Why I'm optimistic about Harris regardless of the polls

For all you Democrats who are losing sleep, gorging food or suffering some other stress reaction, here’s a Marist poll that has Harris up five nationally and solidly over fifty percent. It’s a great looking poll. That should give you some solace when a poll comes out this weekend showing her trailing by one.

Really, though, you should stop paying attention to polls altogether at this point in the election. Or at least stop letting them cause anxiety. There’s no consistency this year. High quality polls come out in the same week with widely varied results. Pundits are still writing about them as if they are crystal balls when they’re really just a single data point among a host of them. Politics and polling have changed dramatically from the days when we received information from a relatively small number of sources and everybody operated with essentially the same set of facts.

As I’ve explained before, polls are no longer a random sample of voters. They are a random sample of the people who respond to polls, probably people more informed and politically interested than the average voter. Pollsters use a witches brew of weighting to find what they believe are the sentiments of likely voters. Some are better at it than others but they have not reached any consensus this year, especially in the battleground states.

If you must obsess over polls, watch the averages. They will offer far more insight than any single survey. However, in watching averages, you lose most information you would gain from cross tabs since questions are worded slightly differently across polls.

As for me, I’m cautiously optimistic that Harris and Walz will win. They’ve run a great campaign, despite what some pundits and political operatives want you to believe. Much of their strategy has been textbook politics.

They spent the first two months of their race consolidating their base. While media types were complaining in September that Harris wouldn’t sit for interviews, she was reaching out to women and younger voters on podcasts or preparing for debates that she won. The campaign spent heavily on online advertising instead of focusing just on television and cable where an older set of voters gets their information.

Her pro-choice message has been consistent and has cut through. Women voters will support her by overwhelming numbers. Younger women believe the anti-abortion legislation is a threat to their health and their autonomy. Older women are shocked and angry that their daughters, granddaughters, and nieces have fewer rights than they did. They have a reason to go to the polls.

As the campaign shifted into the final stretch in October, Harris began doing more high-profile, traditional interviews like 60-Minutes and The View. She’s now going after the late-deciding, lower information swing voters, including younger African Americans. She did an interview with Charlamagne Tha God yesterday and was on a podcast called All the Smoke hosted by former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson last week. That’s smart campaigning.

Don’t believe the media narrative about Black men abandoning Harris. I’ve been hearing some version of this story for years and it never pans out. After I read an article yesterday about Harris only receiving support of 72% of Black men, I emailed Cornel Belcher, an African American pollster. He called it a “false flag” and said that about 14% of Black men have been voting Republican for 40 years and that’s all Trump will get. His bigger fear is low turnout among African American men, so if you’re worried about how this election will end, send money and support to groups pushing Black GOTV efforts. I’ll trust Cornell who I first met when he was polling for Eva Clayton in 1998 over pundits who were just kids when he started tracking African American voting patterns.

I also think that traditional small government conservatives who can’t stomach Trump’s racist, and authoritarian impulses will follow the lead of the Cheneys, Jeff Flake, and other Reagan Republicans who are abandoning him. In an election where states are decided by a few thousand votes, Trump can’t afford to lose anybody. The Harris campaign has very strategically rolled out a steady stream of former Trump staffers, former elected officials, and GOP party operatives who are telling like-minded people that voting for Harris is okay. It’s creating a permission structure to do what was virtually unthinkable before the Trump era and highlights the legitimate dangers of a second Trump administration. I suspect a lot of older, college-educated, country club Republicans will either take a pass on the election or vote for Harris.

Finally, I don’t think Trump has any room to grow. He has to win with exactly the same coalition he had last time. He has successfully driven older, non-college white voters to the polls in record numbers and he may do it again, but four years ago, it was not enough. His whole strategy seems to be to scare more of those same voters with a dark vision of immigrant invasions and a collapsing economy and social order. I just don’t believe there are that many more of them left to get.

If Trump has room for growth, it might be with Hispanic voters. They are largely Catholic, non-college educated, and working class so they fit the GOP profile. However, Trump’s continual bashing of immigrants and threats to deport people even if they are here legally seems to negate much of his potential with them. As his rhetoric gets more racist, I believe they will either opt for Harris or stay home.

So, I’m optimistic right now. Harris has run a solid campaign with almost no mistakes. She’s methodically consolidated her base and is now reaching out to late deciders and supporters who might stay home. I think Black voters and younger people will come out in larger numbers to support her this year than came out for Biden four years ago. Women will support Harris in record numbers and their turnout will outpace expectations. Hispanic and Latino voters who may have flirted with Trump will come home to the Democrats after Trump’s threats and dark vision of a largely white America. Finally, I don’t think Trump has room for growth and I think he will lose support from country club Republicans who held their noses and voted for him in 2020.

As voting gets underway in earnest this week and next, I think the outcome of the election will become more clear. Trump will become more desperate and unhinged. The well-financed Democratic GOTV effort will kick into high gear. When the votes are counted, the race may be close, but Harris and Walz will win enough electoral votes to take the White House.

At least that’s what I think today.