This Morning's Polls

I was originally going to post on Nate Silver's Substack yesterday, The presidential election isn't a toss-up, and I'll have a few things to say farther down, but I actually think it's been overtaken by events, namely this morning's Qunnipiac and New York Times/Siena polls.

The Quinnipiac has Trump up 6 points over Biden in a 5-way matchup, while the Times/Siena poll has Trump up 3. Between them, they put Trump up 2.6 points in the Real Clear Politics 5-way aggregate, 1.5 points in the head-to-head aggregate, when only last week, the head-to-head had him up by only 0.5 points. Although as I've been saying all along, the national polls are meaningless, because the popular vote doesn't elect the president, I think the movement in those polls over June does mean something. Quinnipiac minimizes it:

As President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump prepare to face off in the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, Trump has a slight lead over Biden 49 - 45 percent in a head-to-head matchup, according to a Quinnipiac . . . University national poll of registered voters released today. This is a small change from Quinnipiac University's May 22 poll when the race was too close to call with Biden receiving 48 percent support and Trump receiving 47 percent support.

How is a 5-point shift, Trump down 1 point in May but up 4 points in June, a "small change"? On the other hand, the movement in the Times/Siena poll is in the other direction. In May, it had Trump up by 5 points over Biden 48-43, while today he's up only 3 points. There's probably some statistical chatter in both cases. On the other hand, RCP points out that on this day in history, June 27, 2020, Biden was +9.4; on June 27, 2016, Clinton was +6.8. This suggests we should be adding a significant fudge factor to today's poll results to correspond with the inaccuracies of prior years' polling.

In addition, surfing the web for commentary on these recent polls, I found Dan Pfeiffer trying to deal with trhe May Times/Siena poll:

Before we get into the specifics of this poll, it’s worth remembering that Trump is up by about two points in the overall polling average. Trump may have a slight advantage, but the polling points to a very close, winnable race in November. The defeatism that we hear from some folks with every piece of bad news is disconnected from the reality of American politics in a closely divided election—especially when the other candidate is dealing with a whopping 91 felony indictments.

Notice the mantras: this is "a very close, winnable race". Trump is dealing with "a whopping 91 felony indictments". This brings us to the month of June, following Trump's May 31 conviction in the New York "hush money" trial, which will almost certainly be the only case to reach trial before the election. The conviction simply hasn't affected the polls. On the other hand, the big news as of yesterday was that Nate Silver has announced that the election isn't a tossup, or put another way, it's neither very close nor very winnable.

It seems to me that there are two factors in this morning's polls. Althoujgh one is that the New York conviction hasn't moved them, it's looking like something else did -- and nobody's mentioned it. That's Biden's disastrous performance, especially at the G7. It was so disturbing, and so obvious, that it's driven expectations of his debate performance.

Let's recall that in 2020, the expectation, which he exceeded, was that he'd defeat himself with some relatively minor gaffe, maybe a mispronunciation, maybe substituting one world leader's name with another, maybe referring to all 57 states. In the event, he didn't. This year, driven by the episodes in the first part of June, the question will be whether he can maintain situational awareness, avoid some sort of freezeup, or even remain standing for the entire 90 minutes.

This is a big difference, and it's beginning to move the polls again, and not in Biden's favor.

Silver's Substack essay -- or at least, the lengthy, self-excusing preamble that isn't behind a paywall -- goes to great lengths to support his conclusion. For instance,

[I]f the Electoral College/popular vote gap looks anything like it did in 2016 or 2020, you’d expect Biden to be in deep trouble if the popular vote is roughly tied. So if we’re being honest, pundits who obsess over whether Biden is 1 point ahead or behind in national polls are kind of missing the point. Because national polls being tied don’t make for a toss-up race — but instead one where Trump has a material advantage in the Electoral College. In fact, the race looks a lot like 2012 in reverse, when national polls were often close but the swing state polls consistently favored Obama and gave him the far more robust map.

I ran this url past wordcounter.net and discovered that this preamble, without the part behind the paywall, runs an astonishing 4780 words, when a weekly magazine or newspaper column is normally about 750. It's clear that Silver is deeply troubled by his own conclusions, and he knows his regular audience will find them close to abhorrent. But he also makes an intriguing quasi-confession:

Now that I’m on my own — not tied to some corporate behemoth like The New York Times or Disney — I feel freer to be transparent about my preferences.

. . . Wouldn’t it be suspicious if, in the first presidential cycle where the Democrat has consistently trailed in polls since 2004, I suddenly started telling you that you should trust vibes rather than polls?

Yes, of course. It would be a sign that I’d become a hack.

What he's implying, however indirectly, is that if he were still tied to big corporate money -- as he was with FiveThirtyEight and ABC News until he left last year -- he'd be under heavy pressure, especially this year, to continue with the mantra that the election is a tossup, which as we've seen is something the people at Real Clear Politics still claim, contra their own polling. But of course, this implicitly accuses RCP and the others who continue to claim the election is a tossup of being the creature of corporate money.

Well, if the shoe fits, wear it.