Biden Now Has a 15-Point Lead Nationally

As the coronavirus surges all over the country and the economy remains in shambles, Donald Trump's reelection prospects continue to slip. A new Quinnipiac University poll now has Joe Biden leading Trump 52% to 37%, the widest gap this year. A month ago, Quinnipiac had Biden ahead 49% to 41%.

The key to Biden's success lies with independents, who now back him 51% to 34%. In June, Biden led with independents 43% to 40%. Republicans are still solidly behind Trump (84%) and Democrats are solidly behind Biden (91%). In what might be the worst number in a poll full of very bad numbers, Biden is now leading with college-educated white voters 64% to 31%. This is a well-informed group and it will take a miracle for Trump to win them back. Maybe he can go across the street from the White House, stand outside St. John's Church, and pray for one. Many of these voters live in suburbs and if they vote a straight Democratic ticket, it will wreak havoc with Republicans running for the Senate, House, and state offices.

On all the key issues, Biden now leads:

• The economy (Biden +5)
• On handling a crisis (Biden +19)
• Health care (Biden +23)
• Managing the coronavirus (Biden +24)
• Dealing with racial inequality (Biden +32)

Trump's job approval has crashed. Only 36% think he is doing a good job vs. 60% who think he is not. Just as bad, only 30% trust the information he is giving out about the coronavirus vs. 67% who don't trust him. By a more than 2-to-1 margin, voters disagree with Trump's push to open schools in September.

Pollster Tim Malloy summarized the poll by saying: "There is no upside, no silver lining, no encouraging trend hidden somewhere in this survey for the President."

In the early evening, A poll from NBC/WSJ reported that Biden is leading Trump by 11 points. If we average the two polls, then Biden is +13, still an enormous lead. In addition, in the NBC/WSJ poll, 50% of the voters said there is no chance they would vote for Trump, vs. 37% who said the same about Biden. (V)

Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball Shifts Map Toward Biden

Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, a political website run from the University of Virginia, has updated its electoral-vote map, as follows:

It is somewhat different from our map, in that human beings are in the loop. Based on all the available data, including polling, talking to the campaigns, looking at history, and more, the folks at the University of Virginia Center for Politics put a couple of fingers to the wind and made a new guess how each state will go. Our map is human-free. Software just takes the most recent week's worth of polls in each state and generates the map. Today we have Texas barely blue (even though we don't quite believe it yet), because a couple of recent polls put Biden ahead there. Nevertheless, it's interesting to compare the "intuitive" approach with the "data-driven" approach.

Sabato has four states as toss-ups: Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. We have all of them leaning Democratic, with various amounts of lean. We agree that Florida and North Carolina are indeed toss-ups. However, there have been 16 polls of Arizona since Feb.1 and Joe Biden has led in all but one (a YouGov poll in which the candidates were tied). While we can see forecasters saying "But the Republicans always win Arizona" and not be willing to stick their necks out, we think there is so much data saying Biden is ahead and also that Mark Kelly is wiping the floor with Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ) that combined with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's win in 2018, we think Biden really is leading in Arizona now.

Similarly, there have been 12 polls of Wisconsin since March, and Trump led only one of them. That one was conducted by a Republican firm (Trafalgar), and it gave the President a 1-point lead (i.e., not really a lead, statistically speaking). In the three most recent nonpartisan polls of the Badger State, Biden was up 9, 11, and 8. Given the state's historical blue tilt, we think Biden's really leading there, too.

On the other hand, Sabato has Georgia, Iowa, and Ohio as leaning Republican. The data don't really say that. Currently, we have Georgia and Ohio as barely Democratic and Iowa as barely Republican. We'd call all three toss-ups at this point. Remember that any state on our map that has a white center is effectively a toss-up and that the border color indicates a statistically insignificant lead. If you want to see who is ahead not including the statistically tied states, see the second graph on the electoral-vote graphs page.

For the other states, we generally agree with Sabato. All that said, it is significant that the map puts Biden at 268 EVs. And that is without ME-02 or NE-02. If he were to win both of those, he's in. Starting from the map, Trump needs to win all of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin, as well as at least one of ME-02 and NE-02. That's a tall order, especially Arizona and Wisconsin.

