Biden-Trump and the White Noncollege Vote

Nate Cohn recently published an article in the Times somewhat oddly titled "Is Biden Gaining Older Voters, and Losing Young Ones?" I say oddly titled since his data show a huge swing to Biden among older voters relative to Clinton's 2016 performance but very little change relative to Clinton among young voters. So the implication of a trade-off does not seem to follow.

Anyway, the most newsworthy part of the article to me was his claim of no pro-Democratic movement among white noncollege voters relative to 2016. He has Biden's current deficit among these voters at an average of 29 points, identical to his 2016 point of comparison. Is this believable?

Sure, it is possible but I do have serious reservations about this finding. First of all, his methodology seems idiosyncratic, using only "high quality RDD live interviewer polls" for his averages and not even all of them them (at least by any reasonable definition of high quality). And his point of comparison for 2016 is the same type of polls conducted after the third Presidential debate in that campaign. Huh? That doesn't seem like the obvious point of comparison to me.

Second, while his chosen group of polls may indeed average out at this point to a 29 point Biden white noncollege deficit, there is other data out there. For example, the Nationscape data (70,000 cases since the beginning of the year and counting) has Biden's white noncollege deficit at 15, a huge swing relative to the 31 point Democratic deficit from the actual 2016 election. On the other hand, the Nationscape data show Biden winning white college voters but by about the same amount as Clinton in the 2016 election.

Third, we have a raft of new polls from key swing states that do seem to show superior performance for Biden relative to Clinton's 2016 election performance among this group. I'll use here the just-released Fox polls from Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida (all presumably Cohn-approved since they are high quality, RDD, live-interviewer polls).

Start with Michigan. The poll has Biden ahead 49-41. His white noncollege deficit: 8 points. Clnton's 2016 deficit: 21 points. Note especially Biden's performance among white noncollege women--dead even. Note also that Biden and Clinton do about the same among white college voters.

Then look at Pennsylvania. The poll has Biden ahead 50-42. His white noncollege deficit: 15 points. Clnton's 2016 deficit: 29 points. And Biden's performance among white noncollege women is a mere one point deficit. Biden also does better among white college voters than Clinton, but not by as much.

Finally, look at Florida, The poll has Biden ahead 46-43. His white noncollege deficit: 24 points. Clnton's 2016 deficit: 30 points (Quinnipiac--Cohn-approved!--also has an FL poll out and they have basically the same result). Here again Biden and Clinton do about the same among white college voters.

So am I sure these data are telling the right story and Cohn's the wrong one? No, there is always room for argument--and new data!--on these matters. And I always applaud an effort to keep a focus on the white noncollege vote as an area of Democratic vulnerability. But, if I had to put money on it, I'd say the white noncollege swing--at least at this point in time--is real.

Just Because They Don't Love Joe Biden Doesn't Mean They Won't Turn Out and Vote for Him

The Biden campaign has been deluged with advice from various activist groups about how he can shore up his standing with young voters and make sure they don't stay home in November. Eight activist groups, including Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, sent his campaign a long, long list of positions he needed to take to jazz young voters. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes opined that Biden needed to get "uncomfortable" with his issue positions to unlock a treasure trove of votes from Latinos and young people.

But how true is this? Is Biden really in so much trouble among young voters that he needs heroic efforts to improve his standing? How much sense does it really make to extrapolate from poor performance among a group in a primary context to poor performance in a general election?

Political scientist Brian Arbour thinks: not much. He notes, correctly I think:

"A review of recent elections shows that just because a candidate has a weakness with a particular group of primary voters does not mean he will be weak with that same group in the general election.

The warnings that Democrats have offered Biden in 2020 echo those that Obama received in 2008 from Hispanic Democrats that “he risks losing the Latino vote in the general election if he does not reach out to Hispanic voters.” These warnings were overstated; in November, Obama won Hispanics in a landslide 67-32, a 15-point improvement over John Kerry’s performance in 2004 with this group.

Trump faced a similar problem in 2016 with Republican voters who attended religious services at least once a week. The Pew Research Center found that “[t]wo-thirds of regular churchgoing Republicans were not supporting Trump for the GOP nomination even in April.” Yet in the general election, Trump won white evangelicals by a whopping 81-16 margin, three points better than Mitt Romney did with this group in 2012....

