The MeidasTouch Podcast - Trump Gets SURPRISING BAD NEWS from Latest Polls

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump getting bad news from the recent independent polling data. Read more from Simon: https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/ Visit Tom's TargetSmart: https://targetearly.targetsmart.com/ 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

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I'm joined by Tom Bonnier of TargetSmart, Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles. We got to break down all of the various polling that's out there. There's a deluge of information, a lot of disinformation out there. What we always want to strive to do at the Midas Touch Network is really get the best data and understand the best data that we can to make sense of all of the different polling, early voting returns, vote by mail returns. Tom, I'll start with you and the post that you made recently. I wonder what is what you recently. I wonder what is what you wrote. I wonder what it says about the psychology of each party's relative base that the GOP fundraising emails, and I'll go and say their posts on social media as well, are super confident, generally talking about by how much they are winning, while the emails and

the communications and posts from Democrats are something along the lines of, Tom, we are all doomed, exclamation point, exclamation point. But I want to just delve into that because that is a reality too. You speak to someone that you know who's MAGA, they go, we've got this in the bag. You speak to someone on the Democratic side, they go, I'm nervous. I'm nervous about this. So let's just start 30,000 foot view. Then we'll get into the specific states, the various pollings, the early vote return, but give us your 30,000 view first, then we'll go to Simon. Yeah. And this is something that I've started calling asymmetric anxiety because it's just, it's funny. And this is not, by the way, the first cycle that I've started calling asymmetric anxiety because it's just it's it's funny and this is not by the way the first cycle that we've experienced this we've all lived through this

before and even if you just think over the last few cycles it's this time of year where the MAGA enthusiasts are most confident um the last few white cycles they've gotten pretty quiet after election day so uh they're having their moment. But, you know, what we're actually seeing is a remarkably stable race. I think we've been a little bit spoiled by that because the polling is, you know, usually in presidential cycles, you'll see a lot more movement up and down in a much wider range. And it's just remarkably stable now. And as we've talked about, the real focus at this point, when we sort of set aside and say, look, when you're looking at the real polls, and Simon will do a much better job than I to help people understand what we should be

looking at there, it's going to tell us that this is likely to be a very close race. And so then it's a question of turnout. And what are our best indicators of turnout? Well, it's the actions people are taking. It's the voter registration data that we've been talking about for weeks now showing when we talk about asymmetry, it's been asymmetrical in favor of Democrats in the last several weeks since Vice President Harris became the nominee. We see that continuing on the voter registration front, which is a good sign for turnout. And then on the early vote front, look, we knew Republicans were going to vote early in bigger numbers this time around relative to four years ago, because four years ago, Donald Trump told them that voting early was fraudulent, especially mail voting. Meanwhile, Democrats are very COVID conscious. So we anticipated that. In fact, I wrote about that probably a month ago before any

of this started, saying this is what we need to watch out for. We're not seeing anything unexpected. In fact, to the extent that there are surprises in the early vote, it's generally positive numbers in some of these states. Everything is consistent with where we thought things would be for quite some time now, which is a close competitive election. So yeah, that's the high level at this moment. So I'm going to go to Simon in a second, just give our audience one example of that. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 2020 was around a plus 51 around this time for Democrats. Now it's like a plus 31 in favor of Democrats. But to your point, that is with a massive effort. I mean, quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars being poured in by Elon Musk and Trump telling their people to early vote. And with that, it's still

plus 31. The fact that it's still plus 31, that was actually surprising to you because you had thought actually if they're early voting with all this money behind them, you thought that those margins would be now? Or is that a good kind of summary of just giving Pennsylvania as an example? Yeah, they're not creating new votes at this point. So in early vote analysis, one of the biggest things we're looking at beyond the sort of campaign tactics and what we are seeing in the data is just how the different campaign tactics are playing out. But what we're really looking for are signs of intensity and enthusiasm from each base. And where that comes from is looking at new voters or infrequent or lower propensity voters and who's turning out more of them. In Pennsylvania, in that data you mentioned, over 40% of the registered Republicans who have cast their ballot

already voted on election day four years ago, which is a really amazing number. They're converting election day voters. And by the way, almost all of the rest of the Pennsylvania Republicans have voted already, voted by mail last time around. So we're talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of 92 to 93% of all votes cast. And this is actually across the battlegrounds. It's the same in Pennsylvania, but across all the battlegrounds, 92 to 93% of people voted already, voted in 2020.