The Crystal Ball is beginning to see Trump as the second iteration of Jimmy Carter, who was overwhelmed by crises. If the narrative in the coming months becomes "Trump is simply unfit for the job," other red states may start to weaken as well. But everything depends on how the country is doing, especially in September, when schools will start or not start or sort of start to reopen and people will react to the situation. By the end of September, early voting is going to begin in some states, by which time it may be too late for the narrative to change. (V)

Republicans Worry about What Happens If Trump Can't Hold Rallies

Donald Trump's rally in Tulsa was a dud. Campaign officials planned the next one carefully and picked New Hampshire, which has relatively few cases of COVID-19. It was abruptly canceled the day before it was scheduled to happen. The cover story was a storm, though that storm never actually happened. The truth was a fear that attendance would be poor and Trump would be furious.

If the campaign is unable to produce large rally crowds regularly for Trump, there will be hell to pay (in fact, there already has been some; see below). The situation is like those children's books in which a malevolent giant is threatening some town if the townsfolk don't give him an ever-increasing number of sheep to eat. By this point in 2016, Trump was holding multiple large rallies every week, sometimes two a day. Now there have been none since June 20 and Trump is getting very angry.

The problem for the campaign is finding places where state and local officials are fine with large (maskless) rallies and are not inclined to blame them if there is a big outbreak of COVID-19 a couple of weeks after the rally. And it would be nice if the location were in a swing state. Wyoming has plenty of space and a friendly governor, but if Trump were to go there, the news story would be "Trump is worried about Wyoming's three electoral votes." He can't have that.

To make it worse, some key swing states are rolling back plans to reopen. Big rallies are definitely not on the agenda there. That definitely eliminates Michigan. Even Florida, where the Republican National Convention is to be held, is starting to tighten up a bit in some places, putting restrictions on restaurants, for example. And even if Trump can find the ideal venue, there is no guarantee that his supporters will come, as 70% of Republicans are concerned that they might get the virus. Fortunately, the 30% who know no fear include key Republican politicians. For example, Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK) proudly attended Trump's rally in Tulsa. He also proudly announced Tuesday that he has COVID-19, one of nearly 1,000 new cases in Oklahoma that day. Stitt is the first governor to get the disease.

Chief of staff Mark Meadows and first son-in-law Jared Kushner are trying to distract Trump from his obsession with rallies by telling him that he should focus on communicating better on what he plans to do in his second term. But that is a hard sell. Trump is not so interested in talking about his plans, in part because he doesn't really have any. What he wants is roaring crowds. And that is the one thing he may not be able to have right now. If he can't he could become even more moody and unpredictable, something the campaign really doesn't want.

In addition, there is another problem with the lack of rallies. Normally, local GOP candidates for the Senate, House, and state legislatures are warm-up acts at his rallies. People show up to see Trump, but they first have to listen to somebody running for the state senate. Without the rallies, that PR for the downticket candidates and coattail effect goes away. This could hurt the Republicans in the fall. In principle, it also hurts the Democrats, except that they never depended as heavily on giant rallies so their absence is less of a blow. (V)

Shake It Up...Shake It Up

Donald Trump's polls are a train wreck, the electoral map is slipping away, and he can't have rallies (see the three items above). Someone must pay for that, and someone just did. In a development that was roughly as predictable as the sun rising in the east, (now-former) Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been demoted. He will continue to run the campaign's digital operation, while Bill Stepien will step in to the top job. In proper Trump fashion, the President did not personally advise Parscale of the news, leaving the dirty work to an underling (Jared Kushner) instead. For someone who threatens and blusters all day long, when push comes to shove, Trump is actually a coward.

