I freely confess to paying more attention to polls than I should. Multiple times a day I check in with FiveThirtyEight, still going strong under the auspices of ABC News despite founder Nate Silver’s departure, to see what the odds are that Kamala Harris will prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House. (I’m writing this Thursday evening, and the site gives Harris a 61% chance of winning and Trump 39%. Oh, no! Harris was at 64% earlier in the day!)
Silver himself is still at it, and though I don’t pay the subscription fee I’d need to see what his odds are, his analysis of the polls shows that Harris has a 2.7% lead nationally and — more important — small leads in the crucial swing states of Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as well as a basket of bluer swing states.
What I want to call your attention to here, though, is a fascinating analysis in The Washington Post showing that Harris does much better when voters are asked not who they’re voting for but who they think is going to win. Aaron Blake writes (free link) that academic studies show such a finding can be a good predictor of who is going to win — maybe even better than the direct-question approach:
[S]ome research suggests that this is actually a good measure of where things might end up — possibly even a better measure than merely asking people whom they intend to vote for.
The reason is that it involves people accounting for the preferences of the people around them — turning them into “mini-anthropologists,” in the words of longtime Gallup editor in chief Frank Newport — and possibly even hinting at their own hidden or subconscious preferences.
How pronounced is the effect? The who-do-you-think-will-win question has Harris prevailing by double digits in some recent polls, and similar questions in previous races helped predict President Barack Obama’s re-election victory over Mitt Romney in 2012, Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden’s narrower-than-expected defeat of Trump in 2020.
None of this matters, of course. But for those of us looking for a sign — any sign — that Trump’s existential threat to the country will finally be brought to an end, it’s worth pondering, and savoring.
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“Who do you think will win” is pretty tricky, though. I think Harris will win the popular vote. But the popular vote doesn’t actually determine who becomes president, so we’re stuck yet again with possibly fewer than 50,000 voters determining the next president, even if Harris wins by 7 million or more actual votes.
The older I get, the more I hate this system. No other country in the world has adopted anything like an electoral college, for good reason. I don’t think I would find it defensible if it were my party winning, either, because it’s just wrong when so few votes actually count*. I wish our Founders had been inclined to play strategy games before committing us to 47+ of these elections before this fundamental problem may ever be fixed.
* I guess I should move back to Ohio, where my vote actually would matter.
I’m watching approval and disapproval numbers, by state and nationally. These numbers suggest Harris could do much better than expected from other measures. Trump’s unfavorable pretty much defines that he has a ceiling that is below 50%.
There’s a huge enthusiasm gap that favors Harris, and that I’m hoping is something that polling just can’t capture.