The MeidasTouch Podcast - Trump GETS WRECKED by Polls as Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier WEIGH IN

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Starting point is 00:02:13 Let's talk about what's happening in the future. So let's take a look at just some of the recent polls that dropped. I think objectively a good polling week for Vice President Kamala Harris. But I want to hear from you. The new Fox poll has Vice President Kamala Harris up two. When you break down the voting trends among independent voters, a net 20-point swing towards Harris. She's now leading by 12 amongst independent voters in this Fox poll. You take a look at the new Quinnipiac state polls. You have Vice President Kamala Harris, at least in that one, up six, also leading in Michigan and Wisconsin there.

Starting point is 00:02:46 The 538 averages have her winning 63 times out of 100. You take a look at the new Harris X poll. Vice President Kamala Harris up four. The Angus Reid poll up four. The new FAU poll up significantly as well, up four. I can go through all of these in a new local Pennsylvania poll as well, has her doing very well there as well, up four. I can go through all of these in a new local Pennsylvania poll, as well as her doing very well there as well, up three. And so I could go through all of these, but I want to hear from the people who know this data the best. Simon, what are we seeing in the polls? Then Tom, we'll get

Starting point is 00:03:16 to you. Yeah, listen, the debate changed the election. Her strong performance and Trump's historically awful performance has shifted the election in my view by one to two points in the polling over the last few weeks. She was up two to three. She's now been in the post-debate polls, she's been consistently up by about an average of four. And the polls, it's amazing how many of the polls have very, very similar data, right? It's very unusual. There are very few outliers. We got an outlier today, which we can talk about, but the data has been remarkably consistent. And in the states, we've also seen her, if Biden won by four and a half last time, she's been in the last week around four. And in the states, we've gotten a lot of state polling this week, including in places that

Starting point is 00:04:00 are outside the battleground. And she's at or above Biden's 2020 numbers in many of these states or almost all these states. And so the way I view it is that she sort of has moved up to where Biden 2020 was. And the question is going to be, and we can talk more about this, is, you know, what's likely to happen now over the next, you know, in the 50 days that are left, 40 plus days that are left. But we've had a shift in the election. It's very positive for us. I think we should feel good about it. And Trump has clearly been struggling. I mean, they are, they've been flailing. You've been writing, you've been covering this really closely. They've been flailing. And so it does feel like there's a completely new vibe in the election now. And let me ask you this too, right now, we are seeing, and you've been covering

Starting point is 00:04:43 this, Simon, before I get to you, Tom, these Republican polls that are flooding in in swing states. What are you seeing there, Simon? Yeah, I mean, look, in 2022, the Republicans flooded the battleground states with polling that was three to four points more Republican than the independent polls, and they pushed the averages, you know, into looking, making the election look much more Republican. I mean, the Real Clear politics final Senate map had the Republicans winning at 54 Senate seats. They ended up at 49, right? That was the core of the false red wave. You've started to see in recent weeks some of the return of those same pollsters and where they've spent the most time and money have been in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and North Carolina, indicating that that's sort of, if you reverse

Starting point is 00:05:25 strategy, that's sort of where they're most focused right now. But in the last week, we've seen five polls drop in North Carolina. They're clearly worried about North Carolina. Something's happening there because the five independent polls that we've had in the last two weeks have harassed either tied or ahead in North Carolina in every one of the polls. In the five Republican polls, Trump is ahead. And so they've devoted a lot of energy to try to push the impression of North Carolina into a much more Republican place than all the independent polling. It's the exact same tactics as the red wave in 2022. And whether this is because Michael Whatley, the chairman of the Republican

Starting point is 00:06:05 Party is from North Carolina, and he needs to kind of clean up the mess that's down there. But the important thing is, if you read it backwards, it means they're very worried about what's happening there. And we're doing well, which is what the polling also shows. North Carolina is at this moment, one of the real bright spots of the 2024 election for Democrats. Tom, to you, what do you make of this kind of current moment? Then one of the things you specialize in at Target Smart is following this voter registration data. So first, where do you think the state of the race is? Then let's get into voter registration data that you see. Yeah, you know, I think Simon nailed it on the state of the race and what we've seen. It's

Starting point is 00:06:43 only been, what, nine or 10 days since the debate. It's hard to believe. So I don't think we've even seen the complete effect from the debate just yet. I think we've seen most of it in terms of that bounce that Simon mentioned. But what's interesting to me about the polls is when we think about the last week, we're seeing a lot of copium from the Republicans, if I can borrow one of their terms, and that this new narrative has come out. It's not a new narrative, but it's certainly more popular among Republican talking heads. But unfortunately, it's something that mainstream media seems to be latching onto, which is this fallacy that Trump just inherently overperforms the polls. So while