Parscale really had no business being campaign manager. He has no experience in that job, at any level (i.e., he never managed a campaign for the Senate, or mayor, or dogcatcher). He also has shown no particular ability to influence Trump. Those two strikes would appear to be the only strikes that really matter. Stepien, by contrast, does have experience, having run Chris Christie's two successful gubernatorial campaigns. He's also rather corrupt, which would be a bug to most politicians, but may be a feature to Trump. Specifically, Stepien was a central figure in Bridgegate, so much so that Christie was forced to publicly repudiate him. In any case, Stepien now finds himself with quite the challenge on his hands. We will see if he can right the ship in any meaningful way. The fundamental problem, of course, isn't fundraising, staffing, or anything easy to fix. It's the candidate.

Trump 2020 is not the only Republican-run organization making some big changes, by the way. Ben Howe has been given much of the credit for the Lincoln Project's very clever ads. We're now going to find out how important he really was, because he is out of a job. The issue is that he is aware of an extensive list of vulgar terms for the female anatomy, and he liberally used all of them on Twitter over the past few years. Maybe he thought nobody would look into it. If so, he was wrong. The Lincoln Project has not announced a replacement yet. Is the guy who made the "Daisy" ad still alive? (Z)

Don't Mess with Texas

Yesterday we had an item about Joe Biden's first Texas ad. The big question now is: "Is that a feint, to try to trick the RNC into wasting money in Texas, or is Biden really going to contest this huge, traditionally red, and exceedingly expensive state?" Sarah Longwell has some thoughts on the matter, basically summed up as: "Don't mess with Texas." Longwell is a Republican pollster, publisher of The Bulwark (a site run by high-profile Republicans who feel the Republican Party needs to be burned to the ground and then rebuilt from the ashes), and founder of Republican Voters Against Trump (which features hundreds of videos from disappointed Trump voters who regret their choice in 2016 and who are backing Biden now).

Longwell's view, based on her experience as a Republican pollster, is that Texas is a bridge too far and a waste of money for Biden. Every cycle it looks like Texas might become a purple state and every cycle it doesn't. She thinks this isn't the one.

More important is that Texas is a very expensive state to compete in. Her advice is for Biden to focus on the three Rust Belt States, plus Arizona, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida. Obama won all but Arizona at least once and ads there are much more likely to have an effect than ads in Texas. And North Carolina plus Florida have more electoral votes (44) than Texas (38) and are much more winnable to boot.

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post agrees with Longwell that Texas is a reach, but uses Biden's ad there to highlight a battle within the Democratic Party. One faction wants to win. Period. They will settle for the Sabato map above if they can also get ME-02 and NE-02. For them, if Biden gets 270, he gets the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If he gets 538 EVs, he doesn't get an extra set of keys. To this faction, the entire focus has to be on getting to 270 and nothing else.

The other faction is thinking ahead and realizes that with a 270-268 win, the Republicans will feel justified in blocking everything that Biden does, claiming that half the country opposes him. This faction wants to go for 400+ EVs, to give Biden a huge mandate, and to destroy the Republican Party. In their view, when Republicans oppose Biden, he should be able to say: "The American people prefer our program to yours by an overwhelming margin and now we are going to carry it out, whether you like it or not." In this view, putting serious money into Texas, Ohio, Missouri, and some other red states makes sense in order to win big.

The best argument against the latter view is 2016. Hillary Clinton put money and effort into Arizona (which she lost by 3.5%) and never once set foot in Wisconsin (which she lost by 0.7%). The cautionary tale here is that if you go for a mandate, you may spread yourself too thin and lose the whole game.

There are a couple of other views on Biden's ad as well. Dave Carney, a top aide to Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) said: "It's a $500,000 head fake to see if the bear responds. It's a fundraising tool, in my view." Yet another view came from Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtagh: "This isn't a serious buy and is only designed to trick CNN into writing a story and running the ad for free." Murtagh might be right. A quick search shows dozens of news stories all over the Internet about the ad buy in Texas. If voters in other states begin to think: "Gee, if Trump is in trouble in Texas, he's going to lose," then spreading that narrative all over the country is probably worth $500,000, even if Texas is still a lost cause. (V)

