2024 Pre-Election Political Polls | POLL - Trump would have had 7 point lead over Biden

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“As of noon Tuesday, nearly 3.2 million voters had cast ballots in the 2024 general election in North Carolina, a turnout of 40.7 percent of registered voters, according to preliminary State Board of Elections data.

North Carolina has about 7.8 million registered voters.

… Through the end of the day Monday, more than 2.9 million voters had cast ballots in person during the first 12 days of the early voting period. That’s an increase of 11.9 percent over 2020, when more than 2.6 million voters had cast ballots after 12 days of in-person voting. Factoring in increases in registered voters between 2020 and 2024, in-person early voting is up 2.1 percent over 2020.

… Additionally, turnout in the 25 Western North Carolina counties affected by Hurricane Helene continues to outpace statewide turnout. …”

 
So PA is a state with mostly R or D voters. About 10% of early ballots have been cast by unaffiliated.

For the back of an envelope, let's discount those 10%. If the state is tied, then we'd assume that about 50% of the voters would be Dems and 50% Pubs. "Nearly a third" might mean 30%. So if that's the case, then you'd expect 25% of those votes to be Dem women. Add the UAs back in and maybe the number shrinks a bit, to 22, 23%. So this is not a massive outperformance. And I don't know how big that block of "non 2020 voters" actually is.

I don't see this as big news. Certainly not the best news Dems have had in weeks.

Here's how I see the relevance: Dems won PA by a little over a point. So if we use 2020 as the baseline, that baseline is Dem +80K votes or so. Pubs need to make up that ground somewhere. If the non 2020 vote is coming in with a plurality of Dem women, that suggests maybe they won't make it up so much from non 2020 voters.

BUT BUT BUT all of this data is still self-selected. And there are two sources of "voters who didn't vote in PA in 2020" -- people who were living there, and people who relocated there. Relocated people tend to be educated. They are going to be Dem. And because they are educated, they are also more likely to vote early. So without crunching numbers too much, you'd expect there to be some Dem overperformance among new early voters. Trump isn't focused on relocating people. He's focused on low propensity voters. I don't think this data point tells us all that much about how well the low-propensity voting turnout is going.
 
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CNN North Carolina cross-tabs:

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Gender gap seems much more prevalent in NC than Georgia for some reason.
I don't know about Georgia, but 49% of registered voters in NC are women, compared to 41% for men. There's not just a turnout gap; there's a sizeable registration gap as well.
 
“As of noon Tuesday, nearly 3.2 million voters had cast ballots in the 2024 general election in North Carolina, a turnout of 40.7 percent of registered voters, according to preliminary State Board of Elections data.

North Carolina has about 7.8 million registered voters.

… Through the end of the day Monday, more than 2.9 million voters had cast ballots in person during the first 12 days of the early voting period. That’s an increase of 11.9 percent over 2020, when more than 2.6 million voters had cast ballots after 12 days of in-person voting. Factoring in increases in registered voters between 2020 and 2024, in-person early voting is up 2.1 percent over 2020.

… Additionally, turnout in the 25 Western North Carolina counties affected by Hurricane Helene continues to outpace statewide turnout. …”

This is the difference between Rs and Ds. Rs would have been happy for Helene to ruin the Dems' party. Dems, by contrast, were reaching out to help those largely conservative voters vote.

If I was on the BOE, I would have said, "Hand of God, what can you do?"
 
This new Gallup data measuring enthusiasm is fantastic news and aligns well with all the other voter enthusiasm indicators that we've been talking about (grassroots volunteers, small donor donations, campaign field offices, etc.) Pollsters use Gallup enthusiasm data to craft their LV models. Gallup's data is showing Democratic voter enthusiasm at or exceeding 2008 levels.

My biggest complaint with polling is you need to be very precise and accurate to be meaningful in our polarized FPTP voting system combined with the Electoral College. This works well in non-competitive states where 2-5% polling miss doesn’t really matter. But the presidential election is decided by a handful of competitive states. The difference in a few points can swing the election dramatically from blue to red. I just don't think that polling can deliver an accurate prediction on these tighter races. Voter enthusiasm is going to make a major difference in the battleground states, and it's great to see that the Democrats have a sizable advantage on that front.
 
Ultimately, I think early vote numbers are not as meaningless as last week. Part of that is because there have been more cast, but more importantly, Trump is closing so badly. There's no enthusiasm from him, from his campaign, from his supporters. Maybe that won't matter and his folks will turn out on election day anyway, but he's not doing much that would inspire his supporters. Hell, they leave his rallies early, and when they are there, they are not enthused at all.
 
This does not give me warm fuzzies

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That disproportionate white/Republican vote early seems very pro-Trump. The CNN cross-tabs didn’t include a subset for those who already voted.

