The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Presidential Race Is in Uncharted Territory, but It’s Clear Who’s Winning

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

The movement to persuade President Biden—long after the primaries—to drop out of the Presidential race is unprecedented. So is the candidacy of a convicted felon. But this election season went from startling to shocking with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the death of a bystander. Despite the unknowns, the contours of the race are becoming clear, the CNN data journalist Harry Enten tells Clare Malone. President Biden’s support in national polls following his disastrous performance in the June debate slipped just slightly. But in key swing states, Biden’s support has ebbed to a point that has terrified Democrats. Malone spoke with Enten while he was covering the Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee. She asked Enten about how the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life affected his favorability. Malone also spoke with the highly regarded pollster Ann Selzer, who runs polling for the Des Moines Register. Selzer explains how the polls know what they know—even when so many people don’t pick up their phones.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Claire Malone. I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker covering politics and the media. And I'm sitting in today for David Remnick. There's just no other way to put it. This presidential election has been shocking, with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump coming as the latest in a series of historic and troubling events. And then there's the ongoing movement to convince President Biden,

to drop out of the race. At a press conference on July 11th, the reporter Haley Bull from Scripps asked him whether Kamla Harris should replace him. If your team came back and showed you data that she would fare better against former president Donald Trump, would you reconsider your decision to stay in the race? No, unless they came back and said,

there's no way you can win. Me. Biden won the primaries already. There isn't really a precedent for this. But recent polls in key swing states show his support fading, and that has Democrats, including Congressman Adam Schiff, advocating desperate measures. To find out what we know at this point, the best assessment we can make about what's going to happen in November, I called up Harry Enton. Harry spends most of his time buried in the cross tabs of polls. He works at CNN as a data reporter, and we worked together for years at the website 538.

We did reporting and analysis from polling and polling. other data. I reached him in Milwaukee at the Republican National Convention. Harry, Donald Trump was just the subject of an assassination attempt. This is unprecedented. And I wanted to ask you how you think the shooting will affect the race. Well, you know, you say it's unprecedented, but I recall back in my younger life when Teddy Roosevelt was also the subject of an assassination attempt, in fact, got shot and was still able to give a speech afterwards in 1912 when he was running as the progressive or bull moose party candidate. But of course, that's not the error in which we're in right now, right?

This is a very different error, a very highly polarized era. There is no real sort of historical precedent for this as long as any of us have actually been alive. The only one really in polling history was when Ronald Reagan was president and obviously got shot. What we saw was his approval ratings did go up at least initially, you know, according to Gallup rose by a little bit less than 10 points. But two months later, it declined. But I think that this is bigger than the numbers. I think it's sort of a larger reflection of where we are right now that we are in an incredibly politically divisive time, one in which

members of the other party truly dislike each other to a degree that simply put has not been the case as long as we've had polling data around. Do you think that Trump could potentially get a bump in polling and that it could because of our partisan era and because of the really specific contours of this race? Do you think something like that could be sustainable after this event? Because of the timing, it's going to be very difficult to disentangle what might be a bump because of the events that happen in Pennsylvania with a normal Republican National Convention bounce. maybe if there's no movement in the poll, that might answer it. But if there is any sort of movement, you know, it's going to be very difficult to figure out

whether that was a normal RNC convention bounce or was that something that had to do with the fortunately failed assassination, emphasis on the failed, obviously. Yeah. I don't think, though, to be honest, in this error, you know, if Reagan's any guide, if the Debates have been any guide, if anything along those lines, something may peak at least initially, but then for it to sustain itself, that's something, an order of magnitude more difficult. An additional factor that I'm thinking of is, you know, the Biden campaign pulled a lot of ads off the air in the wake of the shooting in Pennsylvania. They canceled events. The tenor of the media covered and the Biden campaign's partisan rhetoric is very different now.