Democratic Spending Is Focusing on the Rust Belt

As the saying goes, "Not even a donkey falls in the same hole twice." The Democratic donkey seems to have taken that to heart. Hillary Clinton took Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania for granted in 2016, didn't put much effort into winning them, and so she didn't. Joe Biden may make other mistakes this year, but he is not making that one. His spending in those three states is way, way up compared to Clinton's at this point in the year as shown in this graph:

Spending in Arizona is also up. However, the money had to come from somewhere and it came from Florida and North Carolina, where it is less this year than in 2016. The Trump campaign is outspending the Biden campaign by a little bit in Florida and a huge amount in North Carolina. Most strategists expect that these six states will attract the most attention and spending all the way to the end, unless something unexpected happens (say, in Georgia, Iowa, or Ohio).

In total digital ad spending, the two campaigns are close to even. The Trump campaign and allied super PACs have spent $57 million so far and the Biden campaign and allied super PACs have spent $55 million on digital ads. But we are just getting started. Things generally heat up starting after Labor Day. (V)

New Cases of COVID-19 Are Mostly in Republican-Led States

For the most part, when Donald Trump ordered the states to reopen their economies, Republican governors said "How fast?" and Democratic governors said "No thank you." That difference is now becoming clear in the data. Among the states reporting the most new cases, eight of the top 10 are led by Republicans:

In the list above, only three states (California, Louisiana, and North Carolina) have Democratic governors. Worse yet for the GOP, three of the states in the top five, Florida, Arizona, and Georgia, are probably going to be major battlegrounds. It is very likely that more cases is going to mean more deaths in a few weeks. The Biden campaign ads pretty much write themselves (Hint: Trump ordered your spineless governor to reopen your state, which he did. Now people are dying here needlessly on account of Trump).

It is important to realize what the problem here is for the President. Once that is clear, the solution is straightforward. The problem is that the media are reporting lots of new cases of COVID-19 everywhere. This makes Trump look bad. The obvious solution, at least to him, is to have them stop reporting this. To this end, the administration has ordered hospitals, effective immediately, to stop reporting data to the CDC and to report it to the Dept. of HHS instead. This provides a way to minimize the number of cases and deaths reported, simply by changing the numbers. It also sidelines the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci even more. Problem solved. Maybe. If HHS orders the numbers to be "improved," somebody at HHS has to actually sit at a computer and make changes. Leaks could happen, as they did in Florida when data scientist Rebekah Jones was ordered to falsify information on the dashboard she built. Of course, if leaks happen, the top priority of the administration will be to hire some plumbers to fix the leak. That worked out pretty well for Richard Nixon, so why not try again? (V)

GoFundMe Campaign Wants to Poll More States

So far this year, 11 states (HI, ID, IL, LA, NE, OR, RI, SD, VT, WV, WY), along with Washington, D.C., have not been polled yet. Some of them could be interesting, especially to compare them to 2016. If, for example, Donald Trump is barely winning Nebraska, that speaks volumes. Nature abhors a vacuum and so does the Internet, so a fellow named Jack Vaughan has organized a GoFundMe campaign to pay a pollster to poll some of the as-yet-unpolled or underpolled states. The target for this campaign is $20,000. They have raised $4,000 so far.

In a previous campaign, they raised $8,300 and hired PPP to poll Alaska. They also raised money to poll Montana. If they can get to $7,000, they will hire SurveyUSA to poll Kansas. With another $7,000 they will add Maine to the list. If they hit $20,000, SurveyUSA will poll Georgia as well. All three states have important Senate races as well, so if they hit $20,000, we could get a lot of useful information soon. If you want to see these states polled, check out the above link.

As a side effect of this campaign, we now see what a robopoll costs. Both PPP and SurveyUSA do automated telephone polling, apparently for $7,000 for a simple horse-race poll. Live interviewer polls are much more expensive. Think in the ballpark of $20,000 to $24,000, depending on whether you want to call cell phones, how many questions you have, and so on.