Starting point is 00:07:22 everything Simon said is happening and the polling averages, no matter whose average you use, is moving towards Vice President Harris, you see this still sort of sticky narrative that, well, sure, she's leading, but how much does she have to be leading by? Because we're going to price in some sort of democratic bias in the polls. It was only two short years ago that we all have talked about a bunch, even before the election on this network, that they were making the same mistake. And so to see that happening now, especially this week in the face of that good polling, to me is interesting. And so talk about the voter registration that you're seeing, National Voter Registration Day, the Taylor Swift moment. Again, we are seeing a lot of narratives from Republicans that they're very happy in Pennsylvania, which is getting picked up by the media, although your data suggests that that's not really the case. So maybe paint the overall picture, national registration,

Starting point is 00:08:30 what are we seeing, swing state registration, what are we seeing, key moments, and then maybe we talk through the narratives that are being pushed versus the reality. Yeah, it's kind of wild. When we spoke last week, we were talking about primarily that period immediately after President Biden withdrew from the race, endorsed Vice President Harris. And we were just seeing those unreal numbers of registration increases among women, younger voters, voters of color, the same voters with whom Democrats have been overperforming since the Dobbs decision, who fueled the overperformance in special elections, in the midterm elections. And so what we've been able to do since then is extend that analysis out. Because a big question everyone's asking is,

Starting point is 00:09:11 is this just a one moment in time sort of thing, or is it indicative of something that has a little bit more staying power? So we've gotten more updates on key states since we last spoke. North Carolina is one of them. I was actually just looking at it before we got on here. And the good news for the Harris campaign and Democrats is we're still seeing a Democratic advantage among those new registrants in those key states with an overperformance with exactly those voters. Key caveat that you alluded to, a lot of people, certainly Republicans, and again, the media has been picking up on this fallacy, is they'll share stats saying, well, we're outregistering Democrats. Republicans are outregistering Democrats in Pennsylvania,

Starting point is 00:09:56 in North Carolina. Well, the reality is they're leaving out the unaffiliated voters. Gen Z voters we know overwhelmingly register as unaffiliated, but they also overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates. So what we're able to do with this registration dashboard that we actually shared with the Midas Mighty first when we last spoke, if you go to targetsmart.com, you can take a look at it yourself. We've been able to model out the partisanship of those unaffiliated voters. And what we're seeing is they overwhelmingly lean Democratic. These are net benefit new registrants for the Harris campaign and for Democrats up and down the ticket. When we go through the battleground states, just as Simon said with the polling, we're seeing the same thing with the voter registration data. It's remarkably consistent in terms of these gains for Democrats in new

Starting point is 00:10:51 registrants really around the country and focused in these battleground states. Simon, back to you now. When the media presents this polling data, it's often framed as narratives and often framed in terms of narratives that don't capture the full picture. That would be me saying it generously, but more frequently, very negative to the Democratic candidate, as we've kind of seen before. So now that you have the opportunity to speak to the public, frankly, in front of a bigger audience than corporate media, what do you see? What's important that people look at going forward? Simon, what do you want people to pay attention to? What's your overall takeaway

Starting point is 00:11:29 right now in the state of the race? Well, I would so much rather be us than them right now, because not only do we have a modest and potentially meaningful lead in the polls, in the national polls, we're ahead in the battleground states, in my view. But the way the election is going to unfold, I mean, voting begins this week. I mean, we're now entering an important new phase of the election where real people are going to be voting in real voting locations. And we've entered what is called voting season now. Tom has always said, you know, we have to look at voting now as that election day is the last day of voting. And so there's going to be a lot more attention on the act of voting, voter registration numbers. We're going to start

Starting point is 00:12:09 shifting into this period. And I'm just very optimistic that we have a much greater or stronger capacity to close than they do. We have more money, more enthusiasm, more volunteers. They've got problems in their Senate. They have bad candidate problems, again, in the Senate. We've got abortion ballot initiatives that are going to give us a little boost in key places. We've seen enormous defections from Republicans. Their coalition is struggling to hold together while we're incredibly unified. And I think that for all of us who've been in the business, when you look at the two

Starting point is 00:12:43 teams, our team is much stronger than theirs is, and we should be able to close stronger and make further gains, and we're already ahead. And that's without even getting into this fundamental contrast that was established between, you know, Kamala Harris's strength and intelligence and capacity last week and his, Donald Trump's historic awfulness and ugliness that we saw in their extremism. And so, you know, we, when you assess as political folks, right, what's the likely scenario here pushing forward with all the data in front of us, I think it's much more likely that we make gains in the next couple months and we win the election.