[T]he mix of candidates is different in the general election, and voters compare not multiple Democrats or Republicans to each other, but a Democrat to a Republican. And in a general election, the performance of the incumbent party in office is often the most important factor in explaining shifts in vote choice. Hispanics in 2008, conservatives in 2012, and working-class whites in 2016 were all displeased with how the policies of the Bush and Obama administrations had affected their group.

So how will Biden perform among young voters in 2020? As of now, we can only speculate. The premise behind the left-wing suggestion that Biden make policy changes to appeal to young voters is to avoid what happened in 2016. Hillary Clinton proved unable to get enough young voters to the polls to overcome Trump’s advantages with evangelicals and other working-class whites.

Yet, the 2018 midterms tell us a different story. Just as they did last week, progressive Democrats urged their party to shift their platform to the left to appeal to non-voters in 2016, pushing “Medicare-for-all” as an issue that could boost turnout. Justice Democrats, one of the signers of the letter to Biden last week, issued a detailed report to make this case.

The party broadly ignored this advice, instead focusing their health care appeals on small-bore issues like protecting the ban on insurance companies rejecting applicants for preexisting conditions. The Democrats' turnout strategy in 2018 was to rely on anger toward Trump to motivate voters. This worked. Democrats took back the majority in the U.S. House in large part by winning young voters 64-34. Midterm turnout reached unprecedented levels."

And not only did midterm turnout reach historic levels, it went up more (16 points) than among other age groups!

Arbour concludes;

"Joe Biden might do well to follow this model from 2018 and...let Donald Trump be in charge of his voter mobilization program."

Exactly.

A number of voices on the left have started to give former Vice President Joe Biden advice

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FOXNEWS.COM

Brian Arbour: Biden and the youth vote – follow this model to win in November

A number of voices on the left have started to give former Vice President Joe Biden advice

More on the Disappearing Trump Bump

As noted in my recent scribblings, Trump's approval bump was (a) remarkably small, (b) had remarkably little effect on his standing in trial heats and (c) seems to be disappearing remarkably fast.

Harry Enten adds some good data to that story in a piece on CNN (I know I featured another Enten story yesterday, but what the heck--good work is good work!)

Looking at the data, Trump seems to have had one of the fastest retreats of a rally around the flag effect in modern polling history.
Trump's net approval rating stood at -10 points among voters in an aggregate of polls as late as March 11. Less than three weeks later, it got up to -4 points on March 27. Today, it's back down to -8 points.

Even at its peak, the jump of just 6 points is weaker than any well-known rally around the flag event that I know of for a president. It's only about half that of what Barack Obama got after the killing of Osama Bin Laden. It falls well short of the nearly 70-point jump George W. Bush received after 9/11.

But even if Trump failed to reach the levels of any of his predecessors, you might have thought the bump would stick around for a while. Even the shortest of bumps (like Bush got after Saddam Hussein was captured) had residual effects for a few months. My study of rally around the flag events since World War II found that the median one still has some effect for more than 200 days after the event occurs.

We're only about 40 days after Trump started to see his polling climb. Unbelievably, this is usually when rally around the flag effects hit their peak, not when they are almost entirely extinguished.....

In terms of his reelection prospects, it should be worrying to the President that even with a black swan pandemic occurring, he couldn't get his net approval rating above 0 points. It's going to be difficult to win the election if his net approval rating is -8 points among voters on election day."

Make no mistake: The Orange One is in trouble.

Poll of the week: A new Gallup poll finds President Donald Trump's approval stands at 43%. His disapproval rating is at 54%.

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CNN.COM

Trump's approval rally has disappeared

Poll of the week: A new Gallup poll finds President Donald Trump's approval stands at 43%. His disapproval rating is at 54%.

