The MeidasTouch Podcast - Trump Gets CRUSHING NEWS from Final Polls (with Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier)

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas interviews Simon Rosenberg from Hopium Chronicles and Tom Bonier from Target Smart on the the election data coming in today. Visit https://meidastouch.com for more! Join the MeidasTouch Patreon: https://Patreon.com/meidastouch Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card. And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months.

Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash viporter to learn more. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes.

Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Discover the magic of Bad MGM Casino, where the excitement is always on deck. Pull up a seat and check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer. Discover the magic of Bad MGM Casino, where the excitement is always on deck. Pull up a seat and check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer. From roulette to blackjack, watch as a dealer hosts your table game and live chat with them throughout your experience to feel like you're actually at the casino. The excitement doesn't stop there.

With over 3,000 games to choose from, including fan favorites like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz, and more. Make deposits instantly to jump in on the fun, and make same-day withdrawals if you win. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. You don't want to miss out. Visit BetMGM.com for terms and

conditions. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I'm joined by Tom Bonior of Target Smart, Simon Rosenberg of the Hopium Chronicles. You know, the best data guys in the game going through early voting patterns, helping us understand the polling out there. Let's start with you, Tom Bonior. Tell us,

what's the state of play one day before the election? Yeah, I mean, so here we are on the eve of the big day. We've got a lot of early votes in. About 78 million votes have been cast. We know, you know, compared to where we were four years ago, which is the baseline everyone has been using here with all the caveats that we're all pretty well aware of, that means total turnout is down about 13%. Now, we shouldn't take that as a sign of less intensity and enthusiasm. What we're taking that as a sign of is what we expected to be the case, that many people would be shifting back to Election Day voting. Now, what I'm struck by just high level when I'm looking at the early vote data is just really the colossal Republican failure and what they've been telling us they were going to do for months and months now for the the resources they have supposedly invested, the people they've brought in like Elon Musk to get their voters out early. We know that Democrats dominated the early vote four years ago. Republicans said they recognized the error and they were going to get their voters out before

election day this time around in bigger numbers. Well, again, overall turnout is down sort of across the board early. But what I'm struck by is just how much this early vote electorate resembles that 2020 electorate, that 2020 early vote electorate where Democrats won so easily. You have minor differences state to state. There are some states where Democrats are actually doing better than they were in 2020. Some states where Republicans are doing really incrementally, and we're talking about tenths of a percent better. But demographically, you still have those same giant gender gaps, again, with just tenths of a percentage point differences. Some states like North Carolina, where the gender gaps are bigger than they were at this point in 2020, some where they're incrementally smaller. And, you know, if we test the Republican theory of the case of how they were going to win, bringing out a bunch of young men, bringing in new registrants, it's not showing up in the early vote. They haven't done it. They get another bite at the apple tomorrow on election day. But, you know, they have to get a failing

grade for what they've done in the early vote so far. So, Tom, they've invested all this money, all this outreach in trying to get the early vote. That's a lot of what Elon Musk was doing. But what you're saying is that's not showing in the data that they've had any effect after making that their number one priority. that fair to say absolutely uh simon going to you right now let me just uh let me just give you this data point as well the new morrist npr poll that came out a little bit ago has vice president kamala harris of 51 to 47 that's their uh final let me toss it over to you. Yeah, two key points. One is that what we saw in polling this week.

So first of all, the vice president had her best battleground state polling of the election in the last five or six days. And if the campaign's argument is that the Madison Square Garden event sort of repulsed a lot of voters, excuse me, and it broke through into the electorate, and that it helped accelerate late deciders voting, moving towards us, and that we're winning sort of the late decider vote. You would see that, if that's true, right, you would see that in two places. One is you would see it in polling, and we are seeing it in polling. What you're seeing in many of these battleground state polls, not all of them, but again, there's

always variance, is that we're seeing Harris getting to a higher end of the band. She got to six in Wisconsin at one poll. She got to five in Michigan. She got to three in North Carolina. We saw her performing regularly in these last five or six days at the upper end, that Iowa poll, the Seltzer poll, right, where you could start seeing her upper end, the possibility of her performance went up. And we generally had a better week of polling this week than she's had, I would argue, during the whole election, the Marist poll being

confirmation of that, right. But the second way it's showing up is in the early vote. And what Tom mentioned is really important here. The Republicans made this massive investment in pushing their vote because they got burned on this in 2020 and in 2022. They came out of the 2022 midterms. The most common thing you heard from Lindsey Graham and everyone else was we got beat in the early vote. We can't ever let that happen ever again. They ran up the score. We couldn't catch up on election day.

