for a democrats before (other than a couple local elections) but will be doing so this time.

          1. Anandakos

            Thank you. I hope Kamala surprises us all by governing from the precise middle, with at least two important cabinet positions held by patriotic Republicans.

            She has publicly said that no party has a monopoly on good ideas. I hope she listens to herself.

  2. D_Ohrk_E1

    Well if you're going to stick with Registered Voters rather than Likely Voters, dig into those crosstabs!

    Of those surveyed who said they intend to vote for Harris, the % who said, "I could change my mind between now and the election", by race:

    White = 3%
    Black = 0%
    Hispanic = 1%

    Of those surveyed who said they intend to vote for Trump, the % who said, "I could change my mind between now and the election", by race:

    White = 2%
    Black = 4%
    Hispanic = 10%

    Plenty of voters who intend to vote for Trump that might change their minds, especially Latinos.

      1. Josef

        I suppose I live a version of this. I always assume the worst, that way I'm mostly pleasantly surprised. I went to bed resigned to another four more years of Trump in 2020 and woke up to the opposite. A very pleasant surprise.

          1. KenSchulz

            Some of us who don’t marinate in conspiracy theories trust election officials to do their jobs, as they did, and therefore had confidence that the November results would stand, as indeed they did.

    1. KenSchulz

      I wish it weren't so, but I think the writers who argue that a lot of TFG voters support him, not in spite of his being a despicable POS, but because he's a despicable POS, have a point.

      2. Anandakos

        Isn't the logical conclusion that they value POSness simply because it validates their own?

        So Madame Secretary was right after all.....

  6. Solar

    Harris has run as perfect a campaign as can be run. Trump has run one as bad as it can possibly be run, and yet the polls still have them basically tied?

    To me this means one of two things:

    1. Polls are completely useless and no one in their right mind should pay any attention to them since they have no correlation with reality.
    or
    2. The US electorate is so polarized and the Presidential election process is so fucked up beyond hope that campaigning is mostly a waste of time and money, since people will make up their mind about who to vote merely by their party affiliation or whatever pre-made opinion they have about the candidates.

    1. Austin

      The only people I know who answer Unknown Caller calls are either stupid or old. If my anecdote holds true for most other people, this means polls undersample smart and young people. And as parties polarize along both age and intellect, this would suggest that polls are skewed in ways that can’t be unskewed.

      1. Salamander

        I answer "unknown caller" calls because my phone is also the business number. And I reply to polls because I know that they undersample Da Kool Kidz who don't use their cells for voice communications anyway and undersample other liberal types who are just too smart, in the hopes of getting my lefty opinions into the poll results.

        Yeah, I'm old, and I guess wanting to be heard makes me "stupid", too. Heck, I even vote.

    2. iamr4man

      There is another “meaning”. Trump has the winning message. The people voting for him want him to do the things he has promised. I don’t think the person he is and the things he has promised to do could be any clearer. It’s what makes me scared and sad.

      1. jeffreycmcmahon

        Counterpoint, most of his voters are incredibly ignorant and have a vague notion of what they think he'll do, but very little idea of what he'll actually do (just as they have very little idea of what he _actually_ did 2017-2021).

        1. cephalopod

          Along those lines, even if they know what he wants to do, they don't know the likely consequences of those things. Few voters want a trade war or inflated food prices because of mass deportations.

        2. iamr4man

          I’m not buying ignorance. I think the people who vote for him want the things he is calling for and they know who he is. And whether or not they can see the consequences is an excuse, not a reason.

          1. Anandakos

            Spot on. And it is the already afflicted who will bear the burdens of scarcity. For the average Democratic-voting Euro-American family it will mean fewer vacations and chicken more often. For the folks in West Virginia it will mean never leaving home except to go to the food bank.

        3. Batchman

          A lot of voters are thinking things were pretty good at least in the 2017-2019 time period - economy was fine, ISIS defeated, relative peace in Russia and Israel - as compared with the last few years, so it's no wonder they want to return to that state of affairs. What they fail to understand is that we survived (as a nation and as a planet) only because of those in the government who were able to restrain Trump's most extreme tendencies. And it's clear that none of those kinds of people will be around the second time.

          1. KenSchulz

            Also, of course, a lot of the bad stuff that didn’t happen was never under the control of a US President, foreign wars in particular. There was plenty of conflict going on around the world during TFG’s administration, and neither Gaza nor Ukraine is putting American service members at risk in the present.

            1. aldoushickman

              This. Voting for Trump because you are unhappy with inflation is like voting for Trump because you think it rained too much under Biden.

              (It's actually worse than that, since all of Trump's "policies" are inflationary/recessionary, so it's like being unhappy with rain and then voting for the guy who promises to ban umbrellas and cut holes in the roof).

    3. MattBallAZ

      Regarding #2, I don't think that is right. If a Dem had done literally 1 of Trumps 1,000 things, they'd be finished. It would be 56-44 for the R
      One side has become a cult.

  7. FrankM

    Almost no one changes their mind a this late stage. Even when you do see polls swinging after some event, it's due more to response bias than anything else.

    1. CAbornandbred

      I agree, but I also think that voters can become disillusioned with their candidate and end up not voting at all.

  8. Coby Beck

    Everyone continues to assume that the outcome will depend on a fair election process determined by a fair vote count. That is far from clear to me.