Liberals, Read Anne Case's and Angus Deaton's Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism and Then Look Deep Within Your Souls

In an excellent review of the Case-Deaton book by Arlie Russell Hochschild in the Times Book Review, she concludes her review by considering how the book may be received by liberals. She has her doubts about how favorable that reception might be and in the process puts her finger on a key problem bedeviling today's left:

"Readers on the liberal left....are likely to applaud the authors’ many highly thoughtful proposals to counter growing inequality. But while liberals tend to root for the underdog, white males have not been first in line for their sympathy. So one possible source of resistance to this book’s message for them might arise from something else: splitting. This is the tendency to hold apart two apparently incompatible images or ideas, without seeing how the two connect.

Faced with a coal miner suffering black lung disease, or a laid-off factory hand, liberals feel compassion. Faced, on the other hand, with a man in cowboy boots and red MAGA hat, arms defiantly folded, who dismisses climate science and insults overeducated “snowflakes,” many see — and hate — “the enemy.”

Yet what if these are one and the same man? Or almost the same man? What if the man in the red MAGA hat has a brother or high school classmate who died of a heroin overdose? What if his buddy on the road crew drove drunk off an embankment at night and no one called it suicide? What if he fears it’s too late or too expensive to go to college? If we could ask the men in this book, before they swallowed their last pill or swig of whiskey, or fired their last shot, whom it was they would have voted for in 2016, chances are it would have been for that dogged and aggressive great salesman of hope, Donald Trump.

So we’re left with a challenge. The policies the liberal left embraces — affordable B.A.’s, job retraining, fairer taxes, a Green New Deal — are precisely those policies that could best help victims of diseases of despair. Darin [a man Hochschild has interviewed] got into a rehab program, and generously shared with me the silver token given him to celebrate four years of sobriety. He’s now earned his B.A., and has become a well-regarded counselor in a local prisoner release program — both the sorts of publicly funded projects liberals embrace. While Darin doesn’t wear a MAGA hat, his dearest childhood friend, now an unemployed addict, does. The great problem of this highly important book — and indeed of our current political moment — is how to link together the story of Darin’s friend and the jeering man in the MAGA hat."

This continues to be problem for the left. Perhaps if more people read the Case-Deaton book, we might start getting somewhere on this one.

“Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, describes the growing dysfunction of blue-collar workers in white communities.

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NYTIMES.COM

How the White Working Class Is Being Destroyed

“Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, describes the growing dysfunction of blue-collar workers in white communities.

Florida, Florida, Florida

Harry Enten has a good piece up on CNN about the centrality of Florida to the 2020 election. I agree. For all the attention observers--including myself--give the Rustbelt three of MI, PA and WI, the fact remains that Trump carried FL in 2016 by barely over a point; if the Democrats take it and its 29 EVs back in 2020, they're practically done shopping, assuming they hold all their 2016 states. All they would need would be one other state--MI, PA, WI, AZ, NC--and they're done (and so is Trump).

So what are the chances? Enter makes the argument that they're pretty decent. He notes:

"Biden holds a three-point advantage in the Sunshine State in an average of nonpartisan probability polls that controls for pollster. That's closer than Wisconsin (one-point Biden lead), and the same as what we see as in Pennsylvania. Biden is up four points in Arizona and five points in Michigan. (North Carolina, another close Trump won state in 2016, gives Biden a one-point edge, but the high quality polling there has been limited.)"

The RCP average has it closer, just Biden by a whisker, though they throw all the polls in the hopper without adjustment for house effects. The UCLA/Democracy Fund/Lucid Nationscape data--70,000 cases and counting since the beginning of the year--actually had Biden ahead by more in the state, around 5 points. Those data also show Biden shaving 11 points off the Democrats' white noncollege deficit in the state in 2016. These two things are related. More Enten:

"The story of the 2016 election has often been told like this: "Donald Trump secured victory by breaking through the big blue wall in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin." It's how you end up with all those stories about Trump voters in Midwest diners. Heading into 2020, there's still a lot of focus on those pivotal states.

But when you look at the electoral math, it's pretty clear that former Vice President Joe Biden would be wise to look beyond those states and make a heavy investment in Florida.
Florida was a very close state in 2016. Trump won it by just 1.2 points, which is not significantly wider than the margins he won Michigan (0.2 points), Pennsylvania (0.7 points) and Wisconsin (0.8 points). The next closest state (Arizona) featured a significantly larger Trump win (3.5 points). In fact, the presidential margin in Florida has been within 6 points in every election since 1992, including when Democrat Barack Obama won it in 2008 and 2012. No other state has been within that range for so long....

