It Turns Out the Only Pollster I Respect Agrees That We Are In for Some (don't jinx it!)... Well, What I Said Last Month.

You've heard her on my podcast. She is that rare political scientist from the working class. And she has her finger squarely on the pulse of this country.

Friends,

As you know, I have been loathe to predict how I really feel the election is going to turn out on Tuesday. But I’m guessing by now you’ve picked up a basic sense from me that, contrary to the breathless punditry of how “dangerously close” this election is — It’s a tie! It’s a 50-50 country! It’s neck-and-neck! It’s kneecap-to-kneecap! Trump’s gonna win! — I have felt for a long time that not only is Trump going to lose (because, yes, I have a lot of faith in the goodness of my fellow Americans), but Kamala Harris is going to win, and win big. With crowd-size numbers that even Trump will be blown away by, meaning this is the last that we will see him (unless Dr. Phil does a live special from Epstein Island a few years from now).

Yes, I’m feeling that good. And yes, I could be horribly wrong. But there is one person who has shared my warnings about how these recent elections were going to turn out. Virtually no one agreed with my assessment that Trump would beat Hillary, that Biden would beat Trump, and that the “Red Wave” of “up to 40 new Republican seats being added in the House of Representatives” in 2022 was a total fantasy and that, in fact, there would be a Blue Wave of Democrats elected 2 years ago who would form what everyone now agrees is a Blue Wall.

Her name is Rachel Bitecofer. She is a political scientist with a PhD from the University of Georgia. She was a lone academic voice who supported my assessment of the country I live in. She once founded a liberal super PAC called Strike PAC, which she described as "a war machine for the Left." When have you ever heard of something like that? And how badly have we been in need of that kind of thinking?

Today, at 3:30pm, she posted her analysis (see below) of what she thinks may happen in the next 48 hours. For all of you who have written me this week, unable to sleep, pulling your hair out, lost in a doom scroll, all of us at the precipice of the End of Democracy, I present to you here her research and findings — and her very educated gut-feeling about how happy we may end up feeling by the end of this week.

It’s a good feeling to know we’re not alone.

— Mike

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Dude, Where's My Man Wave?!

It’s Starting to Look Like America Understands the Assignment

by: Rachel Bitecofer, “The Cycle” Substack

We’re humans, we like certainty.

In fact, we crave certainty of event outcomes that probabilistic models and horserace polling simply can’t give us.

Whether a single poll, many polls aggregated together, or many polls aggregated together and then combined with other important components of elections (forecasting “models” like 538, Silver Bullet, etc) statistics can only take us so far in predicting election outcomes.

Why?

Well, because even as Nate Silver would tell you, low probability events still occur (think Trump 2016) and because horserace election polling is constrained by unavoidable errors and biases even when done well, including the margin of error, that prevent us from being able to say with certainty which way a race that will be decided by 1 or 2% will end up actually breaking.

This is why my own work relies on what I call “hard” data like registration data, fundraising data, volunteer data, early turnout data, and field infrastructure, combined with soft data insights culled from quality polling data (public, likely voter sample, n at least 800) to assess the overall electoral environment.

Now that the election is Tuesday and average Americans are finally paying attention for the first time to an election you’ve been following for 2 years, we have a good bit of hard and soft data to assess to help us anticipate the outcome.

And what we see in these data is overwhelmingly positive for Harris.

As I have documented in previous posts, the Trump Team’s theory of the 2024 case was that since Dobbs was political kryptonite for Trump, they would build their strategy around men.

It probably took being a woman political scientist to fully recognize the folly that is designing your entire electoral strategy around getting men who don’t normally vote, to vote.

During football season, no less.

Here’s how it’s going:

Source: The Cut

Now, to be clear, the gender gap we see in early voting and registration data is not dissimilar from what we saw in both 2020 and 2022. But Democrats didn’t need an even bigger gap, it was already huge and Joe Biden won with that gender gap.

What Democrats needed was to maintain that advantage in the face of 2 years and millions in investment from Trump and Republican superPACs to drive more men to the polls to maximize their own gender gap to offset ours.

And there is not one iota of evidence that suggests they have been successful in this effort.

And don’t forget: the Man Wave strategy was not without costs for the Trump campaign, Trump further isolated a key part of the voting universe: college educated whites.

Sneer at the White voters all you want but you should know there is one group of White Americans who actually like multicultural, pluralistic democracy, and every cycle Democrats have made additional inroads with them: college educated White voters.

Now, The Nates will tell you that there are too few college educated voters to offset the losses from the GOP’s shrewd grievance campaign to woo non-college educated White voters which is true when you consider the overall American adult population of around 270 million people.

But it’s not necessarily true of the electorate, which cuts that number roughly in half.

Anyone polling the electorate, especially out of the voter file sample, will tell you that college educated respondents make up a majority of the sample nowadays.

We will find out on Tuesday how much this has affected the polling, if at all.

But there are strong signs that Democrats will continue to make inroads among college educated White voters, as they have every cycle since Trump descended down his golden escalator to debut his special brand of hate politics.

But in this cycle, the Harris campaign specifically targeted these voters with messaging designed to break their brand loyalty to the Republican Party.

As far as the Selzer poll this weekend in Iowa shows, it’s working.

Now, recall what you’ve learned in previous posts: party identification explains almost everything about an individual’s vote choice, even among most so-called independents.

Most Independents “lean” towards a party and pollsters now include those leaners with “admitted” partisans in their survey analyses.

Doing so with 2020 exit poll data, we find that, as usual, party loyalty was almost perfect for both parties in 2020: 96% for Democrats and 94% for Republicans.

What is exciting about the Selzer poll and its trusty methodology is that it shows two things right before the election: Harris is winning among actual (pure) independents, but also party loyalty for Trump among Republicans is atypically low, coming in at 89% for Republicans.

If that holds and is reflective of swing state voter behavior, it’s game over for Donald Trump.

Where statistics stop, the gut begins. Nate’s gut says Trump. My gut says Harris.

All gas, no breaks.

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Check out Rachel Bitecofer’s Substack: The Cycle

Also, listen to my podcast episode featuring Rachel Bitecofer:

Ep. 38: There’s More of Us Than There Are of Them (feat. Rachel Bitecofer)

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