    1. Yehouda

      It is probably like 50:50.
      They will try to use intimidation and threats to derail the certification process in the states. The law-enforcement forces know that, so they are ready, but there are large number of Trumpists (and some in the law-enforcement are also Trumpists), so it is not easy.

  9. akapneogy

    I think it's the Electoral College that leads to elections that are poised on a knife's edge. It gives hope and enthusiasm to Republicans that elections can be gamed, and despair to Democrats that even with a simple majority the election would be lost.

  10. Josef

    If you don't have a good enough reason to vote for Kamala Harris here's a doozy of one.
    "A proposed personnel roster circulating within Donald Trump's campaign and transition operation lists Aileen Cannon, the federal judge who threw out Trump's classified documents case, as a possible candidate for attorney general, multiple sources familiar with the matter have told ABC News."
    Can you imagine her as A.G.? JFC what a nightmare scenario.

    1. Anandakos

      Um, I think he was talking about a "trade war".

      But of course it was still absurd, since France does not have tariffs of its own. It's part of the EU, so its '"trade barriers" are completely controlled by Brussels.

      Trump is supposedly an "international businessman", but he doesn't know something this obvious. What a doofus.

      1. aldoushickman

        "Um, I think he was talking about a 'trade war'."

        Was he? That's the beauty of Trump: the things he says are so inarticulate and stupid, even those of us who are very aware of who and what he is reflexively give him at least some benefit of the doubt, because he couldn't possibly be that inarticulate and stupid, could he?

        So yeah, probably he meant "trade war." But then again, since he seems to love Hitler so much, maybe he was thinking of a shooting war. Who's to say? Given that this is politics and not beanbag, I'll choose to say that the Nazi-loving doofus really thinks that he stopped ally-for-centuries France from invading America. Because he's afraid of France.

  12. DarkBrandon

    All the stuff about "No one I know answers their phone to strange numbers," and "They're flooding the zone with Trump-leaning polls," is hopium.

    Remember the pro-Romney "unskewed polls" guy in 2012? That's how stupid you sound. Nobody knows what's going to happen. Anecdotes about yard signs and never having been polled are worth even less than polls now.

    Sure recent polling has heavily underestimated Democratic and pro-choice performance, but that doesn't mean they are doing so right now.

    We don't have enough information to say what's going to happen in 12 days, beyond Trump declaring the election rigged, which he will do even if he wins.

    1. jdubs

      But we know that there have been a large number of GOP sponsored polls coming in lately, many of which are being pulled into the various poll aggregation trackers.

      So call the response to this fact whatever you want, but it is an actual thing that is happening.

      The need for the smartguys to 'both sides' everything is a bit funny.

      1. Jasper_in_Boston

        But we know that there have been a large number of GOP sponsored polls coming in lately, many of which are being pulled into the various poll aggregation trackers...it is an actual thing that is happening.

        All of the big aggregators (Silver, 538, Guardian, Economist, etc) use screening methodologies to account for poll quality issues like partisan skew, house effects, methodology, etc. Per my reading, the supposed right wing slant probably at most confers a 0.5% bump to Trump. Maybe that's bullshit. Could be! But I doubt it: the commercial reputations of the aggregators (who, unlike the pollsters in question, are not right wing) are on the line, and in the past, the degree of polling inaccuracy we've seen has generally flowed from simple error (mostly wrong choices with respect to sampling methodology, weighting, etc).

        Kevin's single outlier poll the contrary, the aggregators now suggest Harris's lead has fallen to about 1.4 points (it was 3 points at the beginning of the month).

        According to Nate Silver, the average inaccuracy of the polling consensus has been about three points the last several elections. So, who knows, maybe Harris is actually leading by 4 or 5 points. But also, according to Silver, there's no way to know for sure in which direction the polls are erring (maybe it's Trump's vote that is being under-sampled, who knows?).

        But my intuition tells me that the pro-Trump direction of the movement in polling numbers isn't consistent with an underweighting of Kamala Harris's vote—the opposite is more likely. But that's admittedly a guess: perhaps whatever factors might cause an underweighting of Harris's support might also be causing bad info with respect to the direction of the changing numbers. Maybe! This is all above my pay grade. And perhaps the polls really are completely screwy this cycle. Or it could be there's yet one more, rollercoaster-like momentum shift ahead of us (toward Harris)—there are still eleven days to go!

        But we'd all better hope for a momentum shift or a big polling miss that reverberates to Harris's favor. Because if the numbers of the aggregators are accurate (again, Kevin's only citing a single poll—and a pretty Dem-skewed one at that), Trump looks like a pretty heavy favorite to win if the election were held today (Harris is almost certainly a heavy underdog in the Electoral College if she only manages a 1.4 point win in the popular vote).

        Sigh.

        1. jdubs

          Sure, we have no idea who will win and the aggregators have no idea who will be a quality pollster this year vs last year. How much should they weight the independant poll vs the Trump sponsored poll....who knows!? Its not clear how much impact the partisan polls have.

          DarkBrandon said that people are stupid for talking about something we know is true and has some effect on the polling averages. This is a dumb opinion, thats all.

  13. Josef

    Another brain fart from the Orange Turd....
    When asked if the United States could potentially end all federal taxation, Mr. Trump said the country could return to the economic policies in the late 19th century, when there was no federal income tax.
    “It had all tariffs — it didn’t have an income tax,” Mr. Trump said. “Now we have income taxes, and we have people that are dying. They’re paying tax, and they don’t have the money to pay the tax.”
    The guy is stupid personified.

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