Florida diversifies the types of states Biden would be competing hard in. When you want to give yourself as many electoral pathways as possible, you want states that are demographically and geographically diverse from each other. That way, if you underperform in one state, it doesn't mean you have in the others. Florida has more nonwhite voters than any of the other close states Trump won in 2016. And it's a southeastern state, unlike Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. There's really no other state like it.

Florida is the type of state where you'd expect Biden to outperform Clinton given the recent polling. It has the highest percentage of seniors in the country amongst its citizen voting age population. Right now, Biden actually leads Trump among those 65 years and older by nine points in an average of the five most recent probability national polls....

According to an analysis by the New York Times' Nate Cohn... the southern swing state voters who didn't cast a ballot in 2018 were much more friendly to Democrats than those in the northern swing states. In the sunbelt, a large portion were nonwhite. In the north, the clear plurality were whites without a college degree.

With presidential year turnout, Biden's likely going to be very competitive in Florida. If he wins there, it'll be awfully tough for Trump to beat him nationally."

The story of the 2016 election has often been told like this: "Donald Trump secured victory by breaking through the big blue wall in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin." It's how you end up with all those stories about Trump voters in Midwest diners. Heading into 2020, there's still a lot of focus...

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CNN.COM

Why Florida may have a big role in 2020

The story of the 2016 election has often been told like this: "Donald Trump secured victory by breaking through the big blue wall in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin." It's how you end up with all those stories about Trump voters in Midwest diners. Heading into 2020, there's still a lot of focus...

The Left Grows Up?

It's nice to see some who were in and around the Berniesphere drawing some sensible lessons from his defeat and planning for a future that doesn't repeat the same mistakes. Sean "Abolish ICE" McElwee, who started as a bit of a firebrand and then went on to help found Data for Progress is definitely one of those.

There's a nice long interview with him on Politico by Michael Grunwald. I don't agree with everything McElwee has to say in the interview but I agree with a surprising amount of it.

"If you had to boil [Sanders' mistakes] down to one problem, it was the belief the Sanders people articulated early on that in a big field, they could win the nomination with 30 percent of the vote. You know, elections tend to be won with 50 percent of the vote. If you’re not even trying to attract 50 percent to your vision, it leads to this view that you don’t need to persuade anyone, you just need to lock in the base and mobilize new voters. That’s setting yourself up for failure. And it’s inspired some very pernicious thinking in the progressive world: Those people who don’t believe what we believe, we can’t win them, so fuck them. You saw this most aggressively on Twitter, where you saw people say: “We need to crush these people, they’re forever lost to us.”....

Warren and Sanders chose not to invest heavily in polling or focus groups. They crafted powerful messages, and they executed well, but those messages didn’t hit the Democratic electorate. That’s why we do message testing and survey research! I’m a college-educated 18-to-34-year-old urban professional, so I’m a tiny percentage of the electorate. I’d be pretty surprised if what appealed to me appealed to the modal American voter. The modal American voter is noncollege and over 50. People like me have to stop trusting our instincts. We should make ads that nonpolitical voters want to see, not ads that we want to see. Go look at the ads by [Alabama Democratic senator] Doug Jones or [Michigan Democratic governor] Gretchen Whitmer; they might not seem appealing on social media but they move votes....

It was smart of AOC to identify as a Democrat, because most Democrats do believe the things that progressives believe. And most Democrats have quite intense party loyalty. One of the biggest misunderstandings on the left is the idea that the Democratic brand is bad. In fact, the Democratic Party brand is one of the strongest brands in the country....

I’d like to see progressives focus on building the infrastructure and policy support for our priorities. I do worry about the lack of dedication to learning the nitty-gritty details of how the process works. I’ve worked on legislation in New York state, and I’ve seen how the simplest thing, like changing voter registration from opt-in to opt-out at the DMV, can require an incredible amount of bureaucratic competence, technical capacity, things like that. Progressives need to dedicate ourselves to learning how those bureaucracies function, or we’re going to be woefully unprepared to implement our agenda....