One way to reduce the cost of live interviewer polls is to use students, who may be (nominally) paid or do it as lab work in a political science class to get an in-depth understanding of how political polling works. Currently, four schools have an A+ rating from FiveThirtyEight: Marist College, Siena College, Muhlenberg College, and Monmouth University. If a college partners with a media outlet, they get money to pay the students as well as massive publicity. Marist works with NBC and has 300 students doing polling. Siena College has a partnership with the New York Times. In addition, high-school students who are interested in studying political science might see these names often and decide these schools are a good place to consider attending.

Here is FiveThirtyEight's ratings page. However, these ratings need to be taken with a handful of salt. Nobody can tell if a poll taken in July is correct. The only way to rate a pollster is by comparing a poll taken in the last week before an election to the result. For national pollsters, that provides only one data point per four years and data points from 2008 and earlier probably aren't worth much. This means there is very little data to go on. Sometimes, by dumb luck, a pollster will be right on or way off one year and that greatly influences the rating. Of course, if a pollster does lots of state primary polls, that provides much more data. Also, releasing a dozen state polls just before the general election is very helpful, too, but not all pollsters have the capacity (or funding) to release a basketful of polls just before an election. (V)

Democrats are Meddling in Kansas Senate Race

Actually, they are not meddling. They are out and out ratf*cking, but we didn't want to put that in the headline because those are tweeted to our Twitter feed and Twitter might not appreciate the term. A mysterious new super PAC, Sunflower State, was formed on Monday and already launched its first TV ad. The ad calls Kobach "too conservative" (which is actually a compliment in Kansas) but praises him for being pro-wall and anti-China. It also attacks Rep. Roger Marshall (R-KS), Kobach's main opponent, for being soft on Trump and weak on immigration.

Democrats absolutely want right-wing firebrand Kobach to win the Republican primary because they think he is too far right, even for Kansas. He ran for governor in 2018 and lost and might well lose a Senate race this year if he gets the Republican nomination. The Democrats are running state Sen. Barbara Bollier, a former Republican who switched teams in 2018. She raised $3.7 million in Q2, the most anyone has ever raised in Kansas for any office in a single quarter. At the very least, Kobach vs. Bollier would force the NRSC to spend money to defend a Senate seat that has been occupied by a Democrat only two times, with the last occasion coming more than a century ago (William H. Thompson, who was voted out in 1918). (V)

Payments to Farmers Have Surged to Historic Levels

Donald Trump is trying to have it both ways in farm states. On the one hand, he has adopted trade policies that have resulted in huge reductions in foreign orders for American agricultural products. On the other hand, he doesn't want to lose the farm states, so he has provided payments (which, if given to urban dwellers, would be labeled as welfare) to farms to protect them from the consequences of his own policies. The problem here is that the cost of the payments is not sustainable.

So far, the government has given farmers $33 billion this year, with potentially more to come. It is an all-time high, and far more than the $12 billion given to farmers in 2017. To give this some perspective, $33 billion is about two-thirds of the entire budget of the Dept. of HUD, which spends most of its money in cities. Here is a chart showing the growth of payments to farmers from 2011 to 2020.

In addition, the money is not targeted precisely at small family farms. Large agribusinesses are also eligible for payments. The Dept. of Agriculture is largely free to spend the money as it wishes, without much accountability. It's just "Here's your check."

Because the farm payments are breaking the budget, Congress is probably going to greatly reduce the amounts for 2021. If farmers have to go cold turkey (even those not in the poultry business), some won't make it. The impact of farm bankruptcies will be felt by the makers and dealers of agricultural equipment, feed stores, community banks, and much more in rural areas.

When you realize that farmers and ranchers represent about 1.3% of the entire U.S. population, it is clear that Trump is spending a wildly disproportionate amount of money to prop up his base. Technically, this doesn't count as buying votes, but the result is probably similar. Neil Hamilton, the former director of the Drake University Agricultural Law Center said: "It's hard to see it as anything but political vote-buying in battleground states like Iowa and Wisconsin that have received the bulk of the payments."

Nevertheless, Joe Biden is fighting back. He knows that farmers are proud and don't like to see themselves as being on welfare, even if they are. So he made an ad entitled "Trump Is Not a Farmer's Friend." In the ad, one farmer said "this is not a long term fix." Another described Trump's trade policy as "we're going to screw you over and pay you off with someone else's money."