Starting point is 00:13:22 And I think that the House should flip. The Senate, I think, is up for grabs. I mean, some people are claiming that Tester's behind. There's no public polling to confirm that. We view this as a battleground toss-up race. The Senate is going to go down to election day in all likelihood. So I think that just on balance, right, I think we are much more likely to win this election today than they are. But it really comes down to how hard we work. And it's really critical now that people realize that if you're going to volunteer, you're going to give money. Do it now. Don't wait to the end of October. People are open to hearing from us now. Our candidates are very popular. Their candidates are not very popular. We have

Starting point is 00:14:01 an enormous advantage right now, and we have to prosecute that advantage now as people start going into voting season. It's really important for us to think about trying to run up the score, go into halftime with the biggest lead possible so it's hard for them to catch up. That's something that we can do together in the early vote with the goal of trying to win this election in October, not in November November by running up the score. This is all within our power to do if we put our heads down and do the work. Tom, you made a very interesting post. You showed all of the headlines when Biden was down two to Donald Trump in the 538 polling average. And you wrote, to this point, when all of these stories were written, Trump's lead was

Starting point is 00:14:40 no more than two points in the 538 polling average over Biden. Right now, Harris currently leads by three points. Where are all the Trump can't win stories? I guess it's a rhetorical question, but let me ask you that. Where are all the Trump can't win stories? And then just as a summation, where do you think we go looking forward? Yeah, they must be lost in the drafts folder somewhere because we're not going to see them. And in the end, look, let's be realistic. That same bias that we were talking about in terms of how the media has treated the Biden campaign, now the Harris campaign and the Trump campaign

Starting point is 00:15:22 is substantial. And we see it there. It's a double standard. Look, it's fine. Kamala Harris can win without that type of coverage. In terms of where I see things, again, I agree entirely with Simon. I think about this from the voter registration perspective. Again, the early vote, as Simon said, get out, vote. It's so critically important. Vote as early as you can. But another stat that I actually just ran just before joining this conversation, which was striking even to me, when you look at the last presidential election and you look at the last seven weeks of that cycle, over 7 million people registered to vote during that time period. It's over a third of the people who registered to vote over the entire year registered in that narrow window right before

Starting point is 00:16:13 the election. And so we have to keep in mind that this electorate is reshaping itself by the minute. And so to Simon's point, where it stands, where it's going, what we can do about it, there is such an opportunity for everyone to keep doing that work, keep reshaping the electorate, understand that the polls aren't necessarily going to be able to keep up with that dynacism of the electorate. We talked about the swift effect and the massive amount of new registrants we saw four to five times, four to 500% what we were seeing on average up to that point when Taylor Swift made that Instagram post. Two days later, it spiked higher than that when she went on the VMAs and urged people to register to vote. And now we have National Voter Registration Day earlier this week week where believe it or not the registration spikes we were seeing were four to five times what we saw after the swift announcement so we're

Starting point is 00:17:10 talking about 20 to 25 times the average registration interest that we were seeing prior to that so we are seeing this unprecedented engagement from the electorate that by no means uh suggests that this election is over, that Vice President Harris has it in the bag. What it means is people are out there, they're hungry, they want to be involved. And if people can get out there, continuing having those conversations, helping people to register to vote, stressing the importance of voting early, then there's a good chance for the Harris campaign to outperform the polls. And Tom, where do our supporters take a look at that data? Where do they see it all? then there's a good chance for the Harris campaign to outperform the polls.

Starting point is 00:17:49 And Tom, where do our supporters take a look at that data? Where do they see it all? TargetSmart.com. There'll be a voter registration dashboard in there. People can look at all those counts themselves. Simon, anything you wanted to say before we conclude? Yeah. Last thing is the DNC and the campaign have been promoting very heavily their I Will Vote website, which where you can, it's called IWillVote.com, where you can check your voter registration. And also if you're not registered, you can register to vote. And I've been promoting in the Hopian community this week. And I had several people say that, thank you, Simon, I forgot, I just moved, I hadn't re-registered and I just registered. And so our population is very fluid in the United States. People move around just registered. And so, our population is very fluid in the United

Starting point is 00:18:25 States. People move around a lot. And so, try to, in your communications and your communities, not only be stressing the importance of the early vote and voting for Kamala Harris and all this other stuff, but also make sure people check their registration. For some reason, they may not be registered anymore. Things happen. And it's iwillvote.com is just a great utility for all of us that the campaign is promoting very heavily this week. There they are, Simon Rosenberg, Tom Bonior. We're going to be doing this every week. We'll keep you all posted on the developments from now until the election day. Thanks for joining us, both. Thanks, Ben. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 4 million subscribers. Have a good one, everyone.

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The MeidasTouch Podcast - Trump GETS WRECKED by Polls as Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier WEIGH IN

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