So despite all of these efforts and all the investment from Elon Musk and others, they're not creating new voters yet. That's interesting because you can actually track that those election day voters from 2020 are that sample that we see about why it's slightly narrower, but Democrats still having the lead there by 31. Simon, the floor is yours. Yeah, really quickly. And I agree with everything Tom said is that, you know, in polling, as Tom said, the polling has actually been

remarkably stable and consistent now since the debate in early September. I know that that's not what people see because they see polling averages and forecasters tipping over to Trump. But as we discussed when we were last on, there is this massive campaign underway, a red wave 2024, as I call it, to shape and push the polling averages more towards the Republicans. They've released more than 80 polls by 31 different organizations going back to the end of August. And last week, they made a pretty significant assault on the national polling average. They've released 13 polls in the last eight days, and it moved the national polling average on 538 from 2.6 to 1.8, and that sort of tipped all the forecasters and

the aggregators into a plus Trump sort of view. But when you take those polls out and you look at just the independent polls, the race hasn't changed. We're still up by two, three, four points. We're up in better shape in the battlegrounds than they are. I write about this on Hopium today. I go through it all. In the last two weeks, the independent national polls have had Harris up by an average of 2.7 percentage points. The red wave polls have had Trump up by a point. It's a three to four point difference. This is exactly the same numbers as 2022 when they launched the red wave effort. So my view is that nationally, the race has been very stable. We are in better shape than they are, but it's really close. Second, on the early vote, there is, you know, as Tom mentioned, just one other bit on the early

vote. And what Tom reminded us is that part of the reason we got the election right in 2022 is we were looking at these indicators of intensity. Performance in special elections, that's continued to be good for us. The registration numbers, good for us. Fundraising, good for us. Now, let's look at the early vote. That was sort of the thing that sealed it for us in 2022, that we were going to do better than what people thought. The early vote has been harder to read this time because, A, some of the states have changed their

laws. Not everybody's voting in the same way. Pennsylvania doesn't have early in-person voting. So it's very hard to create some kind of a unified theory of what's happening in the early vote because the states are operating very differently. However, I do think there are some indications in the last couple days that in the early days of the early vote in some of these big states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada, there was sort of a surge of Republicans into the electorate that they've not been able to maintain over time. And that many of these states are gradually increasingly becoming bluer, which was consistent with our all our theory of the case, which is that we were going to be able to close stronger in these final few weeks. We had more ads on the air. We had more volunteers

reaching voters. We have a far more energetic campaign with a far more favorable and better liked candidate. Every time Trump, you know, I was on a call with a, I was on a presentation with a Republican pollster who said that they now believe that Trump's numbers go up when he disappears and they go down when he starts reappearing. And so they don't, in this time when we don't have a final debate, which is usually the thing that sort of galvanizes people to vote and to check in on the election, it's put more of a burden on the campaigns to generate that intensity and excitement at the end. We're doing an exceptional job at that. We've

got more tools to do that. What they have is him because they've got less money for ads, less powerful grassroots, and they've got him. And he's been particularly, as you've documented really well, he's been super ugly the last few weeks. And there is some growing evidence that this concern about his fitness, his performance, his unhinged, unstable behavior, which is how the vice president described it last night, is starting to really break through to voters at the moment we needed to. And just to put an exclamation point on this, is that the whole theory we've had, Tom and I going back to Dobbs, is that when voters want

to go vote, not when they answered polls, Republicans underperformed, they lost ground. Because people even in their orbit were like, it's just a bridge too far. I can't do it. when they answered polls. Republicans underperformed. They lost ground because people, even in their orbit, were like, it's just a bridge too far. I can't do it. I may want to vote Republican, but I just can't pull the lever. You heard last night in the CNN debate afterwards, when they interviewed some of the undecided voters, you heard a woman saying all this on air, that at the end of the day, she just couldn't pull the lever for Trump. He was too unstable. Kamala did a good job.