I'm curious, like, do you think something like that could affect the. the contours of the race, the polling of the race in the long term? Unprecedented times make for difficult to forecast times. But I think that the general belief is it's going to be very difficult to truly change the contours of the matchup between Biden and Trump. Maybe what will end up happening is if the campaign becomes more positive, then maybe both men will be better like than they currently are, it's difficult for them to be more disliked, at least in the polling, in terms of the unfavorable ratings than each of these guys are. So we do have something different

going on in this election right now. But if you just look after the debates and you look at where Biden's numbers were pre-debate and post-debate, the numbers really didn't change, despite the fact that most nonpartisan analysts would agree that Biden's performance in the debate was one of the worst in the modern era, if not the worst. Before the debate, a record number of people thought Joe Biden was too old to be an effective president. That number may be slightly higher now, but it's not really a big movement pre-debate versus post. It's really a big moment from 2020 to 2024. Yeah. I want to go back to President Biden and his pretty disastrous debate performance that is at this point infamous, I think. I saw some national polls that

didn't show that much of a difference in the race after the debate, but in swing state polls, Biden was down. Can you explain that? Yeah, I think that there are a few things going on there. I think nationally and in the swing states for the most part, there has been a small movement away from Biden post-debate, but we're talking on the magnitude of closer to two points and let's say 10 points. And so in any individual poll, you're, you could see no change. You might even see a slight shift towards Biden, but in the aggregate, you're seeing a small movement towards Trump. And who exactly are the voters who are leaving Biden? Who are the voters that are leaving him? Well, it depends on which polls that you're looking at,

but it did at least appear to me that independence did move by around five points towards Donald Trump compared to where we were pre-debate. And of course, independents are such an important group, a group that Trump won in 2016, then Joe Biden won them by double digits back in 2020. And so if Trump is winning them, you know, by six, seven points, as appears to be right now what is true in the national aggregate, then that is a very, very good sign for his campaign and one that will be awfully difficult

for Biden to overcome if it does, in fact, hold. Do you think the media is blowing out of proportion the polling shifts away from Biden? I mean, because that's been the headline, the shifts after the debate. I think what's going on

for a lot of folks is that they're realizing that Donald Trump's actually leading in the polling in the average. That was, I think, even if there hasn't been a massive movement,

I think there's finally recognition in some quarters that Donald Trump is ahead, not by a ton, but by more than enough, especially given that he seems to be running stronger in the important battleground states than he is nationally. And demographically, who are those independents who might be moving towards Trump? Are they young? Are they voters of color? Who are those voters? They're both, right? Younger people, voters of color, especially Hispanic voters, tend to be the voters who are more likely to identify as independent than perhaps in past years because independence, a larger share of them are younger or Hispanic than the populace at large. And so there's no doubt that there is that overlap there, right, in a sort of nice Venn diagram. And so that is a significant in part of that movement that we've seen away from Joe Biden versus four years ago.

Who are the voters that are sticking with Biden even after this really bad debate performance? Aggressives, very liberal voters, older black voters, older black women in particular. Most Democrats, I mean, that is the situation. It's not like magically these Democrats are going to be like, you know what, I want Donald Trump to be the nominee or want him to be the president. the Donald Trump is still a very unpopular man in this country, at least according to the polling data. So how do we square the fact that he's unpopular according to polling data, and yet he's leading in the polls? The way you swear it is that you have Joe Biden, an incumbent president whose disapproval rating is in the mid-50s, whose approval rating is 40% or below. And there's just no president who's been re-elected with those types of numbers ever.

And so Donald Trump, despite himself being unpopular, finds himself in a similar position that he did in 2016 with the Democratic Party for reasons, picked a nominee that left the door open for somebody who is as unpopular as Donald Trump is. It's really that simple. Donald Trump just has many more paths to victory at this point than Joe Biden has. Yeah. But again, in this country in which elections are won and lost and which not had a single. Major party candidate win election by double digits since before either you or I were born, a shift of a few points could make all the difference in the world. Harry Enton, senior political data reporter for CNN. We spoke last week while he was in Milwaukee covering the RNC.

