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Male Pollsters Shocked — Shocked!! — When a Woman Pollster Discovers Women Voters

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On Friday, Nate Silver tweeted and substacked a piece declaring that there must be herding going on in the casino.

His substack analysis didn’t acknowledge, however, that this herding was going on in his casino.

Now granted, our forecast is close too. But it’s based on polling averages: dozens of polls have been released in each of these states over the past month. That greatly increases the sample size. Collectively, they’ve surveyed about 230,000 voters.

By contrast, the median sample size in individual polls in these states is 800 voters. In a 49-49 race in a poll of 800 people — assuming 2 percent goes to third parties — the theoretical margin of error for the difference between Trump and Harris is ±6 points. If that sounds higher than you’re expecting, that’s because the margin of error that’s usually reported in polls is only for one candidate’s vote share. For instance, in a poll of 800 people, Trump’s margin of error is about ±3 points, as is Harris’s. However, basically every vote that isn’t a vote for Trump is a vote for Harris. If Trump gets 52 percent of the vote instead of 49, that implies Harris will receive 46 percent.1 So the margin of error on the difference separating Trump and Harris is ±6.

What this means is that if pollsters are doing honest work, we should see a lot more “outliers” than we do — even if people love to complain about them on Twitter.

In our database as of this afternoon’s model run, there were 249 polls in the seven battleground states that met Silver Bulletin standards and did at least some of their fieldwork in October.2 How many of them showed the race in either direction within 2.5 percentage points3, close enough that you could basically call it a tie?

Well, 193 of them did, or 78 percent. That’s way more than you should get in theory — even if the candidates are actually exactly tied in all seven states, which they almost certainly aren’t.

The reason we’re seeing this herding is because Nate Silver has spent 16 years training pollsters to herd. It probably makes things worse that polling has become far more difficult, far more expensive, and far more important in shitty campaign coverage (not least because of Nate Silver). The herding is happening because, thanks to the early but not more recent success of Nate, political operatives know they can create a reality in poll averages.

Well, ask and you shall receive, Nate, because Ann Selzer doesn’t herd. Last night, the Iowa pollster surprised everyone with a poll showing Kamala Harris ahead in Iowa.

A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states.

The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

As Selzer describes, this effect is driven by older women voters.

The poll shows that women — particularly those who are older or who are politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris.

“Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” Selzer said.

Independent voters, who had consistently supported Trump in the leadup to this election, now break for Harris. That’s driven by the strength of independent women, who back Harris by a 28-point margin, while independent men support Trump, but by a smaller margin.

Similarly, senior voters who are 65 and older favor Harris. But senior women support her by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%, while senior men favor her by just 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%.

Nate promptly set to work describing how brave it was for Selzer to release this because a gambling market Nate has helped to create says she’s wrong.

Releasing this poll took an incredible amount of guts because — let me state this as carefully as I can — if you had to play the odds, this time Selzer will probably be wrong. Harris’s chances of winning Iowa nearly doubled in our model from 9 percent to 17 percent tonight, which isn’t nothing. Polymarket shows a similar trend, moving from 6 percent to 18 percent after the survey. But that still places Harris’s odds at around 5:1 against.

While I don’t pay for Nate Silver’s gambling market, he appears to have gone on to argue that what Selzer is measuring is inflation, not just — as Selzer explained — big movement from women.

Meanwhile, that Other Nate, Nate Cohn, released this column, in what former pollster Adam Carlson described as “rough timing.”

 

Other Nate then went on to point to things that followed the pandemic but which are either now in the past or which polls always reflected a misunderstanding on the part of voters.

[T]he events that followed the pandemic took a serious toll on the case for liberalism, whatever the precise merits of the arguments. Inflation and high interest rates could be blamed on high government spending stimulating excessive demand. High gas prices could be blamed on suspending drilling permits and the termination of the Keystone pipeline project. A surge of migrants could be blamed on the administration’s looser border policy, which became politically untenable; homelessness, crime and disorder made the case for “law and order.”

