I’m more in the mood for sustained panic than sober analysis, but I can’t get too far off brand, can I? And that’s why I welcome the latest from Nate Cohn. In my thinking, Donald Trump should be about as popular as setting yourself on fire, and any evidence that he’s more popular than that is a good reason to lose all faith in humanity. So, I’ll take comfort in any evidence I can find that people hate his guts.
It’s still early in the primary season, but a whiff of a possible polling error is already in the air. That’s because Donald J. Trump has underperformed the polls in each of the first three contests.
In Iowa, the final FiveThirtyEight polling average showed Mr. Trump leading Nikki Haley by 34 points with a 53 percent share. He ultimately beat her by 32 points with 51 percent. (Ron DeSantis took second.)
In New Hampshire, he led by 18 points with 54 percent. In the end, he won by 11 points with 54 percent.
In South Carolina, Mr. Trump led by 28 points with 62 percent. He ultimately won by 20 points with 60 percent.
As Cohn notes, these are small polling discrepancies but they all lean in one direction. What might explain it?
First up there is the idea that undecided voters don’t and won’t ultimately choose Trump. If they could put up with Trump, they’d have already have chosen him. The second one is that the pollsters are using shitty turnout models that, in particular, don’t anticipate Democrats turning out to vote in Republican primaries. That was easy for Democrats to do in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and tempting since there is no competitive or meaningful contest on the Democratic side. A third explanation is that pro-Trump voters have flipped from their prior habit and are now more likely to talk to pollsters than anti-Trump voters.
But the last explanation is the most satisfying: “Anti-Trump voters are highly motivated to turn out this cycle.” What we really mean here is that they are disproportionately motivated to turn out. Because if that is the case then Trump will have a very hard time consolidating the Republican primary vote. He’s losing 4 in 10 Republican votes now, and that’s not terribly worrisome for him on its own. It’s also not too problematic that many Nikki Haley voters say they won’t support Trump in November. Most of them are either lying and simply don’t know themselves as well as they think they do. But if we’re talking about very highly motivated anti-Trump sentiment, then that could have the needed lasting power.
I hope this is the case, and also that undecided voters in this cycle are going to break heavily against the orange shitgibbbon.
Still, polls that are far closer and the actual Biden win might give me a heart attack before Election Night.
“But if we’re talking about very highly motivated anti-Trump sentiment, then that could have the needed lasting power.”
Adding: it doesn’t take a lot of “very highly motivated anti-Trump sentiment” among GOP voters to swing the election in a big way. For example, Fox News’ John Roberts pointed out that an exit poll showed SC Haley voters who said they wouldn’t vote for Trump in November amounted to 24% of the GOP primary electorate.
Nobody seriously expects nearly 1/4 of Republicans to vote for Biden. That would mean Trump gets only 36% of the November vote. Those are Alf Landon in ’36/George McGovern in ’72 blowout numbers.
But if, say, 1 out of 20 Republican voters abandon Trump this fall, that cuts Trump down to 44%. (Stevenson in ’52/Wilkie in ’40 numbers.)
“Donald Trump should be about as popular as setting yourself on fire,”
Here’s a reminder of the Keyes Constant, aka the Crazyfication Factor, which John Rogers defined as 27% of the electorate, the percentage Alan Keyes got running against Barack Obama in 2004. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Crazification_factor
For presidential elections it may be higher: Goldwater got 39% in ’64; Hoover got 40% in ’28; Landon got 37% in ’36.
Trump is going to get *at least* 40% of the popular vote in November. In some parts of the country he’ll get 70-80% of the vote.This campaign is about 1) keeping him in the low 40s, and 2) keeping 3rd party candidates collectively in the low single digits.