Also, I think the undesignated by gender is warping perception of a gender gap in voting. I think most of the undesignated are probably people who suck at completing forms, and could well be disproportionately men based on the gender gap in registration generally. NC demographics are that just under 49% of the total population are men.
 
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This new Gallup data measuring enthusiasm is fantastic news and aligns well with all the other voter enthusiasm indicators that we've been talking about (grassroots volunteers, small donor donations, campaign field offices, etc.) My biggest complaint with polling is you need to be very precise and accurate to be meaningful in our polarized FPTP voting system combined with the Electoral College. This works well in non-competitive states where 2-5% polling miss doesn’t really matter. But the presidential election is decided by a handful of competitive states. The difference in a few points can swing the election dramatically from blue to red. I just don't think that polling can deliver an accurate prediction on these tighter races. Voter enthusiasm is going to make a major difference in the battleground states, and it's great to see that the Democrats have a sizable advantage on that front.
Enthusiasm doesn't vote. The vote counts the same whether you sprint with excitement to the polling booth, or trudge with reservations. I've never seen good data linking enthusiasm to turnout, though it's also true I haven't looked.

But in this election, I think this is going to be important given Trump's emphasis on turning out low-propensity voters. Almost by definition, you have to get them excited. That doesn't seem to be what is happening now.

Part of this, I think, is that Trump and his crew are projecting (I know, surprise). They think, "it gets us excited to assert dominance over women," and so that becomes their closing message to the bro vote. But does the bro vote really get excited about that? Obviously they have some connection to dominance over women; in large measure, that's what they are seeking to preserve. But does it motivate them in such an explicit way? How many people see Trump say, "whether they like it or not" and think, "yeah! That's right. Shove our protection down our ladies' throats. I'll run through a brick wall for that guy." How many of those people will actually vote? And how many are voting because of that? I would guess very few.
 


Maybe the people who happily voted for a guy openly promising to kick their middle class ass at the kitchen table and in the wallet aren't garbage. Maybe they're just unimaginable morons?
 
This does not give me warm fuzzies

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That disproportionate white/Republican vote early seems very pro-Trump. The CNN cross-tabs didn’t include a subset for those who already voted.
How do you know that white/Republican vote is going to be pro-Trump? I mean, it's obviously going to be pro-Trump on average, but on the margins? I'm not worried about the party turnout. Dems will turn out on election day if they aren't turning out now.

I'm worried about the race turnout. I suspect, though I do not know, that registered Dems in NC are less actual Dem than black voters in NC. And in the past couple of elections, black turnout has been low. So this is a continuation of a trend, which makes me skeptical that it will reverse all that much.

On the flip side, the gender turnout numbers are great. Not only are there way more women, but they are turning out in higher %s than men. And again, that's despite the GOP turnout. This is the story I keep pumping. I hope it's right, in part because it means we win and to a lesser but not trivial extent, it would make me prescient. But it's data like this that suggests a silent Kamala vote among Republican women.
 


Maybe the people who happily voted for a guy openly promising to kick their middle class ass at the kitchen table and in the wallet aren't garbage. Maybe they're just unimaginable morons?

In fairness to corporate America, Trump has only gotten completely fixated on tariffs recently. Before, they were a talking point. Not necessarily something he was going to do. Now they are the linch pin of his entire economic policy, meaning that he will do them because he is all-in on that at the moment and he doesn't need Congress.
 
In fairness to corporate America, Trump has only gotten completely fixated on tariffs recently. Before, they were a talking point. Not necessarily something he was going to do. Now they are the linch pin of his entire economic policy, meaning that he will do them because he is all-in on that at the moment and he doesn't need Congress.
And unfortunately tariffs will be the least of our problems when President Musk and VP Thiel destroy the USD, freak the markets, and crash the economy.
 
I swear Elon wants to the crash the economy and then push crypto as some sort of global economic savior.
If so, joke's on him.

1. Already, BTC does not look like a hedging or alternative asset. It's more of a high-beta proxy for Nasdaq. A plummet in stocks will very likely cause a plummet in crypto.

2. In a panic, all correlations go to 1. We saw that in 2008. Before crypto was around.

3. If prices go up, people will start . . . selling BTC for the cash, since they can spend cash and not BTC. If people lose their jobs, they will start spending BTC.

4. I've never seen an asset class as vulnerable to a crash as crypto. Literally the entire value of crypto is confidence. If a financial panic sets in, and its value starts to drop, and people panic some more -- well, you know, the actual intrinsic value of a BTC is approximately, if not precisely, zero. Those are the types of assets that usually crash (and in some cases to zero) badly in severe downturns.

I won't say that watching crypto get destroyed would make it all worthwhile, but it would be a substantial side benefit. The sooner we can rid ourselves of crypto, the better.
 
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