Blog

Another week gone already, and there are a few points to touch on today. We’re now a few days out from the first debate between Trump and Harris. The first and potentially most important time we will see these two Presidential candidates face-to-face live and in person. These are always important events, and this one even more so than usual.  

Trump is a brand so complete as to be the envy of marketing experts everywhere. This sets expectations for Trump and allows him an opportunity to demonstrate the pugnaciousness and honed mockery his supporters adore. It also means he has some latitude if he has a mediocre night – barring a total disaster, his brand will carry him through. 

Harris has a steeper hill to climb. She has a much softer and less well-defined image with the public, and her path to victory depends on her ability to solidify that definition. She needs to look like she measures up to Trump as an adversary. If she seems overmatched or nervous it will complicate her ability to lock in the audiences who have been leaning toward her since she was named the nominee. 

The debate takes place as Harris’ lead in a national polling aggregation has slid from +3.7 to +3.1 . That is probably closer to a +2 among likely voters. At the moment, it is probably fair to say that Harris has a narrow lead in the so-called “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and crucial Pennsylvania with the other battlegrounds being too close to call. With the largest lead in any of these battlegrounds being ~3% in Wisconsin, this is another way to say that all 7 battlegrounds are inside the margin of error in polling and could move in any direction with a few 10s of thousands of votes.  

We’re going to take a look at Absentee and Mail-in voting requests next week, as that process is now underway. 

August fundraising numbers are in for the Presidential campaigns, and the Harris team generated a prodigious $361 million last month. Always, bear in mind that campaign fundraising reports show the gross, not the net. Small-dollar fundraising is often at or near break-even, showing cash flow but little net income. So, until we see the actual report, let’s take the topline number with a grain of salt. That cautionary note given; this kind of money likely means that resources are available for the Harris campaign to chase any voters they need to in key states. For a clear example of this AdImpact shows a $168 million advantage in ad reservations in the battleground states:  

Campaign Effectively, On A Budget:

Starting at $2,500 for a Congressional District, $1,000 for a State Legislative District or County Seat, and $500 for a School Board District, these Game Plans will make your campaign smarter and more effective.

Target Beyond Voter Registration:

The parties have undergone fundamental shifts in the past decade, but voters rarely change their registration – they just vote differently. These models capture the demographic shifts in the electorate better than simply relying on what is available on the voter file.

Past Voter History Will Only Get You So Far: 

These models identify who is likely to turnout this November based on past voter history plus consumer data to find those voters who might be more (or less) motivated to turnout this year.

Use Key Issues To Motivate And Persuade:

Each Voter Targeting plan comes with an issue model overlay relevant to your campaign, and there are additional add-on options available for purchase.

A quick note this week, with everyone (hopefully) taking their last mental break before Election Day. 

While polling often overrepresents a third-party candidates’ support, RFK Jr’s withdrawal from the race and endorsement of Donald Trump will have some reverberations. First and foremost, it is worth bearing in mind how few votes might be needed to swing the result in some of the battleground states. Arizona and Georgia were decided by less than 12,000 votes in 2020, and Wisconsin has been decided by less than 23,000 in each of the last two presidential elections. It might not take much to have a big impact. 

RFK Jr already saw a drop off in the polls after Biden exited the race. He was the landing spot for many of the “double haters” for Trump and Biden, with the Washington Post-Schar poll finding that 53% of double haters would vote for Kennedy back in June.  

Kennedy’s supporters trended both younger and less likely to vote. They also reported themselves much less strongly attached to Kennedy than other candidate’s voters, with 18% saying they back Kennedy strongly compared to 64% for Trump and 62% for Harris. The numbers for “extremely motivated to vote” were 23% for Kennedy supporters, as opposed to 72% for Trump supporters and 70% for Harris supporters. In short, the small Kennedy percentages in battleground states probably overstate his actual impact on the popular vote – but the margins are so small that it may matter. 

As an added complication, it looks like RFK will not be able to remove himself from the ballot in Wisconsin and Michigan, and at least some North Carolina counties have already sent ballots to print with RFK on them. Will he draw many votes given his withdrawal and endorsement of Trump? Probably not, but it is an additional marginal effect the Trump campaign would rather not have to deal with. 

