John (12:14)
First up, we'll start with what the right is saying. The right feels confident in Trump's standing, suggesting his level of support isn't fully captured by the polls. Some consider the election a toss up, but say polling results like Selzer's make no sense. Others say the polls hold little value in predicting the outcome of the race. In the Washington Examiner, Elizabeth Stauffer asked, is the presidential race actually as close as current polls suggest? It's appropriate to describe the current presidential races neck and neck, right? If polls are the only indicator you're looking at, that might be a fair statement. However, there are other ways to gauge where the candidates might stand with the electorate, Stauffer said. Trump has momentum in this race, and it has come at the best time possible. He's riding high after a string of public relations wins. Trump's brief stint as a fry cook at a Pennsylvania McDonald's was a stroke of genius. His three hour interview with top podcast host Joe Rogan was viewed by tens of millions of voters. He made liberal heads explode with his tour de force at Madison Square Garden last Sunday. Conversely, Harris has stumbled repeatedly. When her campaign's media created momentum stalled in early October, she embarked upon a media blitz. Her performances range from lackluster to disastrous, Stauffer said. Further, the most important economic indicator of all the right track Wrong track poll favors a Trump victory. According to CNN senior data reporter Henry Entin, there isn't a single time in which 28% of the American public thinks the country is going on the wrong track in which the incumbent party actually won in red state, banshee said. We need to talk about that Selzer poll. I don't think Selzer's final offering in Iowa is anywhere close to reality, and there's empirical data to support that viewpoint. For example, the poll has Harris leading with seniors by 19 points. Trump won seniors there by 9 points in 2020. The idea that Trump has lost 28 points among seniors in a relatively red state just doesn't compute, banshee wrote. The overall composition of the electorate in Selzer's poll would be Democrat plus three. Again, this is a state that went Republican plus eight in 2020. Nothing else in the crosstabs makes any sense either. How did we end up here? Did Anne Selzer release this poll to Juice Harris, given her long history of being allied with figures like Hillary Clinton, Claire McCaskill and J.B. pritzker? I don't know, and I'm not going to go that far. It's possible she genuinely ended up with an outlier and had the guts to go ahead and release it anyway instead of massaging it like some other pollsters would have done, Bond, she said. With all that said, I have no idea who's going to win this election. In fact, with just a couple days left of voting, I'm more convinced than ever that this is a pure toss up race. What I'm sure of, though, is that this Seltzer poll is not close to what the real result will be in Iowa, and those using it to predict a Democratic landslide nationally are fooling themselves. In PJ Media, Matt Margolis wrote, maybe just forget the polls. As the election nears, the polls tell us that it's anyone's game, but seasoned observers and political instincts suggest otherwise. After a significant momentum surge for Donald Trump, the mainstream narrative is attempting to suggest that his lead has mysteriously evaporated, with Kamala Harris suddenly performing better in critical states. But for many who followed these races for years, the reality might not be as close as polls are letting on, Margolis said. Before polling became the election season industry. With an endless supply of polls to sift through, reporters once had to seize upon a candidate's standing by observing their rallies, organization and crowd energy. Perhaps the bigger picture is going to tell us a lot more about how this election is going to turn out. Are there polls blinding us to the bigger picture? Especially when the broader indicators of enthusiasm and voter discovery content weigh heavily against Kamala? Maybe, margolis wrote. At a time when polling is less reliable because pollsters are either trying to influence voters or are too scared to make a prediction. Perhaps it is time to just go old school. All right, that is it for what the right is saying. Which brings us to what the left is saying. The left still views the race as neck and neck despite recent polls in Harris favor. Some say the Seltzer poll is ominous for Trump. Others argue polls have lost their value and have become a political tool for campaigns. In the New York Times, Nate Cohn said the race is still a deadlock. Usually the final polls point toward a relatively clear favorite, even if that candidate doesn't go on to win. This will not be one of those elections, cohn wrote. While the overall poll result is largely unchanged since our previous wave of battleground polls, there were some notable shifts. Surprisingly, the longstanding gap between the Northern and Sunbelt battlegrounds narrowed considerably, with Ms. Harris faring better than before among young black and Hispanic voters, while Mr. Trump gained among white voters. Without a degree, the overall effect of these swings is somewhat contradictory. On