I'm Claire Malone, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Claire Malone, a staff writer with the magazine. In presidential election years, we all want. want to know what's going to happen, but we're drowning in poll numbers. National polls, swing state polls, favorability ratings, issue polls, you name it, we've got numbers for it. But it's really difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. There are partisan polls, which may well be biased,

junkie online polls. And there are high-quality polls that still take the time to call hundreds of people and ask them questions. But even those types of polls can seem suspicious. How can you an accurate sample when so few of us actually pick up strange numbers calling our phones. Are pollsters putting their fingers on the scales? I called up Anne Selzer because I wanted to hear from her how polling actually works now, how the polls know what they know. Selzer is one of the best people to explain that. Her company does the polling for the Des Moines Register,

and over the years, she's established a track record for accuracy. There's a particular cluster of people here in Des Moines whose nickname for me is Harbinger of Doom. Now, these are all people who have worked on Democratic campaigns and thought that they were coasting to a win. And then my final poll comes out, and it shows their Republican opponent, in fact, leading with a solid lead. So it's kind of an example of what happens if you don't have good polling. Would they have done things differently in their campaign? Had they been more apprised of what was actually happening? One of the reasons Selzer has been so effective as a pollster

is a method she calls polling forward. She looks at the current demographics of the country instead of who turned out in previous elections. We make no assumptions about what the electorate is going to look like. We don't look at past elections, And there are pollsters that do that go back and look at the exit polls and say, well, this is what the racial makeup was. So we're going to make our data look like that. So I call what I do polling forward.

The future electorate is going to reveal itself through that methodology. That's interesting because, you know, my sort of familiarity is with this idea of, hey, this election in 2016 or 2020 looked this way. we're going to wait our data based on that. How do you actually concretely pull forward? What does that look like? The moment that it was clear to me that my method was on to something was in 2008 with the Iowa caucuses,

and our final poll was showing a surprise that Barack Obama was winning easily. But the bigger surprise in our data was that 60% of the people who planned to caucus on the Democratic side, it would be the first time they had ever gone to caucus. And that 60% just created a furor and an uproar. And there was lots of media talk, lots of campaign memos going about saying,

pay no attention to this poll because this is a number unheard of. I had one of Hillary Clinton's state co-chairs. A friend of mine, he's been a client, called to say, I've knocked on 99 doors. I haven't found this lurking Obama support. And I said, well, tell me about the 99 doors. He said, oh, we're focusing on previous caucus attenders and registered Democrats. Yeah.

And I made no assumption. What are you seeing now in your polling forward for this election cycle? We're seeing a couple of things that are interesting, the way the electorate is aligning. So traditionally, older people have been more on the, Republican side, and conventional wisdom is the older you get, the more conservative you get. The age group of 65 and over is Joe Biden's strongest demographic group, and younger people are aligning more on the Republican side. So I think this is a perfect example of if you're not doing polling, you're going to behave the way you behaved in the past and assume that the

older people who show up in larger, proportionately larger numbers on election day. are going to be voting Republican, and the opposite is true. I don't think it's a secret to you that polling has become controversial in American life. So sell me on it. What are the benefits of good polling? Give me your best pitch. I think it depends on how high you think the stakes are. If you want to have a good idea of the way the electorate is moving, because it does move,

you need to have polling that will reveal that. So I think it's very important to stay on top of how the mood of the nation is changing, how the mood in states is changing, and if you don't know what it is, you're just shooting in the dark. Talk me through how polling actually works. And what I mean by that is,

who pays for it, who writes the questions, who makes all the actual phone calls? Well, I can talk with most accuracy about how we, conduct our polls. So I use the Des Moines Register as my example, but we've polled in other states, we've polled nationally. With the Iowa poll, we put together a poll committee. We all come to the table with ideas. And from that conversation, I began crafting the questionnaire. And I'm keeping a lot of things in my mind as I do that. I need the interviewer to easily pronounce the words and that the syntax is easy for them to follow.

