The Canadian Abacus Data polling group is highly regarded and they’re showing Joe Biden with a healthy 14 point lead over Trump with registered voters. The numbers are less dramatic with likely voters, with Biden up 51 percent to 41 percent. What interested me most when looking at the results was the relative room for growth.
The first thing I noticed is that among voters 31 years and older, there is a consistent 15 percent of the electorate that is undecided or intends to vote for a third party. But voters 30 years and younger have a 23 percent undecided/third party rate. What this means is that there’s more potential to add votes with the younger cohort, and they happen to be Biden’s strongest (57 percent to 20 percent) age demographic.
I noticed something similar with the breakouts for whites, Blacks, and Latinos. Among whites, only 12 percent are uncommitted to either Trump or Biden, but the number grows to 17 percent with Blacks and 20 percent with Latinos. Again, this is more promising for Biden.
Self-described Independents make up most of the undecided vote. They really don’t like Trump, giving him an anemic 26 percent to 57 percent approval rating. But only 62 percent of them are currently registered and one in five don’t intend to vote in November. Fewer than half of them voted in 2016. They prefer Biden by twelve points overall (32 percent to 20 percent) and the registered among them like him by a larger 42 percent to 22 percent margin. So, to the extent that Independents actually turn out, it will not be good news for Trump.
Another fascinating outcome of this survey is that a shockingly low one percent of 2016 Clinton voters express an intention to vote for the president. By contrast, 9 percent of 2016 Trump voters express an intention to vote for Biden. This runs contrary to the popular narrative that Trump’s base of support is unmovable. It looks like nearly one in ten of his voters have already abandoned him.
Among people who did not vote in 2016, Biden leads by a stunning 49 percent to 14 percent. This is another potential area of growth.
There’s really only one part of this poll that has any encouragement for Trump. His approval numbers overall are dismal: 38 percent to 54 percent. But they improve among registered voters (41 percent-56 percent) and improve again with likely voters (45 percent-53 percent). What this means is that he has a bit of an enthusiasm edge. The number of people who support him may be small, but his supporters are more likely to be registered and they’re more likely to show up.
When you couple this with the high undecided rate among young voters, you can see the potential importance of mobilizing the youth vote.
When you examine these results looking for some kind of strategy that could help Trump, the pickings are really slim. He could try to polarize the election even more by race in an attempt to make white voters act like a tribe and choose him as their protector. But his approval number with whites is under water (46 percent-48 percent) and he leads with whites overall by a single point (44 percent-43 percent). Combined with whites’ relatively low undecided rate, there’s just not much room for growth there.
Trump could work on a generational angle and cater his pitch to older voters. Isn’t that largely what his nostalgic Make America Great Again slogan is all about? But here, too, he isn’t looking so hot. His approval with voters 61 and older is dead even at 49 percent to 49 percent, and he again leads among them by a single point: 46 percent to 45 percent.
Trump’s only strong demographics are in the overlapping categories of voters who voted for him in 2016, white working class voters, and registered Republicans. He can try to goose his numbers with these groups, but this has been his strategy all along and it seems to have backfired with all the other demographic groups.
Joe Biden is sitting on a 10 to 14 point lead with 150 days to go, but it actually looks quite a bit better than that for him. There are more undecided voters from demographics that strongly favor him than there are in Trump’s strong groups. Low-propensity voters favor Biden by a huge margin, so he has many more potential votes to tap. And traditional Republican advantages with white and older voters seem to have been all but erased in the current political climate, meaning that Trump has no obvious way to jack up his numbers through targeted pandering.
If Trump has only hope left at all, it’s that some of his cratering support could be pretty elastic and snap back to him if conditions improve.
Do you want to wager on conditions improving under his leadership?
Look, we all know undecided voters are…what’s the word I’m looking for…morons. It’s very possible some of them don’t know who Joe Biden is. Seriously. Morons. So as soon as they discover (are force fed information) that Biden is not – in fact – Hitler and Stalin’s lovechild, he could probably add a few percentage points. Providing those voters don’t get confused leaving the driveway.
Yes indeed, backing out of the driveway is fine and relatively easy, but then you have to turn left or tight and get on the road, that’s where the real problem comes in. These idiots can never get that part right.
Trump’s plan (insofar as there is one) seems to be to sow as much chaos as possible, to ensure that there is nothing like an accurate canvassing of the population. What happens in November when there are no poll workers because we are in the second, much stronger, wave of COVID? What do the networks, newspapers, and Fox news say on Wednesday morning, when the in-person tally in PA favors Trump, and it takes a week to count the mail-in votes from Philadelphia?
What could Trump do to improve his odds? So many things out of the right wing playbook to choose from. From most to least likely:
1) Manufacture dirt on Biden, and wait for Fox and the media circus to keep it in play for weeks beyond the sell by date. Those undecided voters that Boo mentioned eat that shit with a spoon, because as Hawseg says, they’re Morans.
2) Get big daddy Putin to tip the scales with some well-timed computer hacks and disinformation.
3) Manufacture a little emergency somewhere (“terrorist” attack; incursion overseas; something involving school kids being threatened somewhere) and we’ll have strongman Trump to the rescue. Another winner with the Morans.
4) Call on his brownshirt followers to stop “antifa subversion” surrounding the election by any means necessary.
1) and 2) probably underway already and while 3) and 4) seem unlikely, who knows what the rest of this benighted year has on offer? This election is not at all in the bag. Hell, Joe could screw it up all on his own (with a little extra help from the media circus of course).
I’m seeing evidence that the Russians have stepped up their targeting efforts. I’m seeing moderate information Democrats complaining about Biden, typically over something they recently read which leaves them disheartened. It happened to my wife and I had to engage around what she had read. I’m sure she’d vote for Biden regardless; she hates Trump. But she’s a committed liberal Democrat. It concerns me. I think Biden’s base of support could be eroded.
I wouldn’t wager on “conditions improving under his leadership”. I would wager on “polls bouncing up and down a few times in the next four months”, if only because of 1) random (or not-so-random) events providing a break for Trump (e.g., relatively good employment numbers paired with some good news on the pandemic), and 2) the institutional pressures (including political media) for a “close race”.
Relatedly Hollywood producer/writer Dorothy Fortenberry had an astute tweetstorm yesterday, the heart of which was:
“anyway, the current system is:
1) President: Dems gotta get 5 pts more because of the EC
2) Congress: Dems gotta get 8-9 pts more because of redistricting
3) Senate: average Senator like 7 points more R than nation because of population distribution
IT’S NOT GREAT”
In other words, Dems aren’t irrationally anxious; they’re *rationally* anxious. Again, the parallels to the “Slave Power” of the pre-Civil War era are both disturbing and instructive.