So Donald Trump really embraced the early vote. Their campaigns really embraced the early vote. And today, I think we go into election day tomorrow in a better place in the early vote than we were four years ago. It's a huge failure, as Tom mentioned, but it's also an incredible success for us. It's reflective of this basic dynamic that Tom and I have been talking about for the last two and a half years, which is that when people go vote, not answer polls, we continue to overperform expectations

and they continue to underperform expectations because there's just too many people that see MAGA as too ugly a choice for them. And they may entertain it when they're sitting in their house and they answer a poll. But when the gravity of voting itself kicks in and they realize they have to make a consequential decision about their future, what's been happening repeatedly in election after election is that people seek enough people, seek other choices that the Republicans struggle. You saw this with the fascists in Europe and in France this summer too, the same dynamic. You saw it in the dynamic with Trump underperforming in the primaries this year, something, Ben, you talk about all the time, right?

And so what it means to me that what we're seeing here is we are seeing the election move towards us at the end, which is what we all believed would happen when our huge grassroots army that was in extraordinary display this past weekend kicked in. But it is happening both in the polling data and in the early vote data. The election's becoming bluer. And I think that there is an evidence of that, right, that the Republicans know they're losing as they dramatically escalated their red wave pollster effort, which we'll talk about in a few minutes, Ben. But it's a clear evidence they're starting to get worried about what's happening with the polling. Tom, let me go to you. Let me give you my quick recap of, I think, some meaningful events that have just occurred over the past

24 to 48 hours, at least in the polling. I think before maybe people in the Midas Mighty did not know who Ann Selzer was. The Selzer poll drops in Iowa and it has Vice President Kamala Harris up three. The Des Moines Sunday Register leads with the headline, Harris now leads Trump. But when you go into the crosstabs, one of the most meaningful data points that lots of people are talking about is Vice President Kamala Harris leading by 20 points among women in that heavily white Midwestern state. But you go to Kansas, where there's that Port Hayes poll, which isn't getting as much attention, but nonetheless, kind of a big deal, where Trump had only a plus five in a state where he won by plus 14 in 2020. And when you go right into those crosstabs again, the same dynamic of the women vote appears in Kansas, which we're

seeing kind of over and over again. Another thing to note, and Simon, I know you'll talk about this as well, it was so transparent in Iowa because the moment that poll dropped, one of the best pollsters, boom, Emerson, SoCal, Insider Advantage, all these other polls that never even poll Iowa, all of a sudden start to swarm it to skew the averages. And then Nate Selver's like, I guess we just got, to skew the averages. And then Nate Silver's like, I guess we just got to throw her into the averages. So we see that the late breakers are happening. And then, Tom, we're seeing some of this desperation, like we're seeing some of these

Republicans send polls to themselves and claim that they're like these like secret, super secret polls. But when you look at it, they're actually themselves sending themselves made up polls. You can't make this stuff up. So Tom, how significant is that data? And then Simon, I want to get to you also the bad faith part. Yeah. I mean, so look, it is one poll. We have to remember that. But if it was just one poll that wasn't consistent with, as Simon has said, what we have been seeing for over two years now. You mentioned Kansas. Well, Kansas was the first state that illuminated the massive electoral force that the Dobbs decision had become at that moment and just the early weeks after the Dobbs decision. Now to Iowa, it is actually consistent with other data we're seeing,

but just at a high level, I want to say about that poll. Yes, it is one poll. We have to keep in mind, she is one of the most accurate pollsters out there. The way I look at that poll is even if there is a fairly significant polling error underlying in that poll, which there could be, to be clear. Even good pollsters can miss. To be Harris plus three, to miss by five or six or even seven points, which would be a massive miss, would still be very bad news for the Trump campaign in a state that he won by eight points last time around. And when I say it's consistent with other data we've seen, beyond the sort of overperformance that Simon has been talking about here since Dobbs sort of consistently in every election and how what you see in that poll result is consistent in going through the early vote data. What we're seeing, interestingly, is bigger gender gaps and just huge surges among senior voters,

senior Democratic-leaning voters coming out. In a lot of these states, it's actually bigger numbers than their total 2020 early vote. Remember, I said the total early vote nationwide is down by about 13%. So if any group is actually turning out in bigger numbers we look at georgia where seniors have increased their vote by 35 percent i'm sorry that's democratic leaning seniors so again that's actually consistent with what ann seltzer was finding in that poll so i think there's a reason to to to certainly to pay attention to it sim, now to you. I talked about some of the nefarious things we saw just in Iowa. You've been on the front lines early on of warning people about these nefarious