From there, Other Nate made some false claims, such as that Harris — whose plan to include home health care in Medicare has been ignored by the press, and who mentions plans to increase the child tax credit and mortgage assistance in every stump speech — had moved away from populism.

The traditional Democratic program to expand the social safety net has played a diminished role in the campaign. In her speech at the Democratic convention, Ms. Harris didn’t mention the unfinished business of Obama-Biden era liberalism: paid family leave, an expanded child tax credit, student loan forgiveness, universal pre-K or free community college.

And Other Nate claimed that polls have shown that Trump does better on the issue that is most important to voters votes.

If there’s any poll question that captures the swing toward a more conservative environment, it’s the question of which party (or candidate) would do the best on the issue that’s most important to your vote. All cycle, polls have shown Republicans and Mr. Trump with an advantage on this measure.

Other Nate didn’t mention that on the one that matters to most people, the economy, Harris has caught up to Trump.

Crazier still, Other Nate didn’t mention that for those who say abortion is the most important, Harris always wins. He simply disappeared abortion in his claim that voters think Trump would do better on all issues that are most important to them.

The other day, I hoped that someone with interns would review the Other Nate’s statements about this race — but hell, do it for First Nate, too — to see whether his mentions of polling adjustments adjust for the Dobbs effect, the recent trend in which, with one exception, polls have always underestimated and often wildly underestimated pro-abortion outcomes.

Other Nate has spent a great deal of time talking about how polls missed Trump in 2016 and 2020.  On October 6, Other Nate described how whether pollsters are using voters’ recalled votes in 2020 explains a split in the polls (in none of Other Nate’s discussions of recalled vote have I seen any discussion of whether pollsters are accommodating for the documented greater mortality rates among Trump supporters since 2020 arising from vaccine skepticism). On October 22, Other Nate described the theories for why pollsters missed Trump in 2020. The next day, Other Nate described all the adjustments polls have made to remedy their 2020 Trump miss.

This trend in ignoring the Dobbs effect has continued more recently. Other Nate didn’t mention abortion or Dobbs in this column asking whether we can trust polls.

Other Nate didn’t field any questions that addressed abortion in this column about early voting (he did suggest that pollsters expect the normal amount of women in the electorate, 53%).

This column is particularly remarkable. In a column conceding that Harris may win because her coalition draws on more reliable voters than Trump’s, Other Nate didn’t mention that women are more reliable voters. Other Nate focuses on education, but only speaks of gender when describing that Trump’s bros are less likely to turn out.

But this election seems different. As we’ve reported all cycle, Democrats excel among high-turnout voters, while Donald J. Trump is strong among relatively low-turnout voters. He’s made his biggest gains among low-turnout demographic groups like young men and nonwhite voters.

Other Nate linked to an Anna Greenberg tweet noting that Trump was relying on less reliable voters. He didn’t mention the Greenberg tweet posted five minutes later in the very same thread decrying the focus on young men while ignoring how pissed women are.

Greenberg is among the thousands of people who have RTed this tweet from me.

You get my point.

This entire election has been disproportionately viewed through the lens of polling, polling that even the Two Nates confess exhibit obvious problems.

And best as we can tell, pollsters have contorted their polls to ensure they don’t miss Trump voters (again, with no discussion of how you account for higher COVID-associated death rates among Trump supporters since 2020). But they have (apparently) done absolutely nothing to ensure they don’t miss pissed off women.

And then Ann Selzer came along.

Stop Obsessing about Kamala Harris’ (Polling) Bumps

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I’m going to defend Jonathan Karl, who described ABC’s poll showing a six point lead over Trump as within the margin of error. Here is Dan Drezner’s complaint about Karl’s comment, which is similar to that of many other people.