While RFK’s withdrawal will have some marginal impacts, one of the fundamentals of this election is now Kamala Harris’ favorability. Whether or not Harris sees much of a “bump” in her ballot position post-convention, she has certainly seen an improved image among the electorate since July. In their final poll before Harris became the Democrat’s (presumptive) nominee, Quinnipiac had her image at a net –14 favorable to unfavorable (37% to 51%), with 11% saying they had not heard enough about her to have an opinion. This week, they released a survey showing her with an even image: 47% favorable, 47% unfavorable with only 5% not having heard much about her.  

Harris has been a deeply unpopular Vice President, so where did that shift come from? Harris had the biggest improvement among voters 18-34 who went from only 20% favorable to 52% favorable. Her image also significantly improved among Independents (+16 favorable), Democrats (+15), and women (+13). Harris’ favorable numbers improved across racial lines roughly equally (+10 with white voters, +8 with Black voters, and +11 with Hispanics). But clearly, younger voters are connecting with a candidate much nearer to their age than Biden. 

One interesting effect is that rural crosstabs (and thanks to Split Ticket for compiling this material) on public polls since August 23 shows a D +12 shift relative to 2020 vote. Is that real or a sampling artifact? We can’t be sure yet, but it might be impactful in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, among others, if it holds. We’ll be digging into this one next week! 

Finally, we’d like to point everyone to a nice little resource on public polling by our compatriots over at Pew (Thanks for Scott and Courtney for doing this!). Note in particular the proliferation in contact methods to generate interviews, and the error types not accounted for in the ‘margin of error’ –  which only refers to sampling error. All research is an imperfect representation of the real world, so it is always helpful to be alert to the strengths and weaknesses of the tools you’re using. Cross-reference and triangulate whenever possible to gain the most wholistic view you can! This is a good resource to share with your friends and colleagues who may not be as familiar with the polling world.  

The Democrats have finished their convention, and the Harris/Walz ticket is officially official. The Democrats are undoubtably happy with the attendance, energy, and attention from the convention. Some of the show timing was a little odd – it isn’t often that both the sitting President of the United States and the party’s current candidate both take the stage after primetime on the east coast – but the response from the party faithful seems to have been very positive. Politico has a good topline here for the overall swing since Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

With 74 days left we are now in the final sprint. Some words of caution from the Democratic side on getting too optimistic based on some of the public polling can be seen here.

Moving to the battle for control in the U.S. Senate, let’s start in Arizona. The latest New York Times/Sienna has Harris up 4 here now (right around the MoE). In a state where just over 20% of the electorate is Hispanic Harris’ 6% improvement over Biden in the crosstab is important here, as are her movements with Independents and women (particularly non-college educated women). This is a change from a minimal Trump advantage in previous weeks, so we’ll see if it is sustained. On the Senate side it is safe to say that Democrat Ruben Gallego enjoys and advantage. Last week had the race Gallego +2%, the New York Times/Sienna had it at Gallego +9%. (Much of that difference is likely attributable to a difference in the Likely Voter universe. If there is interest, we can look at how registered voter vs likely voter surveys are constructed, and the tools used in establishing a likely voter universe.)

As mentioned last week, Pennsylvania is razor-close at the Presidential level. (With Kennedy a factor vs. a head-to-head race). In the Senate race, however, every public poll in August has Casey ahead. We don’t have anything new to add this week. When you dig in the breaks for independents, college+ men, and less than college women all favor the Democratic candidate over the generic party expectation.

In Montana we have seen a surprising amount of money spent or reserved on media buys – closing in on $60 million on each side, according to our friends at National Media. Those are impressive resources when you are trying to reach a total population of only ~750,000 voters. The last two polls released here have Tester +5 and Sheehy +6% – and were in field at the same time. Make of that what you will, though this may be a response rate phenomenon so let’s keep an eye out.

It’s worth taking a quick look at some Presidential battlegrounds with no Senate races this year in Georgia and North Carolina. In Georgia we find the Presidential race close, with results across all released polls showing anything from a tie to variety of small Trump leads. Even those leads of a few points are much less than Trump’s comfortable leads against Biden. Harris’ 10%+ movement with Black voters looks to be at the root of this change.