I need the respondent to know what the heck we're talking about. At the end of the day, we want to look at the opinions of a few people and project it to the opinions of the entire electorate. That's the beauty of random sampling. You can end up with a good cross-section. So we get a sample of real phone numbers. We drop the last two digits and we put on random digits. So whether you're a listed number or not, whether you're a cell phone or not,

we have the ability to get all of those phone numbers. and then draw a sample from it. I want to ask about that because, you know, it's so easy to screen unknown numbers these days and that obviously didn't used to be the case. So what do you do to deal with that relatively new social behavior that we all have? How does that affect polls? Well, it's not relatively new. That's true.

That's been going on a long time. As soon as people got caller ID, that's decades. Yeah. People say, well, I just don't answer the phone if it says unknown caller. well, fortunately, for every person like you, there's a doppelganger who's willing. I think the important point I want to make is that our polls are known for their accuracy. And if there was a skew in who would answer and who wouldn't, we could not be accurate. And so it makes me worry less.

I worry. Sure. I worry, but I worried less. When we call you, we want to find out if you're a likely voter. In our world, that means if you don't say definitely, you're not a likely voter to us, and we're going to terminate the call. But we will have captured, before we hang up on you, your age, your sex, and what area of the country you live in. So now that's the general population. And from the census, we know what that should look like.

So we wait everybody we talk to, whether you're a likely voter or not. What do we mean by waiting? So waiting is, to novices, it sounds very anti-democratic. Some people count more, and some people count less. So it's not one person, one vote. So if we have too many older people, let's say, we'll count their vote a little less. We're going to weight them down. So give some other groups a little bit more weight overall. It sounds complicated. It's kind of simple. Everybody does it. Well, let me ask this. In an ideal world, would you have any rules that you'd want reporters to follow when they talk and write about polls for their audience? About a million. What about three? Well, I'll give you one that's controversial. Sure.

And there are people who say, if it's a two-point race, you can't really call that a two-point race. You have to call that a statistical tie. But it could also, be true that it's a four-point race, that the gap is actually larger. If you want to say it's a tie, go ahead, but you should also say that it's equally likely that the race is a wider margin than reported, and to do one and not the other is exposing bias. Have you ever gotten a call for a poll yourself? Like last year. Really? The Iowa poll called me up. What'd you do? the first time ever. I said, I'm so sorry. I'm not able to participate in this poll because of my job. But thank you. You didn't say, you didn't say I run this poll? I did not.

Anne Selsers Company runs the Iowa poll. What's the point of the horse race? People are interested in the horse race. Journalists like me are constantly getting scolded for covering the horse race. In other words, talking about the polling results all the time, who's up and who's down. The argument is that the horse race distracts from substantive reporting on issues or from the real stakes of an election. So I ran that argument by Harry Enton, who we heard from earlier. He's with CNN, and he was my former colleague at 538. I hate to blow some people's bubbles here, but I very rarely get asked by my friends,

Harry, in this latest poll, what was the top issue? Their number one question, and oftentimes their only question is, who is ahead and who is behind. If legit news organizations were not going to do the polls, then that poll would be filled by other folks who might not spend as much on the polls,

might do shoddier polls, and then all of a sudden, we have a very different view of where the race is heading into election day than we might otherwise should and could have. I think Donald Trump has actually provided a very good reason for why we should care about the horse race. We are at an all-time low, at least from some sections of our country, who believe elections

and the vote counting is legitimate, which for everything that we see, it is. Donald Trump's case to say this election was stolen is significantly higher if, of going into the election, we didn't have a good baseline level to understand where the race actually stood. So you're saying it gives us data prior to election date that, in fact, legitimizes the results after election day? In my opinion, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely does that. And it does that on both sides of the aisle, right? Harry, you're obviously steeped in polls. You know how to differentiate different polls. But what about people who are just sort of lost in all the swirling numbers? What should they be doing with all of this data that we have? You know, look, we've spoken about this

a thousand times in our lives, you know, average, average, average. Yeah, you take a look at the average. The average of the polls. The average of the polls. That'll give you the best indication. That's always what I try to do. And you can find something that you might not have ever found before, but as a casual lay consumer, you average the polls and read the polls from the people that you trust.

