Josh Marshall

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Josh Marshall is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TPM.

Election Miscellany #5

A curious thing. There’s a new rush of press stories reporting that Mar-a-Lago is suddenly a bundle of nerves as they see evidence they’re falling short in Pennsylvania. This is certainly why Trump is suddenly going berserk on social media, making freakshow claims that the race is being stolen in PA. We knew that. Meanwhile Trump is suddenly losing ground in betting markets, which for a couple of weeks have shown him to be a prohibitive favorite to return to the White House. This is all very nice to see. But I wouldn’t necessarily see it as some sign of momentum in Harris’s favor.

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Election Miscellany #4

If you’re watching the latest polls, make a note of something called “herding.” It could be relevant for discussions of polling after the election. The concept is straightforward. In the final days of an election, poll results tend to trend toward consensus. One possibility is that everyone is finally making up their mind and the picture and reality is coming into focus. But that’s not the only possibility. For a mix of good faith and maybe less than good faith reasons, pollsters can become increasingly leery of publishing an outlier poll. There’s a tendency to “herd” together for extra-statistical reasons.

Let’s say you’re five days out from the election and the polling averages say candidate Jones is up 2 points and you’ve got a poll which says candidate Smith is up 3 points. (Pardon may defaulting to anglo surnames.) Everyone has an outlier result sometimes. But do you really want your final poll to be a weird outlier? In the modern era with aggregators, pollsters are often graded on the predictive accuracy of their final polls. So it kind of matters. If you’re a bit shady maybe you just tweak your numbers and get them closer to the average. If you’re more on the level maybe you take a closer look at the data and find something that really looks like it needs adjusting. Maybe you just decide that you’re going to hold this one poll back.

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Pods

As I mentioned in this week’s podcast, out today, Kate Riga and I are going to be heavying-up on podcasts next week. In addition to the regularly scheduled Wednesday podcast, we are planning to do “instapods” (quick hits lasting 15-20 minutes) through the week. We’re planning on doing the first late on election night. We don’t know precisely when, but sometime late in the evening when we have at least some broad sense of what the results are looking like. And no, we’re not expecting to know a winner at that point. We’re then going to have the regular episode the following afternoon. Then we plan to record late afternoonish instapods on Thursday and Friday afternoons to hit the big developments of the day. If the winner of the election is clear by the following morning, we’re confident there’s still going to be a lot to discuss on Thursday and Friday.

Of course, it’s possible that there will be additional breaking news at any point over the course of the week that might prompt us to do an additional instapod in addition to this schedule.

How To Analyze the Early Vote Prime Badge
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I told you a week or more ago not to try to interpret early voting data yourself. And don’t put much stock in a hot take on it you see from someone on Twitter. It’s a fool’s errand. If you have access to a lot of data you can draw inferences. That can be real-time modeling data the campaigns have access to or it can be various other datasets that provide context for interpreting the data. Even with all that, the hallmark of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about is a lot of tentativeness and uncertainty. With a lot of knowledge you can point to patterns or a tightened ranges of possibilities, not certainties.

I’m doing this post both because the findings are interesting but also because it’s an illustration of how you can actually pull some signals out of the data when you really know your stuff.

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Election Miscellany #3

Pretty remarkable. In a moment of unguarded exuberance, Speaker Mike Johnson promised today that he and future-President Trump will abolish Obamacare and bring back the joys of denial of coverage for preexisting conditions.

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Election Miscellany #2

I want to mention one element of the story we’re now seeing unfold before us. We don’t know who’s going to win this thing or just how either candidate might do it. But what has always been the most obvious way for Harris to win this election is to hold the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. I’ve already discussed with you the issues with the Trump campaign’s decision to outsource its ground operations to super PACs and the way that doesn’t seem to have panned out. But the states themselves aren’t entirely passive players. Or they shouldn’t be. When things are working as they should the national party and the presidential standard bearer’s campaign can plug into a dynamic party organization in a given state.

A pattern that has become more and more clear to me over the last month or so is that to the extent Democrats are outplaying Republicans on the ground a significant part of that is the legacy of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” shenanigans. It’s left a number of these state parties deeply splintered and unable or even unwilling to do the kind of work that keeps a party organization functioning.

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A Massive Backlash Prime Badge
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NPR reported yesterday afternoon that The Washington Post has lost more than 200,000 subscription in the backlash against owner Jeff Bezos’ last minute intervention ending the Post’s policy of endorsing presidential candidates. That’s a staggering figure, far more than I would have guessed. When I wrote my piece over the weekend, the clearest report was that they’d lost over 2,000 subscriptions. If I understand the numbers right, the Post lost almost 10% of its paying subscribers in a single weekend. Again, a totally stunning and in business terms devastating number — in part because the cancellations appear to continue.

I got some inkling that the damage might be severe when TPM Reader BS emailed me this morning to tell me that after canceling his subscription, he received a special offer to restart his subscription including a link to a new article by Dana Milbank in which Milbank argues that he’s not giving up on the Post and he hopes readers don’t either. If the Post had lost a couple thousand subscribers, that would have been a downer for them and certainly a black eye among news super-consumers and what we might call elite news and politics opinion. (I use “elite” here in a purely descriptive sense.) But it wouldn’t be a huge thing in business terms. And I’d be surprised if the institution itself would address the issue so frontally in the pitches to cancelling members. That’s especially since basically all of the columnists and reporters asking readers not to leave do so while roundly denouncing Bezos’ decision.

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Election Miscellany #1

I’m seeing more and more data points and testimonials – from both sides of the aisle – that the Democratic ground game in multiple states is superior to the Republican one, in many cases by a substantial degree. Now it’s Republicans who are starting to say it. For Republicans saying this is itself a get out the vote effort, warning of the danger to shake more Republican voters loose and get them to the polls. But looking at it in toto I think they’re saying it because they mean it.

A Good Piece on Polling

We’ve discussed repeatedly in recent months how poll results aren’t just “the numbers” in some hard, incontestable sense. They include a set of assumptions about the nature of the electorate. For most TPM readers, this is a fairly straightforward point that doesn’t require much convincing or explanation. But this post by a professor at Vanderbilt provides a really helpful real-world illustration. Josh Clinton takes sample data and shows that by using different reasonable and good faith assumptions about the electorate he can get results ranging from Harris +.9 to Harris +8. Don’t pay attention to the fact that these results are all still in her favor. The point is that the assumptions baked into the poll can yield results 7 points apart. It could as easily be Trump +3 to Harris +4. Again, it’s one thing to understand this in the abstract. But the specific explanation and the concrete outputs tell the story in a different way.

If nothing else, this is why that 7 point spread is just a bright flashing neon light that many of us are disregarding or not even seeing while we’re obsessing about win or loss margins of like half a percentage point.

Uncertain, But Not Necessarily Close Prime Badge
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I’ve made this point a few times in recent weeks, here and on the podcast. I’m going to make the point again because I think it’s critical for understanding this election nine days out. We keep hearing that this is the closest election in decades. Polls say that’s right. At least 5 of the 7 swing states are within a single percentage point — fairly meaningless margins statistically. National poll averages are between one and two points — right on the cusp of where most believe a Democratic Electoral College victory becomes possible. But I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. What we have is a high uncertainty election. That’s not the same thing. There’s every chance that most or every race that looks close will veer more or less uniformly in one direction. And that wouldn’t necessarily be because of one late-breaking story, some great decision by one of the candidates or even undecideds all “breaking” in one way. It could simply be because the dominant understanding of the race and the electorate was just a bit off and had been all along.

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