Month: November 2024

Shocking news from Iowa, more sobering numbers from the Times, and a map that favors Harris

The map if the Times’ poll is right*

A huge and encouraging outlier for Kamala Harris on Saturday night. Some more sobering numbers today.

First, the encouraging news. As you may already know, the new Iowa Poll from Ann Selzer, which gets high marks from FiveThirtyEight, shows Harris with a three-point lead over Donald Trump. It’s hard to know what to make of this. But Iowa has gone deep red in recent elections, and virtually every other survey has put Trump well in the lead — including earlier samples taken by the same poll.

The margin, 47% for Harris and 44% for Trump, is being driven by voters over 65, especially women, who say they are supporting Harris by 63% to 28%. But Harris also has a slight edge among older men, 47% to 45%.

What does this mean? I’m not a polling expert. I can tell you that the latest Emerson Poll, which also gets very high marks, continues to show Trump with a nine-point lead in Iowa. On the other hand, a new Miami University poll shows Trump with just a three-point lead in deep-red Ohio, and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown with a two-point lead over his Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno. I should add that FiveThirtyEight does not rate this poll.

If the Iowa and Ohio results are picking up something real, then Harris may be headed not just for a victory, but for one larger than anyone expects. My own totally unscientific, vibe-based sense of the race is that there are three possible outcomes: (1) a narrow Trump win; (2) a narrow Harris win; (3) a surprisingly substantial Harris win. I’m going for somewhere between (2) and (3). Needless to say, Harris will win the popular vote with ease.

Finally, The New York Times this morning came out with its last poll before Election Day, and it is simultaneously worrying for Harris yet showing some unexpected opportunities. The Times-Siena poll sits atop the FiveThirtyEight rankings, so we can’t ignore it — although, as Josh Marshall has observed, it also relies on a different understanding of the electorate from what most other pollsters are using, and that understanding may be right or wrong.

*Based on the barest of margins in the Times poll (something you really can’t do given that all these numbers are well within the margin of error), Harris would lose the Blue Wall state of Michigan and win Pennsylvania. Wisconsin seems a little safer. But she also has small leads in North Carolina and Georgia.

One other possible good sign for Harris: the Times-Siena poll goes all the way back to Oct. 24 (through Nov. 2), and Harris seems to have built momentum in recent days. In any case, I played around with the map, above, and awarded Harris every state in which the Times poll has her ahead, even by less than 1% (again: don’t try this at home) It shows Harris with 293 electoral votes, 21 more than the 270 needed. I also flipped Pennsylvania to Trump, and Harris would still win, with 274 electoral votes.

Corrections: My map is an accurate reflection of the Times-Siena poll, but an earlier version of this post said that Harris was ahead in Arizona. She’s not. I’ve also corrected the number of Electoral College votes needed to win.

With Election Day upon us, some new numbers suggest that Harris has a slight advantage

Cherry-picking the data while trying to maintain my sanity: With Election Day looming, I want to share four sets of numbers suggesting that Kamala Harris really will dispatch the Orange Menace once and for all.

First, The Economist’s election model, which has showed Donald Trump with slight edge in recent days, has flipped again, giving Harris a 52% chance of winning and Trump 48%.

The model is similar to what FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver do: it’s based on some high-level math that takes into account polls, poll quality and other measures and then runs multiple computerized simulations. You may recall that similar models gave Hillary Clinton a 70% to 95% chance of winning in 2016, so obviously this needs to be taken with several truckloads of salt. Still, it’s better to be at 52% than 48%.

Second, the latest Marist Poll, which FiveThirtyEight judges to be of high quality, gives Harris a lead of between 2% and 3% in the all-important Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Again, that’s not much, and it’s well within the margin of error. But it’s better to be ahead than behind.

Third, The Washington Post’s polling average —that is, an actual average of polls rather than a FiveThirtyEight-style simulation — also has Harris slightly ahead in Wisconsin and Michigan (by 2%) and in Pennsylvania (by less than 1%). The Post’s averages have consistently tilted more toward Harris than The New York Times’, but there’s no reason to think that the Times is doing a better job with these than the Post.