Yeah. And there are places that do the average of the polls for you somewhere like real clear politics or... The New York Times. CNN has a poll of polls. Okay, so there's places for people to go. They don't have to sit there with their calculator. No, no, although granted with our phones these days, I mean, folks, I mean, you know, you learned math in school. Why don't you put it to some good usage?

Okay, there you go, a public service announcement from here. Math is fun. I want to ask about how people should be consuming polls. I think there's more polls than ever now. Should people be paying attention to these big national polls, or should they really, if they want to be a smart consumer and know what's going on should they only really care about who's up and who's down in swing states? Look, this election is going to be determined in the electoral college. It's just a matter of what it is that you're looking for.

If you're looking for what are the issues that are driving this election, then the national polling is going to give you a pretty good idea. But if we're looking at a race that's tied, then, yeah, you want to be paying attention to those swing state polls because at the end of the day, we have seen numerous times in recent history where the swing states go one way. or the electoral college goes one way, and the popular vote, the national popular vote, goes another way. Every single election since 1988 in this country on the presidential level has been decided by single digits nationally.

It is the longest such stretch. I think the trends that have stood out to a lot of people who watch this stuff closely are the changing sentiments of black voters and Latino voters. And black voters in particular have historically been a pretty reliable democratic voting bloc.

And the top line in this election is that we're not seeing as much support for Biden as you might think. But I wanted to get you to break it down a little bit. One of the trends that we do know is that black voters traditionally speaking, black voters who are more religious actually tend to, if anything, be slightly more democratic depending when you control for some variables than black voters who aren't so religious, which is the complete opposite pattern that you see among whites and Hispanics. Now, all of a sudden, church going is heading downward.

the church helps keep black voters into the democratic fold in a way that I think is very unfamiliar with a lot of white audiences. Now all of a sudden you're seeing dropping religiosity. Same is true with younger black voters. Now all of a sudden, that thing that is keeping them in the fold may not be keeping them in the fold any longer. So all of a sudden you sort of have all of these different things coming together, which is lower religiosity, you have movement away from Joe Biden among,

younger Americans, generally speaking, and you have fading memories of the civil rights movement. I'm not saying there aren't any other factors, but those three, I think, are a starting point to help understand what it is that we're seeing. Very interesting. Most people in the U.S. don't have a bachelor's degree. What's so interesting to me is that Joe Biden's appeal was always kind of Scrant Joe, down to earth, working class. But now his support is trending much more elite, right? You know, how? How is he doing, let's maybe talk broadly, with voters who don't have a bachelor's degree. And how is that shifted since 2020? So, you know, what we're seeing is across the board voters without a college degree shifting more and more towards the Republican column. You are seeing that with white voters without a college degree.

We're seeing, you know, I wouldn't be shocked of a margin if Joe Biden lost them by well more than 30 points this time around. And white voters with a college degree used to be like a lean Republican demographic. Correct? Absolutely. I mean, if you think about... They flipped a little bit. A little bit. A little bit. They flipped. I want to go back to young voters. Are young voters moving away from the Democrats to the Republicans? Are they just sort of saying, I'm unaffiliated? Did they not like Biden? But maybe they'd come back to the Democrats once there's a different candidate. What's going on there? There's certainly a larger share that say that they're independent, just generally speaking. 51 percent, according to the latest Gallup data. There you go. Now, if you were to look at the polling data, what it would tell you, especially in a lot of these Senate races, is that, you know, if you go to, let's say, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Joe Biden is doing worse than the Democratic candidate for Senate in all of them. And who he's doing especially poorer amongst, on average, tends to be those core parts of the Democratic coalition that we've spoken about here, voters of color and younger voters as well.

So if we have a different Democratic candidate, could things differ? Absolutely. It's oftentimes difficult to know if we're hitting a mere bump in the road for Democratic support among younger voters or whether this is something larger and unforeseen. But, you know, if I could take a step back in 2000, young voters split evenly between Al Gore and George W. Bush. By 2008, young voters— The Obama Coalition— The Obama Coalition, those under the age of 25, went for Barrett. Obama by, I think, the mid-30s.

