The founder of the main outside spending group backing Kamala Harris for president says their own internal opinion polling is “much less rosy” than public polls – and has warned Democrats that they face much closer races in key states.
“Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,” said Future Forward super PAC president Chauncey McLean said during a Monday event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
According to public polls – which, as you’ll see below, are largely bullshit – Harris is leading Donald Trump in several national polls by FiveThirtyEight; 46.6% to 43.8%, and has allegedly pulled ahead in several battleground states, Reuters reports.
Except that’s not what Future Forward is seeing…
The PAC has created a ‘massive polling operation’ and tested some 500 digital television ads for Biden and 200 for Harris, along with polling some 375,000 Americans in the weeks after Biden was forced out of the 2024 race and Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee on July 22.
According to McLean, the majority of Harris’ momentum after she took over for Biden was from young voters of color – opening up Sunbelt states such as Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. That said, Pennsylvania – the most consequential state in the group’s analysis, is a ‘coin flip’ based on Future Forward polls.
He says Harris must win one of three states – Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Georgia – to win the White House.
He warned that Harris has yet to fully rebuild the Biden coalition of Blacks, Hispanics and young voters that brought him the White House in 2020.
McLean said polling shows the public wants more detailed policy positions from Harris.
He says they don’t want “white papers,” but they also don’t want platitudes. He says they need more concrete examples of how she may differ from Biden and make their lives easier economically. Trump allies have called on Harris to do the same in recent days, hoping to pin her down on controversial issues. -Reuters
According to McLean, the race is tight as ever.
“We have it tight as a tick, and pretty much across the board,” he said.
About those bullshit polls…
Mark Davin Harris of political consulting firm ColdSpark says they’re seeing a “historic response bias on surveys that is setting the table for a large polling miss this fall.”
Diving right in, Harris says pollsters are essentially injecting unreported bias into polls by targeting subgroups more likely to answer the way they want.
For example, “In the meta data from the call centers college educated Dems are 3-4x more likely to answer than non-college. While weighting can help minimize the bias if done correctly it won’t totally eliminate the problem. For example even if you quota’ed for party (something I have very mixed feelings about) AND for education at the topline you can have the college Dems consume such a big chunk of Democrats that you miss the downscale Dems that are MUCH less partisan loyal.”
Harris is set to release an analysis that show “historically liberal” bias even when they “weight back to party.”
Cherry picking cross tabs is almost always fools gold but this is a critique of the methodological approach people are using to try to adjust for this issue.
— Mark Davin Harris (@markdharris) August 16, 2024
Gauging by turnout?
According to Harris, one possible solution would be to focus on a person’s past voting history – as those who ‘always’ vote are being oversampled vs. the ‘low turnout’ voters, who are more likely to vote for Trump.
“We’re seeing a lot of surveys WAY oversampling the ‘always voters’ and not getting enough of the infrequent voters that are so important in a Presidential race and Trump does better with low turnout folks,” he said.
I don’t blame the public pollsters for not fixing the response bias issue they are operating on really tight budgets but I do think they are herding results with weighting as well which I do blame them for.
— Mark Davin Harris (@markdharris) August 16, 2024