Take, for example, Sunday’s ABC News/Ipsos poll of the national race. It showed Harris leading 52%-46% among likely voters, a six-point lead that was outside the margin of error. Given the closeness of the race, a national poll showing Harris ahead seems newsworthy.

That, however, is not how ABC’s Jonathan Karl chose to frame it:

Karl says that Harris’ lead is “just barely outside the margin of error,” which is just a weird way to describe one of the few polls where someone has a statistically significant lead. Karl could have simply pivoted from the poll result to talk about how it’s still very close in the Electoral College — but he didn’t. Instead, he described a poll in which Harris had a significant lead as a toss-up.

It’s absolutely right that this poll is outside the margin of error (it is unchanged since before the convention). But Karl is right that the race is much closer in swing states, where voters have been flooded with Trump attacks on Harris for weeks now.

I think Democrats are telling themselves a wildly overoptimistic story about this race. I’m grateful Kamala and her campaign manager keep warning that she remains the underdog in this race.

That’s because this race is unlike any normal race. That’s true not just because Harris is a mixed race woman, though both her gender and race should raise concerns that the polls are overestimating her support (we literally hear stories about Republican women wondering if their spouses will learn for whom they voted). But it’s true because Kamala is not yet halfway through her race, and she’s running against a former President over 90% of the way done.

Pundits are measuring this odd campaign rhythm according to normal rules, such as that conventions bring a bounce (neither did this year) or that Labor Day marks some line in a sand about the final stage of the race.

As one example, both Frank Luntz…

And Nate Silver…

Pointed to this single Michigan poll of 600 possible voters to defend their argument that the Vice President has not gotten a bump from the convention. Neither of these men — a Republican partisan and a guy whose gambling habit may be influencing his analysis — are reliable sources.

And this is a particularly bad poll on which to base such judgments. Polling in MI has been pretty shitty going back two decades (though it is true that Trump has underperformed in many of them). It took WDIV/Detroit News five days to release this poll as compared to one day for their July poll. It was all done post-RFK endorsement of Trump (and as such could reflect RFK’s Trump-leaning vote moving to the former president), but before his bid to be removed from the ballot failed. Because of Michigan’s significant Arab American population, it is the swing state most likely to be influenced by Biden’s failures on Israeli policy. The August poll has a Likely Voter category (the one they report) and a Definite Voter category, the latter of which Kamala leads by 1.6%.

And as my former blogmate Dana Houle (who has run statewide campaigns in MI) noted, this poll delays release of crosstabs, and when they released theirs in January, they showed wildly unlikely results (results equally inconsistent with July’s poll).

More importantly, both the WDIV poll and the ABC one show two things that many polls are reflecting: First, while overall support for the candidates may look the same, the nature of their support is changing, with a gender split growing for each.

More curiously, that’s happening even as Kamala Harris’ favorability is going up. Even Joe Biden is on course to tip over into favorable ratings by election day!

That’s also happening as the electorate, at least in the short term, is becoming more female, more diverse.

What’s going on with the race is that Trump has a ceiling of support. While more men may be saying they’ll vote for Trump, Trump is not getting more popular.

And so he needs to do something to increase Kamala’s negatives (the success of negative ads may explain the narrower polling in swing states, but Trump’s future ad payments may indicate he’s blowing the money it would take to keep that up).

And therein, I think, was the intent of the Arlington Cemetery stunt — where Trump’s people, invited in by a few people who lost family members in the Afghan withdraw — took video from the gravesides of people whose family did not give consent, and did so after physically shoving a cemetery staffer.

This is the Benghazi playbook. Trump’s attempt to politicize an Afghan withdrawal that he played an instrumental role, according to his own former National Security Adviser, in making chaotic. This is, as everything with Trump is, a planned stunt coordinated with the House GOP.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced that Congress will honor the 13 American service members killed in the attack by presenting their families with the Congressional Gold Medal on Sept. 10.

