From Here To Election Day | 538 Politics Podcast

an underrated aspect of this year's elections the British election was on July 4th and the American election is on November 5th AKA guy fox day that's true oh yeah y fireworks for Britain in America and then fireworks for America in Britain okay well somebody just described our last round of polling over the next few months as the finale to a fireworks show so I feel like that works out really well that's good I love that [Music] hello and welcome to the 538 politics podcast I'm gayen Dro and we are exactly 2 months away from election day in fact early voting in Pennsylvania The likeliest Tipping Point state begins in just a week and a half September 16th folks it is election time to help prepare for the final post Labor Day stretch we're assessing the presidential election from perspectives how we got here where we are now and what we should expect over the next 2 months we discussed where we are and how we got here in the last podcast episode so if you missed it you may want to go back and listen to that first today we're going to talk about what to expect over the next two months how much polling usually changes between Labor Day and election day sources of polling error debates and of course October surprises joining me again are senior elections analyst Nathaniel raikit and survey editor at the New York Times Ruth gelnick let's Dive Right In so election Watchers probably us included treat Labor Day like a bright dividing line in the campaign calendar before Labor Day we caveat most things with it's too early after Labor Day we're really into real election season so how much do polls actually typically change between Labor Day and elction day well gayen our own gellot Morris has done some work on this and basically he found that since 1948 uh at this point in the election cycle the margin between the candidates in State polling averages moves historically by about 7 percentage points so that is obviously a lot and you should expect a decent amount of volatility in the polls that said 1948 is a long time we are in more polarized times these days so I don't expect seven points of movement between now and election day but I do expect that these averages will not look exactly the same on Election Day and because when we're talking about leads of point2 points or whatever obviously that's important yeah Nathaniel as you mentioned the 1940s was a long time ago and our producer Shane crunched some of the numbers more recently and if you look from the 1980s onwards it looks like the volatility is more like between Labor Day and actual election day 3 and a half percentage points and then if you actually just look from the 2000s onward it's more like 2 and a half percentage points so yes that final Labor Day stretch used to be a period during which you could see all kinds of wild swings it seems like that's lessoned but of course sometimes history is prolog and sometimes it's not Ruth do you think that Labor Day proves as a real marker in terms of when the real campaign happens and when things can really shift I think why it matters is cu historically it was when voters started paying attention right and this election has been a little bit different because we saw that shift a little bit earlier little bit um a little bit earlier um but that was the historical marker that mattered not so much that the polls couldn't shift during that time period they could and did and will um it was more that that was when people started paying attention and so actually you could argue there might be more volatility after Labor Day than before Labor Day because people weren't paying attention so I think that's the marker to to Really note so would we take that suggestion and say well maybe that period has already happened because if you look at Gallup polling in August 79% of Americans said they are giving quite a lot of thought to the campaign that is a record for Gallup asking this question in August they also ask it right before the election happens the all-time high for that number since they started asking this question was 84% and that was October of 2004 like right before the election in 2004 we're only 5 percentage points shy of that number in August so I mean there's not even that much more attention literally that can be paid before you reach 100% uh is that reason to believe that this Cycle's post Labor Day will have any less meaning than past post labor days I don't think so because I think one of the things one of the sort of themes we keep seeing come up is this race to Define kamla Harris that you know Harris is trying to Define herself and that Trump is trying to Define her we talked a little bit earlier about the sort of dramatic swing in favorability for her and one thing that any dramatic swing in polls these days really clues in to me in this hyperpolarized era is that those are fairly soft opinions if things swing really dramatically it's because it's not a really firmly held opinion so I think there's reason to expect some volatility even though people are paying a tremendous amount of attention because I think there's still a lot of Def that needs to come in this race yeah Ruth that's a really interesting point and the Wall Street Journal asked this directly they said do you have a firm opinion of KLA Harris yes or no or do you need to hear more about her 84% said they had a firm opinion of her 15% said they need to know more in a relatively polarized World 15% ain't nothing so is that evidence to you that really there is more sort of softness and volatility potentially yes that is absolutely evidence to me and that's the exact question