If Biden wins, trade policy might be very different and payments to farmers could be cut. Most states have some farmland, so giving farmers free money is popular in Congress. Still, while New York produces a lot of milk and Washington produces a lot of apples, neither one is a big producer of soybeans or hogs. One can imagine Biden changing the nature of the farm payments to send more money to blue-state farms and less to red-state farms. And the total amount of money sent to farms could be reduced and perhaps limits per farm might be introduced to prevent corporate farms from gobbling it all up. (V)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Resting at Home

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been discharged from Johns Hopkins Hospital and is resting comfortably at home. At the hospital, a bile duct stent was cleaned out.

Her health is of more interest to more people than that of anyone except possibly Donald Trump. She has had multiple bouts of cancer, including one with pancreatic cancer, which is exceedingly deadly, as well as with lung cancer. She also broke three ribs in a fall at home last year.

If she were to die in the next few months, there is no doubt that Donald Trump would immediately nominate a successor and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) would try to ram it through the Senate. The chances of that succeeding depend a lot on the timing, though, as we discussed yesterday.

If she were to be hospitalized in a coma and kept alive by various beeping machines, but not technically dead (although warring teams of doctors might have different opinions of exactly how dead you have to be to be really, really dead), we could have a constitutional crisis that would end up in the Supreme Court. Imagine Terri Schiavo on steroids. (V)

Massachusetts Will Vote on Ranked-Choice Voting in November

One of the bugs in the first-past-the-post voting used in nearly all U.S. elections is that sometimes two left-wing candidates split the left-wing vote and allow a single right-wing candidate to get the most votes and win (or vice-versa). This has happened more than a few times.

One solution is ranked-choice voting (also called instant-runoff voting). With this system, voters mark their first, second, third, etc. choices as far down the ballot as they want. Initially, all the ballots are sorted into piles (conceptually) based on the first choice votes. If no candidate has 50%, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and all those ballots are redistributed into the piles of the other candidates based on their second-choice votes. This process continues until some candidate has more than 50%, which will always happen, except in the unlikely event that it ends up as an exact tie.

Maine is the only state that will use RCV for the presidential election, both statewide and in the two congressional districts. It used it in the 2018 midterms as well, but not everyone liked the result. In that election, Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-ME) got 46.3% of the first-choice votes to Democratic challenger Jared Golden's 45.6%. In a first-past-the-post election, Poliquin would have kept his seat. However, there were two independents in the race as well. Tiffany Bond, who can be described as Democrat-lite, got 5.7%. Will Hoar, whose only issue was health care, got 2.4%. In round 2, Hoar got the axe and his votes were redistributed. Still no one hit 50%. Then, in round 3, Bond was eliminated and her votes were redistributed to the second choice (or possibly third choice, if choice 2 was Hoar). After this was done, Golden had 50.6% and was elected. Republicans were angry because they wanted the three-way split among the (somewhat) leftist candidates to let their guy win, but RCV blocked that.

Anyway, the actual news here is that Massachusetts voters will get the chance in November to decide if they want to follow Maine and adopt RCV as well. The petition to put the question to the voters got 17,512 signatures, far more than the 13,374 required. Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin (D) has certified the count now, so it will go on the ballot in November. If Massachusetts' voters approve the measure, no doubt more states will have it on the ballot in 2022.

RCV has a definite effect on voting patterns. It gives voters "permission" to register a protest vote without helping a candidate they despise. If RCV had been in use in all states in 2016, many of the Jill Stein voters might have voted (1) Jill Stein, (2) Gary Johnson, (3) Hillary Clinton, just to make a point. The effect of RCV might well have been that in round 3, Clinton would have gotten 50% and won. (V)

Today's Presidential Polls

Like Michigan and Wisconsin, Pennsylvania is looking less and less swingy by the day. It's Biden's birth state, which he will probably remind the voters there from time to time. (V)

State	Biden	Trump	Start	End	Pollster
Pennsylvania	52%	42%	Jul 09	Jul 13	Monmouth U.

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