“Congress has a duty to ensure these sacrifices are never forgotten, and it is my distinct honor to announce that Congress will bestow the families of these 13 heroes with the Congressional Gold Medal — the highest award Congress can present to any individual or group,” Johnson said in a statement released last week.

The ceremony, and remarks by a bevy of Republican lawmakers, will take place at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda the same day as the presidential debate between Harris and Trump.

Like Trump’s planned attack on Biden incorporating documents altered by DOJ, and like his hosting of Tony Bobulinski in October 2020, Trump is hoping he can use the debate to stage a Reality TV event that gives right wingers a hook for the remainder of the campaign.

The reason why right wingers still complain that 51 former spooks said, truthfully, that the Hunter Biden laptop looked like an Russian information operation is that it undercut Trump’s Reality TV show; Trump even tried to use that as his stunt for the debate with Biden.

Here, though, Trump doesn’t have the two to four years on which both the Hunter Biden laptop and the Benghazi attacks built. Plus, the Arlington stunt has begun to backfire, most notably with John McCain’s son publicly endorsing Kamala in response. If Jamie Raskin succeeds in getting answers from DOD about what happened before the debate, it risks upending Trump’s hoped-for attack by demonstrating the contempt in which he holds service members. This risks turning into yet another story on how Trump believes service members are suckers and losers.

There’s one more thing that remains unsteady in this race: The great disparity in most polls between statewide and presidential polling (one exception out today, CNN’s, shows at least two state races — the Senate races in AZ and PA — that are not remotely credible). That may reflect misses in the modeling of the race more generally.

Kamala Harris has not gotten the polling bumps where pundits are trained to look for them.

But even as they watch for those signs closely, they’re not contemplating how other nearly unprecedented movement might shape the race.

Update: One more point about the weird timing of this race. USAT has a poll (which finished fieldwork on August 28) showing that Kamala has significantly narrowed the margins on the two topics Trump wanted to run on: the economy and immigration.

Harris also has made inroads on which candidate would do a better job handling important issues.

  • On the economy, voters’ top concern, Trump was favored over Harris by 6 percentage points, 51%-45%. That’s an asset, to be sure, but it is less than half the 14-point advantage he held over Biden in June.
  • On immigration, an issue that energizes Republican voters, Trump was favored by 3 points, 50%-47%, down from the 13-point preference he had over Biden.

She has narrowed that gap, even while she’s still rolling out policy proposals, such as new tax credits to support small business formation.

Harris’ proposal, released on Tuesday, calls for significantly expanding the tax deduction for start-up expenses from $5,000 to $50,000, while also setting the goal of 25 million new small-business applications during her first term, according to a Harris campaign official granted anonymity to describe details of the plan. The plan also proposes reducing barriers to getting occupational licenses and developing a standard tax deduction for small businesses.

There’s a famous line Andy Card used when discussing the Iraq War in 2002: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

Whether by necessity or design, Kamala can offer news events like this for the next several weeks. And this one sets up a solid contrast before the debate, in which Trump will be forced to defend tax cuts for billionaires over support for small businesses.

This Is Bullshit: Silver Takes the Gold for COVID Guff [UPDATE-1]

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[NB: Check the byline, thanks. Update at bottom of post. /~Rayne]

I’m sure my neighbors wondered what the hell was going on here Friday. The weather was nice enough that my windows were wide open exposing those within hearing to my vented spleen. There was so much crap in my social media I couldn’t help yell, “Bullshit, bullshit, absolute bullshit!” I can only hope they thought I was yelling about the Olympics.

What really set me off was dangerous twaddle from someone who should long ago have learned not to opine without data.

Because he refuses to stick to his lane using data to support his case, Nate Silver has become anathema, all of his own doing. His bullshit tweet Friday about COVID can get people killed if they pay him any heed at all.

No data offered here to support this swag – it’s pure opinion.

For the last couple of months we’ve known we haven’t been dealing with the same virus variant which began the pandemic; we’re now up against a far more transmissible version the features of which researchers are still analyzing.