average, Ms. Harris fared modestly better than our last round of surveys of the same states, but her gains were concentrated in states where she was previously struggling. Meanwhile, the so called blue wall Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania does not look quite as formidable of an obstacle to Mr. Trump as it once did. As a result, Ms. Harris position in the Electoral College isn't necessarily improved. In Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall assessed the Selzer poll. I think the Selzer worship is a bit over the top, but she has a very good record. What makes this pretty hard to make sense of is that if Harris is really positioned to win Iowa or even come close, that would suggest we've pretty dramatically underestimated Harris electoral power. Like really underestimated her electoral power. As you know, I've long believed there's a good chance that pollsters are doing just that, but this would be at a more dramatic level, marshall wrote. Even for a pollster with a great record, it's just one poll. Polls can be off. It's also the case that Iowa is a state with a lot of white college educated voters. Democrats do pretty well with those voters right now. It's also not that long since it was a swing state. Probably the best way to interpret this is to see it as a bit bad for Trump in directional terms and not get too hung up on the specific numbers. But even that may not really add up since since the actual result is so hard to believe that I'm not sure it makes sense to pick and choose accepting that it must be good news for Harris in directional terms, while dismissing the actual results as just not credible one way or another. It's an ominous sign for Trump. How ominous. How important? I really don't know, but it's not good for him. In the nation, Chris Lehman suggested no more polls for all the election season lamentations over AI mischief, deepfakes and dis and misinformation. There's a central source of toxic data derangement hiding in plain sight the erratically useful, wildly misleading and ideologically disfigured polling industry, lehman said. The way that hotly touted polling findings distort and disfigure our basic understanding of what's going on are teeth gnashingly familiar by now. Just over the past month we've had news that the Rosmussen group, the long standing right leaning polling operation, has been sharing advanced findings with the Trump campaign. In our own age of counter majoritarian blinkered negative polarization, polling increasingly functions to reinforce the narrative campaigns put forward about surging popular support and finally crafted appeals to undecided swing state voters. As the Rasmussen episode shows, some pollsters even appear to be distorting their own research, lehman wrote. So here's a modest proposal. Let's block poll findings out of the final stage of our presidential elections. In the hectic last lunge toward election day, the defects of polling become greatly magnified as voters are prone to use the alleged shifts in the mass electorates mood as rationales for casting ballots in a fog of empirically dubious pseudo pragmatism. In the hectic last lunge toward election day, the defects of polling become greatly magnified as voters are prone to use the alleged shifts in the mass electorate's mood as rationales for casting ballots in a fog of empirically dubious pseudo pragmatism, or else to refrain from voting at all. All right, that is it for what the left and the right are saying. Which brings us to my take the Tangle team is all assembled in Philadelphia for election week, and when the Iowa poll dropped, it immediately caused a ruckus. My first thought was can I take my prediction back? I'm kidding. Mostly you can interpret Seltzer's polls in a few ways, but before I break those ways down, I want to counter a bit of nonsense that I'm seeing about it online. A few prominent talking heads have suggested the poll is a psyop or gaslighting or some other attempt to suppress the Republican vote. That read strikes me as very, very silly. For starters, Selzer isn't going to torture sterling reputation in an attempt to play politics. She's been doing this a long time and is widely respected across the political spectrum. Let's not forget Trump was himself complimenting the quality of Selzer's polls just last year when they showed him with a big lead in Iowa. Second, I don't know a single Trump voter anywhere in the United States who would decide not to vote because of one poll in Iowa showing Harris winning. It makes zero sense as some kind of suppression tactic or Democratic plot. That being said, it's worth pausing here to make the case that we should take SELZER Seriously. In 2020, a lot of people thought Biden was going to blow Trump out with some polls showing the candidates tied in Iowa. Then Selzer released a poll showing Trump up by seven in the Hawkeye State, which gave the impression the national race would be much tighter. Biden ended up winning by a whisker across the swing states, largely vindicating her here's what Seltzer's recent poll record looks like. In 2022, her poll found Republicans plus 12 in the Senate. Republicans ended up plus 12 in the Senate. In 2020, she found Republicans plus 7 for president. In Iowa, they ended up plus 8 