Dem
48
GOP
52
We are not done with polling today. In truth, for so many reasons, including herding, shy voters on both sides, and more, we are less sure of the polling results than we ever have been before. There are so many factors pulling in different directions that any of them could be dominant. If Trump wins, everyone will be yelling: "You knew about the young Black men voting for him. Why did you ignore that?" If Harris wins, everyone will be yelling: "You knew abortion was going to motivate millions of women. Why did you ignore that?" Thanks for the advice.
Politico Magazine has a guest op-ed from Justin Brown, who goes with the latter line of thought. His point is that pollsters have had 8 years to figure out how to find and measure Trump's voters, even the "shy" ones. They will probably get it more-or-less right, especially since many Trump voters now are not only not shy, they are in-your-face loud and outspoken. The pollsters have had only 100 days to figure out how to sample Harris' supporters. That might not be long enough.
There are a couple of categories of voters the pollsters may have missed. One is life-long Republicans who never voted for a Democrat in their entire lives, but who hate Donald Trump with the heat of 1 million suns. These are the 20% of Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley after she dropped out. They might be too tormented internally to tell a pollster: "Yup, I'm over it. I'm moving to Team Harris." They might not actually decide until they are in the voting booth. But some unknown number of Haley fans, especially women, might actually mark the box for Kamala Harris. How can a pollster capture voters who do not themselves know how they will vote? The use of "recalled vote" weighting this year will work to minimize them because they will tell the pollsters that they voted for Trump last time and then will be included in the sample as Trump voters, which they may not be this time.
A second group consists of the "uncommitted" voters who are protesting the war in Gaza. They will almost certainly not tell pollsters they are for Harris because they want to make everyone think she is weak on account of Joe Biden's foreign policy. But when they actually vote, many of them will realize that Trump will give his second-best friend, Bibi Netanyahu (after #1 friend Vladimir Putin), all the weapons he wants and a whole additional bunch he hasn't even asked for. Trump has publicly said he wants Israel to "finish the job," which is code for either killing all the Gazans or at least driving them out of Gaza so Young Jared can develop it into Miami Beach East (or maybe even Monaco). When they finally realize how horrific a Trump presidency would be for the people in Gaza, a fair number of "uncommitteds" may bite their tongues, hold their noses, vote for Harris, run outside the polling station, and throw up. But those votes still count.
A third group consists of married working-class women whose husbands are very macho and gung-ho, all-in for Trump, and are proud of how big their... truck is. Some of these women secretly really want a woman as president, just to show all men that women are quite capable of doing any job. Some may have had an abortion or know someone who did and this is a Big Deal for them. They would never tell a pollster they were voting for Harris because when Hubby later asked about it (assuming he wasn't in the room at the time), she wouldn't want to lie to him. But in the secrecy of the voting booth, she might just vote for Harris. The Democrats understand this and, as we have noted several times, are actually running ads saying: "Whether you voted or not is public information, but how you voted is private" to encourage these women (like the ad below).
No doubt all of these are true, only we don't know how big the groups are. Sorry about that. (V)