In North Carolina we have seen results ranging from a Trump +3% to Harris +4% in the past 10 days. This is a state the Democrats haven’t won in the Presidential race since 2008 and were not expecting to win this year either. If they manage to do so it would enormously complicate the electoral college math for the Trump campaign, but would be a major shift to sustain through election day.  Also to note, the underperforming Republican Gubernatorial campaign of Mark Robinson is consistently failing to break 40% in statewide LV polls. This might prove a drag for Trump at the Presidential level.

Also worth a little thought are the results of the Washington primary earlier this month. Washington uses a ‘jungle primary’, in which the top two vote-getters advance to the November ballot regardless of party affiliation. The combination of this structure and the August timing has made Washington something of a bellwether for recent cycles – much to the excitement of Democrats following their D +16% popular vote performance in the popular vote this time. So, what happened?

Using an individual voter history-based approach, increases in turnout seem to be driven by new movers. In particular, it looks like postgraduate educated new movers in high tech sectors. As a result, this year’s primary probably skews more left than previous years, so we should be cautious about the wider applicability of the result. We also see turnout dropped in more rural and suburban areas, particularly when not bolstered by the Seattle media market.

No earth-shattering news on the campaign trail this week, just ordinarily frantic campaign action. As a result, the public polling has had a chance to catch up. We are going to take advantage of that to walk through the ‘state of the race’ this week, both nationally and in some of the battleground states. This is an opportunity to look at some of the demographics we flagged for you all last month and see if the shape of the race is changing.

National Overview

Looking at the race nationally, YouGov has Harris up 2 points. Monmouth shows her leading by 5 points, rooted in a 39-point increase in their tracked ‘voter enthusiasm about the race’ question among Democrats. The Monmouth poll fielded August 8-12, which supports the thesis that the surge in Democratic enthusiasm about the election since Biden stepped down as the candidate is a lasting effect.

Battleground States Focus

Bearing that in mind, let’s focus on the battleground states that will determine the result: In five of those states, the Cook Political Report finds Harris ahead, including North Carolina, with Trump leading in Nevada, and a tie in Georgia. In crucial Pennsylvania, the average margin of public polls is now Harris by less than 2 points, a statistical tie.

Equis Research released toplines for a poll of swing-state Latinos that shows Harris nearly quadrupling Biden’s lead from 5 points to 19 points. While this is a major shift in favor of the Harris campaign, it is still below Biden’s 2020 mark. Perhaps more importantly, it is driven to a notable extent by new voters – and both parties have learned about the volatility in both voter turnout and intent from new voters.

With a few weeks’ worth of data in, it is fair to say that the transition to Harris has salvaged Democratic prospects and returned us to the expected close race.

We will be looking into the Senate races next week – there is a lot to unpack there.

Texas Public Policy Foundation Polling

Some of WPAi’s polling was released by the Texas Public Policy Foundation this week. We were digging into attitudes to education and curriculum. When looking at the appropriate role of religious history and stories in the school curriculum, the polling found nearly two-thirds of Texans (64%) supported “the inclusion of historical religious stories and examples into state-provided curriculum,” while 33% opposed including the stories. Three-quarters (75%) of Black Texans supported it, as did 59% of Hispanic Texans.

We also gave respondents two statements regarding the stories that were currently included in the curriculum and asked them to choose which statement came closer to their opinion. One statement said, “people say that knowledge of religious stories from different faiths can provide students with a greater understanding of the development of Western culture, art, and history.” The other statement said, “other people say that providing passages from the Bible in state schools has the potential for religious indoctrination.” Fifty-eight percent (58%) of respondents said the religious stories gave students a greater understanding, while just a quarter (25%) said they had the potential for religious indoctrination. Changes in attitudes to education since the outbreak of COVID-19 are a book-length topic, and we may return to that at greater length when time and the election allow.

Want to talk about the data more in-depth? We’re here to talk.  

Alex Muir (amuir@wpaintel.com)

Amanda Iovino (aiovino@wpaintel.com)

Conor Maguire (cmaguire@wpaintel.com)