This is what we saw with the fascists in Europe, the fascists in France. It's what happened to Trump in the primaries, as we discussed last time, where he underperformed in 19 out of 20 votes. The idea now that there is some evidence that what's on people's mind now is his fitness and being unstable and unhinged is exactly what we thought was going to happen. And when that happens, we win, they erode Republican, they bleed Republican votes, and we win the election. And I'm not saying that is what's happening. I'm saying there is more and more data suggesting that that's what's beginning to happen now in this close. It would be, to me,

it was always the likely scenario of what would happen in this election. And I think there's evidence now that we're beginning to see the election that we all wanted to have. You know, and there's still time, right? The momentum continues to grow. Vice President Kamala Harris will be of all places in Texas with Beyonce. You know, she's also booked this major speech for them, you know, in the mall in Washington, in the Ellipse area as well. Let me ask you this though, Simon. I mean, the hard part for me, and I like to pretend at least that I'm a little bit sophisticated with data sometimes, is trying to call... There's so much bad data out there intentionally trying to deceive. And it's like if I were to take the

SATs and I prepare and I study for it, and as I'm taking it, I have a bunch of fake questions that are then kind of put into my exam. And I'm like, I don't even know what's the real question. What am I supposed to answer? Every day there's these new polls that have fancy names and you talk about this. You called out this phenomenon, if you will, probably phenomenon is not the right word, artificial, astroturfing. How much worse is it right now that we're seeing than even what we saw in 2022? It's worse. And it had to be worse because there are more polls in a general election year. So for them to move the polling averages, they had to produce more polls. And just even take today. You know, you have in one day, what was been released today is Forbes, you know, a business of right-leaning

business publication with a pollster that's been hostile to Democrats. You had the Wall Street Journal releasing a poll with Trump's own pollster. You had CNBC releasing a poll with the DeSantis pollster. You had RealClearPolitics dropping their own polls. What's happened is that this is one of the reasons that Midas Touch exists. There is so much right wing money, the right wing noise machine, Fox News, all this stuff, just the volume of money that is working to influence our daily discourse and shape our understanding has now moved. That entire huge machinery has now moved into polling. This was not true four years ago, six years ago, eight years ago, ten years ago. It's true now. They launched a successful effort to shape the national environment in 2022, the red

wave that never came. Ben, we talked about it here on air two years ago. They're doing the same thing this time. The New Republic, to their credit, had a major piece looking at this yesterday, an analysis going into detail about this. But the inability of the mainstream legacy media to really acknowledge this chicanery and this malevolent, illiberal behavior to intentionally deceive people. The thing that you have to recognize about this, one, is that this is part of a much

broader set of problems with the poisoning of our information ecosystem in the United States and the power of the right-wing noise machine now extending its reach into areas that had not been in before. But the other thing is they'd only be doing this, Ben, if they were losing. You don't need to cheat if you're winning. You don't need to invent an election that's not happening if the election is going the way that you want. And one of the things that should make people sanguine about what we're seeing is this is a sign of desperation and weakness, in my view, and not a sign of strength, because they're having to sort of, like they have to every day invent a Democratic party to run against because they can't beat the one they actually are running against. They've now created

this alternative universe of an election. It's three to four points different than the independent polls. Why are they doing this? Three quick reasons, I think. One, Trump needs to be leading in the polls for his ego and for his entire stature. It's a way of obscuring his ugliness. He can say, I may be a rapist, a fraudster, a traitor, and a felon, but I'm leading in the polls and I'm strong. It's a tactic to obscure his ugliness, as well as sort of feeding his ego. Second is, I think they're doing this with certain target demographic groups that they're trying to bring along to say, you know, go the bandwagon effect, my guys winning, you should come with us. I think it's particularly targeting young men through polymarket and all this crypto stuff that

don't have strong affiliations, but they just see a guy who's winning and strong. And then third, it's a predicate for them contesting the election. It is probably the case today that 80% of Republicans think that Trump is winning the election and that they're going to be pounded with this information every day between now and election day so that when he loses, he's going to be able to say, hey, everybody, we all saw the polls. We saw the maps. We saw real clear politics. We were winning this thing. How did I end up losing? They cheated. And that's, I think, another major element. It's creating the conditions that make it far easier for them to contest the election in two weeks. Tom, one of the pieces of data that I found most

interesting, and I know we're digging through it because it was just released by the Morris polling, is that in states like Arizona, where people have already voted, they polled the early voters. So you can take a look at the party affiliation or what can be extrapolated about party affiliation from these various states. And there are some states where Republicans slightly ahead in pure party affiliation, who's voted first, basically. So what's fascinating is if you take that data and then you compare it, assuming this Morris polling data is correct, and you put the two things together here, you take a look at Arizona, where Republicans are slightly up in early voting raw numbers, more Republicans have voted than Democrats. that data set of people who are not prospective or likely. They're actually people who voted. North Carolina, similar deal, 55 to 43. Harris, 54 to 45 in Georgia, where we're seeing kind of

