If you’ve followed my thinking on this you know I’ve long had a pretty low opinion of political betting markets. Their user base tends to lean right, with the built-in bias you would expect that to cause. They’re also prone to manipulation. But the biggest problem is that, in my view, they’re largely derivative of polls and the press narratives. Garbage in, garbage out. I will simply note that the wild gyrations all of them have been doing over the last three or four days provide, I think, some backing for my argument.
I’ve told you a few times about Professor Michael McDonald’s early vote analysis. He has a paywalled final analysis of the early vote in North Carolina. The upshot is that by conventional early vote analysis, Donald Trump appears poised to win North Carolina. That wouldn’t be a surprising result either on the basis of history or the current polls, which show a dead heat race with the slightest advantage to Trump.
But McDonald also notes that it is an unusual cycle with conflicting signals. The polls look more favorable to Harris than the numbers in the early vote. Actual votes matter more than polls of votes, by definition. But this is a reminder of what early vote analysis is based on. We’re largely going on party registration and limited demographic markers as a proxy for voter intention. Those will generally point in the right direction, except when they don’t.
If you’ve followed my thinking on this you know I’ve long had a pretty low opinion of political betting markets. Their user base tends to lean right, with the built-in bias you would expect that to cause. They’re also prone to manipulation. But the biggest problem is that, in my view, they’re largely derivative of polls and the press narratives. Garbage in, garbage out. I will simply note that the wild gyrations all of them have been doing over the last three or four days provide, I think, some backing for my argument.
The great secret and poverty of campaign reporting is that the majority of it is based on reading the polls or the eventual result and then writing a story of the campaign to match that outcome, predicted or real. Every losing campaign is run by idiots and vice versa. With that reality in mind, I wanted to share some opinions in advance of the results. I think Kamala Harris has run an almost flawless campaign. Many people think a great campaign is made up of a great strategy, or perhaps a great speech. The truth is that campaigns are almost all down to execution. That’s particularly so in an early 21st century American presidential campaign, when the main constituencies and issues are chosen in advance and not by the candidate.
An upstart city council or even House candidate might upset the status quo with an outside-the-box campaign or set of issues. Presidential campaigns don’t work that way. Presidential campaigns are won by energizing and mobilizing key constituencies, shaping the issue agenda in your favor and having more days on offense than defense. On the constituencies front, that means base and reach constituencies. On issues, it’s mostly about raising the salience of issues where a majority agrees with you. Above all, it’s about not making mistakes. It’s also about running a campaign of the quality that you force a lot of mistakes by your opponent. As I said, it’s mainly about execution.
We’re still pretty much where we were last night on that Selzer poll. It’s hard to know what it means or whether it matters. It’s just one poll. The most interesting day-after analysis I’ve seen centers on the fact that an abortion ban went into effect in the state just in July. And it went into effect pretty clearly against a big majority of the state’s residents. An earlier Selzer poll already showed Iowa much closer than people anticipated. It’s also a state with a lot of white people with college degrees. So there’s some argument that it might be more Harris friendly than people expect. It’s even occurred that picking up some of the ad spend out of Nebraska could be having an impact in Iowa. So maybe those are parts of an explanation. But it seems like folks working in the inside DC publications have fixed on the abortion ban blowback theory of the case. But that in itself is pretty disquieting news for the Trump campaign, to put it mildly. Note too that a lot of these polls we’re seeing now show abortion moving straight to the top of the issue matrix for voters.
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
On the eve of the 2024 election, there’s little I can use this platform to say that will relieve the collective bubbling, ulcer-forming acid in all of our stomachs, so here’s a more digestible tale — though RFK Jr. would not refer to it as such.
Member Newsletter