In its pandemic coverage, the Washington Post reported the Centers for Disease Control acknowledged in an internal memo “the war [against COVID] has changed”:

… The document strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold.

It cites a combination of recently obtained, still-unpublished data from outbreak investigations and outside studies showing that vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant. …

In other words our past assumptions about SARS-C0V-2 no longer work; this isn’t a virus with a replication factor of R2 (in which one infected person infects two more on average) but an R-naught much higher.

Let’s revisit what was known at the end of June this year about the Delta variant in this explainer I’ve shared before:

It’s the change in charge and in the amino acid described in Rob Swanda’s video above which may be responsible for both the high level of virus load found in both unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals. Think of the electrostatic charge as acting like a magnet, attracting more virus to receptors, combined with a change to the spike protein which may allow the virus to attack host cells more quickly and not be recognized quite as rapidly by vaccinated persons’ immune systems. You’ll grasp why vaccinated persons are infectious and spreading the virus along with unvaccinated carriers.

For another overview which offers a fairly basic explanation of the process by which viruses mutate and then disperse as well as an overview of the Delta variant, see this MedCram video from July 20:

If you watch this video, do pay special note to dates on materials cited. There’s one graph in particular addressing the spread of Delta in the UK based on data from June; the spread of Delta is so aggressive that data wasn’t accurate by the time of this video a month later.

This article in BBC provides a graph showing the trend from mid/late June in the UK; Delta’s spread continued along that rapid uptick, resulting in more hospitalizations though vaccinations kept the rate from matching the last COVID surge. The MedCram video (at 5:17) does attribute the increase to the Delta variant.

Note also the differences in population testing positive for Delta – now much younger – and the admissions. While vaccinated individuals are still unlikely to need hospitalization as documented outbreaks like that in Provincetown MA show, they can still get the virus. We still don’t yet know what the long-term repercussions are among vaccinated individuals who have asymptomatic or mild cases of COVID. We do know that previous variants have caused damage among infected individuals even though they had asymptomatic or mild cases, and younger people including children were among those who were injured.

But now that we know vaccinated persons can both be infected with Delta and spread it, vaccinated persons can’t simply “choose to live [their] life ~however [they] want under COVID” because they pose a danger to individuals who can’t be vaccinated or are immune compromised.

That’s someone like Montel Williams, living with a compromised immune system, fully vaccinated, did everything right to protect himself, and yet someone infected him through thoughtless carelessness:

Don’t listen to bullshit from unqualified hacks who don’t have skin in the game. Pay attention to credentialed virologists, epidemiologists, public health professionals who are on top of the data related to COVID and the peer-reviewed research about its variants.

Above all continue to wear masks and maintain some level of social distancing even if you’re vaccinated, not just because you may become mildly ill but because you may infect others who may not be able to be vaccinated — particularly children — or who may be immune compromised.

This tweet shows the difference between an infected young teen’s lungs and health lungs; imagine this happening to younger children, unable to be vaccinated while vaccines have yet to be approved for use among those under age 12:

Prevent this from happening to more children by encouraging vaccination. The sooner we reach 70% or more vaccinated, the faster we can halt the emergence of the next highly-transmissible and damaging SARS-CoV-2 variant.

UPDATE-1 — 2:40 PM ET 31-JUL-2021 —

When some denialist throws a 99% survival rate statistic in your face, sit them down and share this.

Oh, was I suppose to provide a trigger warning? COVID doesn’t provide them, oops.

The video above only addresses patients who’ve been hospitalized. At least one recent study suggests an average 13-14% of persons who recover from COVID have symptoms lasting weeks and months, some of which are debilitating and reflect permanent damage COVID does to the body.

Freedom. Woo. Choose to live your life however you want. Good luck getting out of bed freely after hospitalization, or keeping your job while suffering from brain fog and other cognitive impairment found in long COVID.