that I think the Wall Street Journal many others will be asking to try to understand and it'll be particularly interesting in swing States um because yeah to me 15% is a relatively High number and granted we've historically like these past few elections we've been talking about kind of insanely well-known candidates between Trump and Biden and Clinton but at the same time it's enough people to really make a difference and kind of Mak up a lot of that swing in her favorability is people who are like well I don't really know but she seems good and maybe that holds as they learn more about her and maybe it doesn't that's hard to say yeah so I think it's instructive here that when we saw the polls basically not move between Biden and Trump in 2024 basically like until the debate and also like throughout a lot of the 2020 cycle we were dealing with some very well-known candidates and in 2016 the polls were a little more volatile because people were still kind of feeling out their opinion of trump uh in particular right you saw after Access Hollywood he dipped down and then after the Comey letter he went back up and Clinton went down so there is some recentish precedent for the polls to change and I think to Ruth's Point another interesting tidbit is that if you look at our polling averages you look at our Harris Trump polling average now Trump has basically been consistently at 44% you look at our Biden Trump polling average Trump was also at 44% um for a while he he rose a little bit after the debate his numbers have been quite consistent and I think that tracks with the fact that everybody knows how they feel about Donald Trump at this stage KLA Harris and Joe Biden you Joe Biden was was obviously polling lower he was like around 40 41% in our polling average before and Harris is now pulling higher that that variability has been on the Democratic side and so I completely agree with Ruth that Harris is kind of the perceptions of Harris and Harris's number in particular is maybe what's softer and what could move here so another thing that's going to happen over the next two months is a lot of talk about polling error Ruth what sources of error in this election keep you up at night oo all sources of error keep me up at night she's not sleeping folks no right yeah I have small kids I'm never sleeping um there are three things for me that I I think I'm paying a lot of attention to and one is maybe resolved I think I was very worried earlier in the cycle about the error that was associated with a more popular Third Party candidate just because polling it's very challenging to measure Third Party candidate support if you name them you historically overstate their support if you don't name them you obviously understate their support and so how polls were handling that was really inconsistent and I worried a lot about that leading to error that is arguably less important now with Kennedy dropping out though I still think some of that is a little bit murky the other two sources of error are kind of interrelated one is I'm concerned about error in accurately measuring Latino voters that's been a fairly swingy group this cycle and I think we and others have been paying a lot of attention to that and making sure that we're very accurate in making sure we get the right types of Latino voters college educated Latino voters non- colge educated voters that speak English voters that primarily speak Spanish so just making sure that we are accurately measuring and have the right balance of those voters and interrelated sort of states that have higher than average polling error and some of that is states where we have a higher share of Latino voters but also just other states where there's a higher than average polling error right like Wisconsin is a source of anxiety for all of us the biggest polling error in Wisconsin recently was nine percentage points in 2020 if we're looking at Wisconsin right now and a lot of Democrats are looking at Wisconsin and saying that looks like an okay state for Harris a 9 percentage Point polling error could really change the conversation around that state so I think don't trust a Wisconsin poll folks exactly so I think state level polling error is really the thing that keeps me up at night is these states where we have this higher than average polling error do you think that pollsters have worked hard in general I mean the New York Times has also shown their work on this I mean they've tried different survey methods in Wisconsin sending actual snail mail creating actual incentives to respond to surveys trying to see the difference between high response surveys and low response surveys and what the different kinds of voters might be who respond to service literally in Wisconsin and so I know you've all been showing your work and being really diligent in this space and trying to fine-tune the work that you're doing accordingly but do you think the broader pulling landscape has been sort of working hard on this issue after the past two presidential elections and that they've tried to make changes to address some of the sources of error yeah I would say yes and I would say yes people are working very hard at it and I don't know if we found the solution yet I think it's a problem that we know exists and a lot of people in the polling Community are spending a lot of time and attention on at the same time we walked out of 2020 without sort of firm conclusions on what all went wrong to cause that pulling error so without a clear Direction on what went wrong it's hard to feel like we've gotten our hands around found a clear solution um like you said we've done work in Wisconsin with