betting markets. What we're seeing a change in these betting markets, not just the volatility that we're seeing, which doesn't go through any logical betting patterns. You also pointed out that these are crypto overseas exchanges where Americans aren't even able to vote, but they've actually now been changing their metric to who's going to be inaugurated in January, opening up the concept of coups may happen in the United States now. There may be other opportunities. Even if we lose, let's open the betting exchange for the coup, but just go more comprehensively the bad faith than we can target these, we can target smart these areas. Yeah, no, I mean, no biggie, right? Like, just because she's winning the election doesn't mean she wins the election, right?

Listen, it is the level of, if I can use this term, Ben, fuckery that we have seen from Republicans going back many, many years now. There can't really be any surprise about this, right? I mean, once you try to overturn an American election and attack the Capitol when all 435 members were there at the same time, you know, you're capable of doing anything, right? I mean, like so we're already we crossed the Rubicon on this stuff a few years ago. And we shouldn't be surprised when we are seeing now what we're seeing. And the first thing is we the red wave 2024 is vastly bigger than red wave 2022 red wave 2022. There were 40 polls. There's probably now over 150 polls that they've done since the end of August, 30 different organizations.

They did 75 polls in the last eight days. Dramatic escalation. And let's be very clear about this. This escalation is a sign that they know the election is slipping away for them because they've had to work much harder to try to create this false impression this false 2024 red wave that donald trump is winning the election why is that important to them because it's the predicate for them contesting the election this week they want to have donald trump can only successfully pull off whatever he's going to try to pull off if his voters stay with him and his

people who work for him stay with him, if the money stays with him, it's the second stage of his campaign. So what they're doing is they're talking to their own voters. Trump is leading by huge margins. Polly Market had him at 65%, right? Donald Trump keeps saying, I'm leading by more than I've ever led in polls before, right? These sort of very Trumpian kind of exaggerations. But it's there to create an impression among their voters that this is a blowout election. So when she wins, it will be obvious that we cheated, right? Because we've seen polymarket. We've seen these polls.

We've seen real clear politics, right? This stuff is flooding their social media, you know, these maps showing Trump with winning every state and all this stuff, all this false stuff. So they have created a massive propaganda disinformation campaign to tell their own voters they're winning when they aren't. And the way we know this is the escalation was required in order to counter the polls that were moving against them and the early vote data that was moving against them as we went to. This new thing you're describing is incredible.

Tom picked up on some of it. We were talking about this earlier. I saw it yesterday. They're now creating betting markets on who's going to be in the White House in January, not who's winning the election. And they're doing this for two reasons, right? One is it's going to continue to keep the drumbeat using this false system they're building that Trump is the legitimate winner of the election and should be in the White House. The second thing is they get to also keep the betting markets open. So they get to keep making money, right, by extending the election period to January. And so some of this is bad faith. Some of this is just greed, right,

and that's driving this. But the key to all this, and I wrote about this over the weekend, is that we have to change all this. This can't be allowed to ever happen again. We have to change the way that we understand political data. It just cannot be the case in a democracy as important as ours that some random Brazilian firm drops a bunch of polls on the Sunday before the election and all of us are told that we should take those polls seriously. It's fucking ridiculous and it's an insult to our democracy. And the people who are telling us that this is a legitimate form of political discourse have to change their tune.

It's outrageous what we're being asked to expect. Hundreds of polls, 30 different organizations, polymarket where Americans can't even influence any of the data. This is an outrageous affront, an illiberal affront to our democracy. We, after this election, have to be far more demanding of those that are creating the conditions for the hacking of our data system and our understanding of our own election. It's too important, our democracy, to allow this kind of horseshit to continue. We have a lot of work to do, Ben, on the other end, end after this election to really confront the people who've laundered this bad faith action and brought it into mainstream uh you know discourse in the country bring up one more good data point before getting your final remarks uh before election day but uh from this final PBS NPR Morris poll showing Vice President Kamala Harris wiping

out Donald Trump's lead among men, Trump down from plus 16 among men last month to just plus four now. Harris still leads among women by double digits. And I think you've seen with people like LeBron James and former President Barack Obama and others, the pro-democracy movement recapturing just being a man. And being a man means not putting people down and screwing people over and doing anything like that and kind of recapturing the narrative from all of these MAGA folks. Let me ask you this, Tom. What are you looking for on election day? What is your kind of final, what should people be looking for? So as

