The Backchannel

I heard from a reader yesterday who saw one of the country’s top political journalists give a public presentation about the race. The run-down I got of that event crystallized something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to over the last few months and writing about here and there. At the elite level, political journalists have a basic contempt for Democrats. It’s not even very concealed because in a way it’s hardly even recognized as such. This continues to be the case despite the fact that most of the people I’m talking about, if they vote, probably vote for Democrats. They are socio-economically and culturally, if not always ideologically, the peers of Democrats. We often confuse cosmopolitan social values for liberalism. If anything, this basic pattern has become more the case over the last decade. These people are highly educated. They are affluent. They are the creatures of the major cities.

Are they secretly rooting for Donald Trump? Hardly. Or at least not in the great majority of the cases. Trump is a tiger on the savanna, dangerous but also fascinating and above all alien. That’s why the notorious rustbelt diner interview stories were and are such a staple. They’re safaris. It defines the coverage, and in ways seldom helpful for Democrats in electoral political terms.

Before social media foreign subversion became a staple of partisan politics in the U.S., the first journalist to write about the topic for a big mainstream audience was Adrian Chen. He published a piece in The New York Times Magazine in June 2015. It was called “The Agency” and it told the story of the Internet Research Agency, the government-linked Russian troll farm which would become a centerpiece of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and the long investigations that came after it. The IRA was owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner Group whose star would continue to rise over the next decade until he mounted an ill-fated rebellion against Moscow and later died “mysteriously” in a plane crash.

I wanted to share with you a few ideas, possible insights and caveats about campaign polls. These aren’t original to me in most cases, just some general points, observations, etc.

First, herding: Herding is the phenomenon in which even professional, good-faith polling operations start grouping together in the latter stages of a campaign because you don’t want to go too far out from the consensus numbers. Right now the national top lines have been between 2 and 4 points in Harris’ favor for a couple months. If you do a poll that gets you plus 10 in either direction, you’re going to think or are liable to think something’s wrong with your numbers. Somehow you’ve just got a spoiled set of data. Maybe you don’t release that poll or maybe you look again at the numbers and decide there are too few of some demographic subset and you re-weight that and it brings the topline back close to that 2-4 range.

It’s also the case that voter choice gets more settled in the final weeks of a campaign. So maybe the voters are actually herding themselves. There are lots of possibilities. But the general point here is that there are factors which can drive even ethical and professional pollsters in this herding direction.

The Beltway demand for Kamala Harris to do her ninth or twentieth “substantive” (read: mainstream media) interview is reaching a fever pitch in the wake of Harris’ campaign announcing a new round of podcasts, Late Night and influencer interviews coming right after her appearance on 60 Minutes. Yesterday’s Politico’s Playbook captured the mood in a newsletter edition that managed to be both catty and frivolous, a churning mix of trying to make “fetch” happen and “debate me, bro” hectoring. Yes, she’s doing a bunch of interviews, they announced. But sorry lady, they just ain’t the right ones …

Over the weekend a number of people, independently, asked me if there was some shift in the presidential campaign, some shift in the vibes, some shift in the polls, etc. When I asked what prompted the question, it was usually chalked up to a number of articles over the weekend suggesting that Harris’ campaign is faltering or stalled or somehow blowing the election. The through-line through most of this commentary is that Harris’ campaign is too risk-averse or not running an aggressive enough campaign, which she needs to be doing. There are actually some so-so polls out this morning. But we’ve been in a period of small ups and downs for about a month. So I wanted to tell you what I told these people.

So, I’ve been trying to poke around further into my new favorite mystery: the GOP ground operation and what on earth is going on with it. So far, I’ve been looking back at articles I’d read on publication and rereading them, and at articles I had not read and reading them for the first time, for clues into the Trump/RNC ground game question that I’ve been discussing in recent posts. One thing I hadn’t fully grasped or perhaps had forgotten is that Turning Point USA and its chieftain Charlie Kirk had a big role in pushing for the ouster of Ronna McDaniel at the RNC. And the push seems to have been in significant measure about wanting to take over or play a bigger role in GOP field operations. So a substantial amount of the impetus for all of this appears to have originated with Turning Point and its campaign arm, Turning Point Action. So that’s one clue.

As I’ve explained, this issue of turnout operations and what we can glean about them is one of the things I’m most interested in finding out more about as we hurtle into the last 30 days of the campaign. None of the information I’ve found so far gives any definitive answers. I’m not even sure definitive answers are possible. But I’m going to pass on some interesting hints I’m finding. The thing you hear again and again about canvassing and ground operations is that you cannot just overwhelm it with money. Money is obviously critical. But you need a lot of institutional experience and time to make it work. With TV ads you really can overwhelm it with money. Get a billionaire with unlimited funds, cut some good ads and get them on TV. Done and done. One of the big factors operating now in swing states is that outside groups are paying 10 to 25 times the ad rates of campaigns. But still, unlimited money can help with that. Canvassing and field operating takes time and institutional experience.

One thing we’ve talked about a lot this year in the Backchannel and the podcast is changes pollsters have made to their methodologies over recent years, in large part because of 2016 and 2020 polling errors tied to Trump. Kyle Kondick, of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, posted two good links on this that I wanted to share with you. The first is this short interview with Professor Charles Franklin of Marquette Law School who runs what is generally considered the signature in-state poll in Wisconsin and one of the most reliable nationwide. (Some of you may remember that Franklin was our polling methodology advisor back in the days of TPMPollTracker.) Then there’s this short article which goes over the changes industry-wide.

Wars are not only bloody and murderous endeavors, they are also unpredictable. The specter of former forays into Lebanon looms over Israel’s current one: easy to get in, harder to get out. After the stunning assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as well as most of the secondary leadership of the organization over the last three weeks, we’re hearing voices in Israel and the U.S. talking predictably about a “new Middle East.” Meanwhile others in the international community and the U.S. talk about these new developments as an “escalation” out of nowhere — Israel looking for a new war, basically.

This is complicated stuff, like everything which happens in this region and especially everything tied to Israel, the Palestinians, and the states surrounding both. But I wanted to share some thoughts on why this escalation and Israel’s fight with Hezbollah are qualitatively different from anything that is happening in Gaza.

After days of hints at it, Democrats are now making a serious foray into Florida and Texas in a last-ditch effort to hold on to their Senate majority. Before calling it “last-ditch,” I wondered what to call it. Is that too pessimistic? Too optimistic? I’m really not sure. You know the background. Democrats went into this cycle with an almost historically bad map. One seat in West Virginia was, by universal agreement, hopeless. Beyond that preordained loss, Democrats had incumbents up in a several of the swing states and new candidates trying to hold existing seats in other swing states. On the other side of the ledger there were no obvious pick-up opportunities. Starting from those inauspicious beginnings, the Democrats’ map has held up remarkably well. In all but one case, Senate Democratic candidates go into the last month of the campaign either favorites or strong contenders. That one exception is Montana, where Jon Tester is now a decided underdog. Which brings us to Florida and Texas.

Are these races really plausible?