high response rate surveys and incentives to try to see if the types of Voters that we were getting are different than the types of Voters that we get with our phone polls that have 1 to 2% response rates and we found that the voters that we got when we did these higher response rate surveys were sort of less politically engaged which could be valuable the sort of balance of partisanship wasn't necessarily wrong in that our phone polls match what we were getting getting these higher response rate surveys but we were getting these s of less politically engaged people that could be a Difference Maker so that's something that we think we might have gotten our hands around but I I still worry about it obviously it's still something that's of concern to me Nathaniel what keeps you up at night um and for you I'm asking just generally not P the possibility of pulling error is real right we talked about the the shift I think it's important to remember that there are these two kind there well there are many types of pulling error but like the thing two things that we don't know right now are how much the polls are going to change between now and election day and then how much the polls on Election Day are going to be quote unquote wrong and obviously the polls on Election Day can be wrong for many reasons there's kind of good old fashioned sampling error where it's just like you didn't get like your sample just like wasn't quite it was maybe a couple points too Republican or to democratic and that's the ball game and then they're kind of trickier things like uh non-response error which is you know this idea of uh that you know maybe there's something systematic about Trump voters in 2020 and 2016 that we maybe or maybe haven't solved about in terms of kind trying to make sure that we're getting more of them in the sample um and again the polling era could also go the other way uh you know we've seen Democrats being very engaged in elections like special elections over the last several years and maybe if you have a situation where Democratic turnout is significantly higher than people were expecting you know the polls might lowball them as well and so that kind of thing I mean in some ways it's good that the polls are so close because it makes our job easier as journalists to say yeah that 0.2 percentage point lead it could go either way and it's hard I think for people to dispute that you know that's just the thing we want to get across to people is that right now at least this is a very close election and even if the polls are like historically accurate that would you could still be off by like one point if the average polling error were one point that would be fantastic that would be such a great performance for the polls but obviously in a state with a 0. 2 percentage point lead that could be the difference so that's what keeps me up at late and it's worth saying that we've said this many many many times on this podcast before the average National error in a presidential election is for percentage points and I'll just say since we were comparing from the 1980s and the 2000s until now since the 2000s the average error like comparing polls from Labor Day to the end result is three and a half percentage points and if you compare the 1980s until now it's five percentage points between the polling around Labor Day and where the actual results end up so that's a difference between how much the actual polls move yeah and I will just add and maybe this is sort of a controversial take my entire career is focused around polls I think polls are insanely valuable they're the voice of the people I could go on and on and on but I think something polls aren't great at is measuring really really close elections they are fairly blunt instruments they do us a do a really good job of showing us where things generally stand and they're showing us right now that things are generally very close but being able to tell the difference between one percentage point this way and one percentage point that way polls just aren't great at that they're not a exact enough instrument to be able to tell that difference and that is a real challenge because it is the only tool that we have to measure these kind of things but it's also an imperfect tool and so I think that's just a real challenge right in some ways the thing that we obsess the most over as pertains to PO is the thing that they are least good at doing so if we're talking about an error of percent points and we're looking at a question on which the American public divides you know 7525 then okay say you even double that error you still know where the majority Falls but on a question like this it's just like we ultimately know that squint and half the country feels this way half the country feels that way and like finding the difference of in the like 3% is just not what polls are in some ways even designed to do polling error is a known unnown here there are some other known unknowns and then there are a lot of fullon unknowns so let's talk about that a little bit but first a break the debates we've got one in a week we've got a VP one at the beginning of October Nathaniel how much we already had this conversation once in the cycle because we had actually the first presidential debate in June but how much might we expect these kinds of Affairs to shape the election well we've already had maybe the most consequential presidential debate in history probably I guess you'd have to say so right so obviously it'd be pretty pretty silly to say that debates can't matter or don't matter our colleague gelott Morris did crunch the numbers before that first debate and found