The emotionally unsatisfactory 2024 election was particularly unsettling for loyal Democrats this past fall and winter as former President Trump outperformed President Biden in the polls, with the polling average showing Trump ahead by as many as three points in late January and early February 2024 (45-42), according to The Economist’s Trump Biden polling tracker. Don’t worry. I’m not naïve enough to think that polls this winter nearly a year from the election are predictive, but one ignores the information in them at one’s peril.
More recently, President Biden has recovered in one– on– one matchups with Trump into a polling average tie ( See The Economist, supra). An optimistic pundit named Simon Rosenthal, publisher of the Hopium Chronicles , has been citing many polls with Biden leading Trump, and took hope from a New York Times poll the other day that showed Biden recovering from being five points down in February to only one point down in April. Rosenberg cited analysis from the Times’s own pundit, Nate Cohn, in “The Tilt,” stating that Biden was recovering traditional Democratic strength among Blacks and Hispanics. With Trump’s hush money trial underway and the Democrats hammering away about Donald Trump being the cause of abortion bans across the country, President Biden may strengthen further. A tie is a precarious place to be, however, when President Biden won by 4 ½ points in 2020 ( with smaller margins in the swing states ), and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by two points and lost in the Electoral College.
BACK TO THE FUTURE?
Bringing up 2016 is depressing, but I can’t help wondering if 2024 is going to be closer to 2016 than 2020. Remember when you thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the 2016 election ? The polls showed her too far ahead to lose, right? (More on polls later). Clinton won the popular vote by two points ( 48-46), but lost by a sum of 77,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, with third-party candidates seemingly hurting Clinton more than Trump. I can see Biden winning the popular vote but Kennedy, Cornel West, and Jill Stein draining enough votes from him to throw the election to Trump. That’s not good, but fortunately, right now, it is not possible to predict the outcome of this election: it’s name is Precarious.
JIM: WHY DO YOU PAY ATTENTION TO THE POLLS? THEY ARE WRONG SO OFTEN!
I spent 32 years in the New York State Assembly, running for office and helping friends and colleagues in their own elections. I used polling in my own hotly contested, expensive primary in 1992 between myself and another incumbent. Our internal polling was uncannily accurate. We hired a professional pollster and did a poll of likely primary voters ( one always has to be very careful about who you think is going to vote) about five to six weeks before the election. I was in the lead 33%-29%, with the remainder undecided. The primary was occurring in a newly reapportioned district where each candidate was poorly known in about half the district and well known in the other half. The undecideds broke in about the same proportion in the actual election as the initial result of the poll had shown. I won 53%-47%.
In 2001 I was helping two candidates, one for Brooklyn Borough President and one for City Council, assisting in the strategic guidance of the campaigns. The internal polling for both campaigns was uncannily accurate. Our Borough Presidency polling showed the race was very close but we had a good chance to win; in fact, we won 38-35-27 in a three way race. In the City Council race our daily tracking showed our candidate wasn’t going to win, another candidate was too strong, and sure enough we didn’t make it. That City Council poll was, once again, extremely accurate.
Polling took a terrible public relations nosedive following Hilary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, when it seemed she was so far ahead in the polls and lost. But many people who assumed Clinton was going to win may not realize that Trump had closed the polling gap with Clinton in the final days.
A review of the final six weeks of polls in the Clinton Trump campaign from Real Clear Politics are painfully instructive. In the first three weeks of October 2016 Clinton was leading by an average of six points; by the second to last week, she was leading by four points. By the last week before the election, her lead was an average of 3.2 points, Here are the last ten polls:
The polls in the Clinton Trump 2016 race were wrong by one percentage point; she won the popular vote by two points and led by three points in the polls, and lost.
BACK TO 2024
One mistake Biden will not make now is to take Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan for granted. In fact, it is a near certainty he cannot win except by winning all three to get to 270 electoral votes. Pennsylvania has 19 electoral college votes and Georgia has sixteen. If he loses Pennsylvania he has to win Georgia and Nevada, which has six electoral college votes. Like in 2016, however, the third party candidates are wild cards. The current polling with third parties included shows Biden trailing by 0.9 points in Real Clear Politics in the last ten polls . 538.com has dropped the Rasmussen firm from inclusion in its poll tracking, although RCP has not. If Rasmussen were excluded from RCP Biden would trail by 0.2 points, not 0.9 points. Like the two-way polling, the multiple candidate race is also a dead heat.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is the Joker in the deck. He has polled at more than ten points in six of the ten polls cited in RCP. Although he takes some votes from Trump, he takes more from Biden ( some very recent polls show Kennedy taking more from Trump). West and Stein are left-wing candidates who take from Biden. While third party candidates tend to fade as campaigns progress as voters realize they will throw their votes away if they vote third party, all three remain wild card threats to Biden.
The election will remain precarious to the end, but Biden does have some things on his side. His lead in fund–raising may continue, and Trump might beconvicted of a felony in New York, although a trial before the election in the Jan.6 case seems only a remote possibility. The disengaged voters will finally be paying attention by the conventions, and much of the Democratic base will come home. North Carolina may come into play, thanks to the Republican’s awful candidate for Governor, Mark Robinson. On the other side is war in the Middle East and an explosion in oil prices.
For New Yorkers, it will be another Presidential election to help out in the swing states or the competitive House elections right here. For following the election, I recommend Simon Rosenberg in the Hopium Chronicles, or Nate Cohn in “The Tilt.”
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You cannot ignore the effect that the last minute comment by James Comey had. Comey had no business, other than ego, to interfere. As you point out it was a very close election and Comey’s remarks may or may not have made the difference.