you start to see the data roll in, what are you looking at? Yeah, well, that's the great thing about the early vote data is it sort of narrows our focus and our understanding of what each campaign is going into election day needing. And, you know, from the Trump campaign, we've covered this, but to clarify here, it just means that the voters who they said they were going to get out early, that that was going to be what was going to reverse and sort of change the electorate in their favor relative to one four years ago that wasn't favorable, was get out these young men. So that data that you just shared is problematic for them. And then to bring out these new registrants, lower propensity voters, they said

they were going to get out and they haven't in the early vote. So that's the lift for them, which is really they're in a as deep of a hole, if not deeper than they were four years ago, as Simon said, they've got to do something bigger. For Democrats, things are going according to plan. And so what they need to do is all those, the younger voters, the voters of color, the gender gaps that we've seen since Dobbs, those voters who have told us we're intending to vote on election day, that gives the Harris campaign the opportunity to really put up some big numbers on election day. So I'm going to be looking when that early vote data first drops in these states

that count the early vote data first, states like Michigan, where they can count early. North Carolina is a pretty fast state. We'll be looking for signs in those results. If you checked against the baselines of four years ago, if you see Vice President Harris running even or outperforming in the counties that come in where they're completed faster, which again will be generally smaller and more Republican-leaning counties, if we see overperformance in those counties early, that'll be a very good sign for the Harris campaign. That's what I'll be looking at in the sort of first hour or two after polls close. Simon? Yeah, I mean, I echo everything Tom said. I think that, I think we

also have to sort of steady ourselves to recognize that we may really not, if it's really close, we may not know until Friday, Thursday or Friday, and people have to be sort of always believed it would be, where it was far more likely that we would overperform our polls than to underperform them because of all the dynamics we discussed earlier, then you will start to see, as Tom mentioned, you'll start to see that in the performance in these counties that can count their votes quicker. But there's going to be a lot that we don't know. And given what's happened, we all have to be careful and cautious to not jump the gun and to stick to our knitting in essence, right?

But I will just tell everyone who's watching, you know, between Tom and I, we have more than 55, 60 years of experience in doing this kind of stuff. And A, our campaign feels like a winning campaign. It has the vibes of a campaign that's winning. Joyful candidate, extraordinary exuberance in the events, enormous ambition, creativity, right? Every day, there's like new, amazing stuff. Huge performance, overperformance in the early vote polls breaking our

way unprecedented amounts of money you know uh all that stuff right and then look at the other guy the guy which you document so well been here every day is just melting down unraveling embarrassing himself you know is clearly in middle stage of kind of some kind of dementia or something else. He has impulse control problems. He's starting to reference sexual stuff on stage on a repeated basis. It's crazy, right? I mean, we're closing unbelievably strong with joy. They're closing unbelievably ugly in every way imaginable. And so I just want to conclude by saying that based on everything I'm seeing, everyone I'm talking to on the ground, people on the ground are feeling it right now. I would so much rather be us than them

going into this final day and a half. But what we need to do as citizens is to continue to do the work to keep driving this vote so that we reach the upper end of what's possible in our performance because not only is winning important but so is the margin and that's why whatever anybody can do here in terms of phone calling canvassing you know ballot curing just go do it right leave it all in the playing field no regrets tuesday night no regrets if you need places to donate money come to hopium i've made some late recommendations. But folks, the power is in our hands now. We're having the election we all want to have,

but we need to close out this thing, finish strong, and go win this thing together. There you have it. Tom Bonior, Target Smart, Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles. It should be noted that when people are out there talking about the data, they're talking about Tom's data itself. And so when you have Simon, who's been doing this forever, Tom giving you the data that's actually trying to be used and manipulated, but he's telling you, let me explain to you what my data means. That's why we go to the source here at Midas Touch Network. Thank you both. This has been incredible. You helping us through this coverage and I'm sure we'll have you back

soon. Although maybe I don't hope to have you back soon. It's kind of like when I was a lawyer, it was like, you didn't want to necessarily give me a call when I was a lawyer but i want to speak to you both right now and for real thank you for everything that um that you've done you're doing everybody hit subscribe let's get to 4 million subscribers together have a good day everybody real quick medages changed their algorithm to suppress political content please follow our instagram at midas touch right now as we head towards 400,000 followers so you don't miss a beat.