So you can have- Are we a little bit living? Have we, for the past decade or so, sort of been living in the shadow or the conventional wisdom of the Obama coalition and now things are just maybe reverting to a historical norm? Yeah, or a new history, right? You know, these coalitions last until they don't. You know, if, you know, you go to 1976, the Democratic coalition for Jimmy Carter that

beat Gerald Ford. is the southeast plus the industrial north. The West was a wasteland for Jimmy Carter. Gerald Ford, I think, basically won every state west of Texas except for Hawaii. That obviously is no longer the case. The question you have to ask yourself now is whether or not we're in a new coalition or an emerging coalition, and it's certainly plausible that we are. And in five years, we'll go, we should have seen it coming.

I mean, I have to say it sort of feels like that to me, you know, that there's that we might be in the midst, that 2024 could potentially be one of those elections where you look back and say, that's where the trends really sort of solidified themselves. That's when it was kind of an inflection point. It is possible that we are. Now, watch, of course, we'll get to Election Day and then the exits and everything else will look the same. And it was just a false start. But at this particular point, yeah, I think you're on to something, Claire.

President Biden in the Biden campaign, they keep saying they don't believe the polls. The polls are broken. They're not accurate. What do you make of that view? Are they diluting themselves? The polls are the same polls that were taken four years ago that had Joe Biden's favorable rating about 15 points higher. So when he says, oh, the polls are broken now, you're not, you're saying they're not more broken than they were four years ago when they were favorable to him? He loved the polls. In the same way that Donald Trump loved the polls. Remember Donald Trump would quote the polls every freaking time in 2015 on his rise to the Republican nomination. then all of a sudden the polls went in direction he didn't like.

It turns out that at least when it comes to polling and reading polls and complaining about polls that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have very similar viewpoints. When the polls are good for them, they like the polls. When the polls are bad for them, all of a sudden, the polls are not so great and they complain about them. And this is a thing that I know people who deal in polls or who are polling analysts who are pollsters themselves get really riled up about, which is when people say the polls missed this result, the polls were inaccurate. I mean, what's your response to that? Give me two examples. One where the polls were really accurate and another when the polls were really off.

The polls in 2016, the national polls, were pretty much right on. But people were surprised by the results of the 2016 election. Yes, the polling in those battleground states did show that Hillary Clinton was ahead. but if you know how much a poll can miss by or how much an average can miss by in a state, you know that it can miss by depending three, four, five, six percentage points is not something that is crazy. So if you recall at 538, which we were a part of, if I remember correctly, Hillary Clinton had a 71% chance of winning on the eve of the election, and Donald Trump had a 29% chance.

You and I were in the same newsroom, I still remember feeling surprised when I realized Trump was going to win. I look. Is that an emotional response? Yes. Because I had, you know, I was consuming all of these polls. I still was consuming the media narrative that I, I guess, helped create that Hillary Clinton was probably going to win.

Yes, that's part of it. But I think also this was something that was so unique. And when you combine that with the fact that. that if you lived in New York City at the time, you lived among people who had a college degree, which many in the media did, then, yeah, I think that it becomes very, very easy to get lulled into a sense of

what am I actually seeing here on these pieces of paper? What are these polls actually telling me? So people should be more aware of these margins of error. Okay, I want to hit you with one last question. When do the polls actually count? When are voters really most likely? likely to be locking into the positions that they'll have on election day. Here's the deal. The deal is that you really should wait until after the conventions before

really understanding where this race actually stands. Labor Day is another way to sort of look at it, right? But don't let the polls run your life. Touch grass, kids. Touch grass. Buckle up. Harry Anton, thank you so much for coming. It's so great to see you. The pleasure was all mine. Thank you. Harry Enton is the senior political data reporter at CNN, and he hosts their podcast, Margins of Error. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Claire Malone. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Jared Paul.

This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Alicia Zuckerman. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccat. And we had additional help from Ursula Sommer. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part

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