massive turnout there. So what do you make of that? Is that something that maybe we should start looking at a little more? Is that more statistically significant than other things? Yeah, this is definitely one that's going to be worth watching. I think more pollsters will be doing this over the closing weeks of this campaign. We certainly saw it two and four years ago. The reason that I like this type of polling is they have the ability to sample a known universe. You know, we know likely voter polling reflects the pollster's

perception of who's going to vote. And it's an educated guess. For that universe that you talked about, the people who are already voted, we know who they are. We know how many people. We know what the partisan distribution, how that looks. And so if the pollsters are doing this right, and they know what they're doing,

so I don't have any reason to doubt it at this moment, they're actually sampling that universe of people. So that sort of margin of error that's outside of the statistical margin of error, but the ability to just miss turnout, shouldn't be a factor. So again, I'm going to keep watching these. I'm going to see how it comes out from other pollsters. But I take this as a positive sign. It's also not something that was entirely unanticipated. We have been talking about this. You mentioned Arizona. We've been talking about this for a while.

One thing that we know that has been happening really across the country, but even more so in the Southwest, in Arizona and Nevada, is you've seen more younger voters voting, registering to vote as unaffiliated, but the polling shows that they're overwhelmingly Democratic voting. And so this poll data is an early sign that that's what's actually happening, that these unaffiliated and independent voters are skewing overwhelmingly towards the Harris campaign. The other thing to keep in mind is none of the data that we've talked about really shows crossover voting. How many Republicans might vote for the vice president? We do know from data four years ago that registered Republicans who voted before election day

were actually more likely to vote for President Biden than those who voted on election day. So that may be what we're seeing here as well. So when folks are looking at the early vote data and they're looking at the partisan registration, they have to keep in mind it's only part of the story. And this polling is suggesting that the true picture is one that actually looks better for us. Simon, let me give you your closing of what people should take out of this today, and then Tom, I'll give you the closing. Yeah. I mean, listen, it's just really close. And I think we're getting past the point of the precision of polling at this point to tell us

anything other than it's close. I think the early vote is, I'm very encouraged by the early vote I'm seeing in particular in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska. And, you know, when we saw these kind of big over performances in 2022 in the early vote, those states usually ended up voting very strongly for us. And we're seeing, you know, really impressive performance in the early vote in those three states. I would say the other states are getting, they're competitive, but they're getting better. There's improvement happening. Pennsylvania is going to be sort of its own thing because of the weirdness of there's no in-person voting, it's only male. And I think there are a lot of Democrats who are going to be voting on election day. And I see Pennsylvania as kind of an outlier to these other trends where there's more in-person voting happening. But, you know, things have gotten more democratic in Nevada and in Arizona and in Georgia and in

North Carolina in recent days. That's what we think is going to happen, right? I mean, because of all the things that I went through earlier, it's always been our expectation that our superiority in money, field, and intensity of our campaign was going to drive the late breaking vote towards us and not towards them. At least over the last few days, there is some indication that that dynamic is starting to kick in after what was a more competitive set of days in the early vote. We'll see. Thanks to Tom and Target Early, we get this data twice a day

for all the data nerds out there that you can look at the performance of the early vote. But I feel like we are starting to see the contours, the outlines of the election that we wanted to have. And now we just all have to work as hard as we possibly can. For us to do what I'm describing, it requires all of us to move the election towards Kamala and towards the Democrats. It's the power of all of us that we're counting on to be able to move.

So volunteering, postcarding, canvassing, all the things that all of you do, you got to do more of it in the close because that's how we win. Tom? Yeah. more of it in the close because that's how we win. Tom? Yeah, to that last point Simon made, I spoke to a group of activists around the country last night and someone asked me the question, what state should I be focusing on? What's the closest state? Where can I have the biggest impact? And we're in a bit of an unusual situation where I said, look, across the seven battleground states, all of them are very much in play. There is no state that we are going to look at and say, well, we've got that wrapped up. Don't worry about it. There's no state we're going to look

at among those battlegrounds where we say we can't win there. They are very close to the best of our ability of read this data. And then the expanded battleground and the opportunities for some surprises in Florida and Texas, in house races, in Senate races. There is no one in this country who should live more than a couple hours drive away from a very competitive, targeted, very important race. And obviously, we know now all the things that you can do also from the comfort of your home. So to everything Simon just said, it's all there. There is no shortage of opportunities this race is going to be won in these closing days we've just got to do the work tom bonior simon rosenberg will be back on soon we'll be following all that data let's keep these going get people accurate information so

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