A lot of leftists don’t think of Data for Progress as a leftist organization—not because they don’t think we’re leftists, but because we started an organization! We’re engaging in politics! And yeah, we’re engaging with Democrats; we gave advice to every primary candidate except Tulsi Gabbard. I always say we love all Democrats, just in different amounts. Working and pushing inside the Democratic Party is the way that progressive gains will happen. They’ll never be exactly what we want, but that’s life....

[A] lot of progressives were upset about the Affordable Care Act. And yeah, we wish there was a public option. But look what happened: The Medicaid expansion has been a big success, while the private exchanges have struggled, and that’s helped make our case that delivering concrete benefits through the public sector works, and it’s undermined the neoliberal policy strategy. My view is that the Democratic Party is moving every day towards a place where young progressives should feel comfortable."

Of course, none of this is rocket science. Indeed a lot of it is Politics 101. But some of Sanders' supporters did not appear to have taken that course. Maybe now that insiders like McElwee are making these points, more left activists will take them up. I certainly hope so.

Progressive pot-stirrer Sean McElwee has some thoughts about what went wrong for Sanders supporters, and how they can get what they want (eventually).

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POLITICO.COM

What AOC Gets that Bernie Didn’t

Progressive pot-stirrer Sean McElwee has some thoughts about what went wrong for Sanders supporters, and how they can get what they want (eventually).

North Carolina: The Least Considered Important State

Many observers say that the election in 2020 may well come down to six states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida and North Carolina. I agree. Of these six, it's fair to say NC gets the least attention. That may not be justified since it should be very competitive indeed this cycle and, if it falls, Trump could be a goner. Right now, the RCP average has Biden leading Trump by 3 in the state and the Natonscape data (since the beginning of the year) have Biden up by a point.

Amy Walter runs down the importance of NC and its highly contestable nature in a good Cook Political Report analysis.

"I have been thinking a lot about North Carolina these days. While the former "Blue Wall" states get the lion's share of coverage, North Carolina is actually the bigger bang for the buck. It is one of just two states — the other is Arizona — to have its presidential contest and its senate race in the Toss Up column. Oh, and it also has a competitive Governor's race.

How North Carolina goes is not just going to determine who wins the White House, but also who controls the Senate.

There's a good reason why the GOP is holding its convention (well, we think there will be an in-person convention) in North Carolina instead of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Michigan. Trump can afford to lose two of those three midwestern states and still hold the White House. But, if he loses North Carolina, the path to 270 is that much harder. For example, if Trump lost Pennsylvania and Michigan, won Wisconsin and carried all the other states he won in 2016, he would win the Electoral College by a squeaker — 270-268. If he lost North Carolina, as well as Pennsylvania and Michigan, but won everywhere else he did in 2016; he would lose, getting 255 electoral votes to Biden's 283.

On the Senate side, Democrats are very bullish (and Republicans quite jittery) about GOP Sen. Thom Tillis' re-election chances. And, it's hard to see how Democrats get to a majority in the Senate without this state. Even if Democrats succeed in knocking off GOP Sens. Cory Gardner (CO), Susan Collins (ME) and Martha McSally (AZ), they are likely to lose one seat, that of Alabama Dem. Doug Jones. That leaves Democrats one seat shy. A win in North Carolina, therefore, would get Democrats to the magic number 50. If Biden wins the presidency, the Democratic Vice President would be the tie-breaking vote."

Kind of whets the appetite, doesn't it?

I have been thinking a lot about North Carolina these days. While the former "Blue Wall" states get the lion's share of coverage, North Carolina is actually the bigger bang for the buck. It is one of just two states — the other is Arizona — to have its presidential contest and its senate race in...

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COOKPOLITICAL.COM

Battleground North Carolina: The Suburban Vote

I have been thinking a lot about North Carolina these days. While the former "Blue Wall" states get the lion's share of coverage, North Carolina is actually the bigger bang for the buck. It is one of just two states — the other is Arizona — to have its presidential contest and its senate race in...