that generally speaking the polls move by an average of two points uh historically after after the debate can make a difference but on the margin which is kind of the same old song right kind of to the point of what we were talking about earlier this is K Harris's first debate again Donald Trump has done lots of these he did them in 2020 he did them in 2016 we saw him already in 2024 well she had a VP debate oh that's a good point yes that's fair but also people will be viewing her with different eyes in this debate the pressure will be on it is the kind of thing that could change perceptions of her uh at this kind of malleable time for her and I think expectations will also be higher for her than they were for Biden um which doesn't help her basically it is exactly the kind of thing that could kind of quote unquote stop her momentum but it's also the kind of thing that she could use as a springboard or could not make a difference because sometimes that happens too yeah speaking of which I was on vacation so I actually totally missed the CNN interview and I still haven't watched it I promise I will once I'm done catching up on all of my email folks don't worry you really don't have to I mean I mean that's another type of event where you could say that it will either stem or continue the momentum in your estimation did it do either of those things no that kind of thing like a debate a presidential debate is like a capital E Event right those are the types of things that people are used to being big things on the calendar even people who aren't super obsessive politics nerds like us are going to like maybe stop and watch the debate or at least they will watch clips of it afterward because they feel like it's their Duty as a citizen or whatever those individual Network interviews on the other hand they're just not nearly as big of a deal so for example that CNN interview last week got 6 million viewers which like hey you know like sounds like a decent night for cable news and like sure it is the debate in June got 50 million viewers so to give you a sense of just kind of like the scope of it and obviously people are going to watch Clips afterward and the these numbers don't include streaming and stuff like that but like again I think it shows you the the way that a debate can penetrate The Narrative about a presidential campaign much more than one individual interview as as hyped as CNN wanted to make it we are also entering the period of the race where people are absolutely inundated with advertising so far since Harris took the Helm of the democratic ticket Democrats have outspent Republicans we're going to spend more time looking at ads and AD dollars on this podcast it's a whole episode unto itself but is that another source of change or is that one of those things it's like yeah we kind of make a big deal of it and it's a big part of Elections but it doesn't change much I think probably mostly the latter we we've talked on the podcast before about how it's kind of like a mutually assured destruction type of thing like both candidates have a ton of money they're going to spend a lot of money on ads in swing States and as long as no one candidate dramatically gets their message out much more than the other one it's kind of going to cancel each other out I kind of expect that to happen so far I will say that the Harris campaign has been out advertising Trump whether it's by enough to make a difference I don't know you know again there are two months left so I don't think TV advertising is something that is historically moved campaigns all that much and I don't really expect that to be different here all right lastly we've got some unknown unknowns like October surprises there might not even be any exactly that would be uh that would be the ultimate surprise right if there are no surprises did that happen in 2020 do I remember correctly that there wasn't a real October surprise are you kidding me Ruth Peter Ginsburg died Trump got covid does RBG dieing count as an October surprise yes absolutely 1,000% that 2020 was like the most ridiculous campaign from start to finish like the Topsy turv of that race will never be topped and I am not issuing that as a challenge 2024 I don't know RBG also died in September not October and it seemed to change literally nothing we don't know I mean the polls ended up being not that accurate in 2020 so like we don't know what kind of things were happening under the surface like I don't know anyway Trump test positive for covid October 2nd 2020 boom okay there we go so RBG was a September surprise Trump's Co was an October surprise I mean the Access Hollywood tape was an October surprise and that ended up not mattering because there was the later the the next October surprise which was the Comey letter like this this is crazy yeah if we don't get anything I will be a very happy campaign okay needless to say we don't know and we won't start speculating now so with that thank you let's speculate it's fine let's do it could be fun what are what are some fun October surprises that we could get um aliens we haven't gotten the aliens yet that one's like that's the big series finale right Nathaniel what are you doing here with that thank you so much Nathaniel and Ruth for joining me today thanks for having me thanks gayen my name is gayen Duo our producers are Shane mcken and Cameron Travian and our intern is Jayla Everett you can to touch by emailing us at podcast 538.com you can also of course tweet us with questions or comments if you're a fan of the show leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us thanks for listening and we'll see you soon [Music]