in Iowa. In the 2020 Senate race, she found Republicans plus 4 in Iowa, they ended up plus 7 in Iowa. In 2018, she found Democrats plus 2. In Iowa, they ended up Republican plus 3. In 2016, for president, she found Republicans plus 7. They ended up plus 9. In 2014, she found Republicans plus 7. In the Senate, they ended up plus 8. In 2012, she found Democrats plus 5 for president and they ended up plus 6. That's about as good as any pollster gets. Does she miss? Yes, she does. Would I bet against her? No, I would not. The most interesting aspect of this poll is that it's out there at all. Sometimes when pollsters get an outlier like this, they might spike the poll. Seltzer hasn't. She clearly feels some level of confidence in her results, and she certainly understands that people are going to remember it and judge her accordingly. So here are those different ways of interpreting this poll that I mentioned at the start. Number one, Seltzer is, as she has in the past, outperforming her peers. If this poll is close to accurate, Harris will win an electoral blowout and likely take all the battlegrounds, with the possible exceptions of Arizona and Georgia. Remember, Iowa is important because it has a lot of white and white working class voters, which makes it a good barometer for other states like Wisconsin and Michigan, with some signals about the others thrown in too. Number two, Seltzer is off, but directionally correct. Maybe Trump will win Iowa by four or five points instead of eight or nine and Seltzer is capturing some late break toward Harris. Even in that situation, the blue wall is almost certainly a lock, securing Harris Road to the White House. Number three, the poll is a complete outlier. Sean Tran, the expert who runs Real Clear Politics, said about one in 20 polls will be flat out wrong, just legitimate outliers. Perhaps a well respected pollster just happened to drop an outlier poll at an incredible time. Or number four, maybe, just maybe, the poll is both right and Trump could still be in a good position to win the swing states. I don't find this likely, but it is possible. Iowa is not being treated like a swing state this year, but maybe, given that neither candidate is spending much time there and the state isn't being blanketed in ads, it's just moving in a different way than the Midwest swing states, that outcome would obviously be something pollsters end up analyzing for years, but it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility to me. If Selcer is capturing some genuine break with the polling average, it obviously begs the question what happened? One answer is that Republicans in Iowa passed a statewide six week abortion ban despite it being a relatively pro choice state. Another is what the New York Times poll also picked up on, which is late breaking independence going toward Harris. We also have a lot of data that Harris is outperforming Trump among women and voters older than 65, offsetting any potential erosion in black or Latino support. That too is consistent with the crosstabs in Selzer's poll. Or perhaps it is what Nate Cohn, the chief pollster at the New York Times, said this week that pollsters have been so concerned about underestimating Trump again that a lot of them have been spiking or underweighting polls that look really good for Democrats. We have some statistical evidence for that too. Nate Solver recently explained how it is a statistical improbability that so many polls are showing a coin flip race which is evidence of hurting. Nate Solver recently explained how it is a statistical improbability that so many polls are showing a coin flip race which is evidence of hurting pollsters, all publishing neck and neck races to avoid being wrong. Or maybe it's the exact opposite. Cohn wrote that some evidence indicates Trump's support could once again be undercounted. Cohn said this about the non response rate in the New York Times final poll. Quote across these final polls, white Democrats were 16% likelier to respond than white Republicans. That's a larger disparity than our earlier polls this year, and it's not much better than our final polls in 2020. Even with the pandemic over it raises the possibility that polls could underestimate Mr. Trump yet again. The truth is, once again that all the early voting polls and late shifts can only tell us so much. Based on information I had two weeks ago, I predicted that Trump would win the election but lose Pennsylvania. For me, predictions are a good way to test my hypotheses. And if I'm being totally honest, which I always promise to be, I think if I were making my prediction today with the benefit of the information we've gotten in the last two weeks, I'd probably pick Harris. But I'm also not feeling so moved to abandon my initial call. I still think Trump just has more paths to the presidency electorally, and so I'm hanging tight for the final 48 hours. My expectation is a very tight race in all the battlegrounds, but one that could easily end up in an Electoral College blowout if there is a polling error in one direction. We'll see in the end, as is true in every presidential election, the only thing that matters is the actual vote. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. We'll be right back after this quick break.