Finally, the Gallup Poll shows a 10-point enthusiasm gap favoring Harris, with 77% of Democrats and voters who lean Democrat saying they are “more enthusiastic than usual” about voting and 67% of Republicans and Republican leaners saying the same. As with all these numbers, it’s impossible to say exactly how that’s going to play out, but it’s better to be at the higher rather than the lower number.

Taking advantage of Jeff Bezos’ folly, publications tout Harris endorsements to sign up new readers

What is proving to be a debacle for The Washington Post is simultaneously turning into a boon for other news outlets. A week after Post owner Jeff Bezos killed an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, a number of other publications that endorsed Harris say that subscriptions are on the rise.

The Post lost 250,000 of its 2.5 million digital and print subscribers after the paper announced that it would no longer endorse candidates for political office. Bezos compounded his problems with an op-ed in which he defended the decision and whined about how hard it is to be a billionaire newspaper owner.

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Among the publications taking advantage was The Philadelphia Inquirer, which fortuitously published its endorsement of Harris last Friday, the same day that word of the Post’s non-endorsement was getting around. The Inquirer’s endorsement quickly made the rounds on social media — and, according to Sara Guaglione of Digiday, the paper immediately experienced a bump. She wrote:

After publishing its endorsement of Harris on Oct. 25, The Philadelphia Inquirer gained over 4,200 new digital subscribers, “about three times a typical week for us and our biggest week of new starts ever,” Inquirer publisher and CEO Lisa Hughes said in an emailed statement. The Inquirer also saw “a bump” in individual donations to its journalism fund with The Lenfest Institute, she added. Donations to The Inquirer’s High-Impact Journalism Fund are up about 15% since the endorsement, according to a company spokesperson, without providing exact figures.

The Seattle Times published its endorsement of Harris this past Tuesday, a day when it could take full advantage of the outrage that had broken out over Bezos’ action and by a similar action at the Los Angeles Times ordered by billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Under the headline “Hell, yes! The Seattle Times edit board endorses Kamala Harris for president,” the paper’s publisher, Frank Blethen, and Kate Riley, the editorial-page editor, devote nearly as much space to disparaging the Post and the LA Times as they do to touting Harris’ credentials. (The Blethen family owns the Seattle Times.) Blethen writes:

We take our journalism and community service very seriously. We have been preparing our fifth generation for Times leadership when I step down at the end of 2025. And members of the sixth interned in our newsroom this summer.

So it is with consternation that I and editorial page editor Kate Riley learned that the publishers of two of America’s most venerable newspapers on both coasts decided not to weigh in at all, even though their editorial boards were preparing Harris endorsements.

In contrast to the Philadelphia and Seattle papers, The Boston Globe endorsed Harris back on Oct. 18, too early to take much advantage — but it’s trying nevertheless.

“Jim Dao, our editorial page editor, has been actively sharing our position on endorsements this week,” said Globe director of communications Carla Kath by email. “We are pleased with our growth in subscribers over the past few days with new subscribers indicating that they subscribed because we maintained our tradition of endorsements.” In a follow-up, though, she added, “We are not sharing numbers at this time.”

Digiday’s Guaglione reported that The Guardian has also benefited from the Post’s folly. The Guardian endorsed Harris on Oct. 23; after Bezos’ cancellation became public, Guardian US editor Betsy Reed sent an email to readers asking for donations. Guaglione wrote:

By Oct. 28, U.S. readers had pledged roughly $1.8 million to the Guardian, according to a company spokesperson. The Guardian brought in $485,000 in reader donations that Friday, a U.S. daily fundraising record. Saturday brought in even more — $619,000 in reader donations.

I’m among The Guardian’s new donors. I actually canceled the Post months ago after my employer, Northeastern University, began offering free digital subscriptions to faculty and students. Otherwise I would not have canceled the Post despite my anger at Bezos — but I did figure that the moment was right to show support for another news organization. (I was also a weekly media columnist for The Guardian from 2007 to ’11.)

During the 2016 presidential campaign and throughout the Trump presidency, news organizations benefited from an increase in subscriptions, donations and audience. Although a second Trump presidency would be far too high a price for our democracy to pay, we may be seeing the early stages of that happening once again if the worst comes to pass.

Clarification: The Seattle Times endorsed Harris on Sept. 1; that editorial is behind a paywall. The “Hell, yes!” endorsement is a follow-up, and is free.