It's Never Happened Before & Probably Won't Next Year Either
Simon Rosenberg is optimistic about the presidential election— and he’s optimistic based on polling! “[T]he idea that Biden is struggling with elements of his coalition— youth, Hispanics, African-Americans— has been derived largely from small sample sizes and data… [W]e have not seen an erosion of our coalition in actual elections which have taken place over the past 18 months… Our performance since Dobbs remains remarkable, and important. In 2022 we gained in AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH, PA over 2020, getting to 59 percent in CO, 57 percent in PA, 55 percent in MI, 54 percent in NH in that ‘red wave’ year. This year we’ve won and outperformed across the country in every kind of election, essentially leaving this a blue wave year. We got to 56 percent in the WI SCOTUS race, 57 percent in Ohio, flipped Colorado Springs and Jacksonville, flipped the VA House, Kentucky Governor Andrew Beshear grew his margin, we won mayoralties and school board races across the United States. Elections are about winning and losing, and we keep winning and they keep losing. Opposition and fear of MAGA is the dominant force in U.S. politics today, and that is a big problem for super-MAGA Trump in 2024. Fear and opposition to MAGA has been propelling our electoral wins since 2018, and will almost certainly do so again next year.”
Rosenberg would never call Siena an incompetent polling firm, but outside of New York elections it is exactly that— always as worthless as pay-for-results firms like Rasmussen and Trafalgar. That the NY Times uses Siena instead of a competent polling firm is absolutely insane and the fact that anyone puts so much emphasis on a Times/Siena poll—with it’s absurdly large margins of error— skewers political discourse away from reality. “We do,” wrote Rosenberg, “have recent large sample polls of Hispanics and young people, and both show Biden at, near or above his 2020 numbers.”
Hispanics— A late September large sample (1401 interviews) bi-partisan Univision poll just of Hispanic voters had Biden leading Trump 58%-31% (+27). This would put Biden at or above of two of the three Hispanic exit polls from 2020, and within striking range of what I think his number needs to be in 2024, +30. Remember the last two cycles have been the best Democrats have had in the heavily Hispanic Southwest since the 1940s (yes there’s that winning elections thing).
Do note that the NYT poll which caused the big freak-out had Biden +8 with Hispanics in these battleground states. Here it’s +27.
Young People— A new gold standard Harvard/IOP youth poll (2098 interviews) has Biden up over Trump with likely 18-29 year old voters 57%-33% (+24). +24 was Biden’s margin in 2020 according to the Exit polls. His lead shrinks to +16 with likely young voters when all the potential third party candidates are named so while this poll is encouraging we still have work to do.
In what is very bad news for Rs, despite having a live primary right now, there’s been a significant drop in vote intent for young Republicans from four years ago while Dems are holding:
Democrats (Fall 2019: 68% “definitely vote,” Fall 2023: 66%)
Republicans (Fall 2019: 66%, Fall 2023: 56%)
Independent/Unaffiliated (Fall 2019: 41%, Fall 2023: 31%)
The NYT battleground poll had Biden winning 18-29 year olds by only a single point, and losing 18-44 year old voters overall. Here Biden is winning 18-29 year olds by 24 points, and 2020 exits had Biden winning 18-44 year olds by 14 pts in 2020.
He also points to 6 more recent polls not done by Siena, that show Biden tied or ahead in the last week:
42-41 Economist/YouGov (Biden’s gained 2 points since mid-November)
43-43 Morning Consult (Biden’s gained 3 points since late November)
39-37 YouGov
37-35 Leger/The Canadian Press
44-42 Economist/You Gov (last week)
43-42 Morning Consult (last week)
What does this mean? He’s glad to share his thoughts: “The NYT polls from October should no longer be referenced. The only fair characterization of the election now is that polls show it within margin of error, with a majority of them showing Biden with a slight lead. Trump is no longer favored or leading in the polls. Recent large sample polls of Hispanics and young people do not find erosion for Biden and the Democrats… Our continued strength in elections of all kinds all across the country since the spring of 2022 is in my mind the most important electoral data out there, and should be getting far more attention… Note that last night Democrats had another significant overperformance in a South Florida state house special election— 10 pts above 2020, 31 pts over 2022. Amazing stuff:
All that said, it’s certainly worth thinking about it in the context of Ron Brownstein’s new essay for The Atlantic, A War On Blue America, in which he warns that “in a second term, Trump would punish the cities and states that don’t support him.” What Brownstein doesn’t say, but only hints at, is that is exactly what Trump’s zombified MAGAts want. He wrote that “During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president— with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends— to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out for a second term makes clear that those bruising and divisive efforts were only preliminary skirmishes. Presidents always pursue policies that reflect the priorities of the voters and regions that supported them. But Trump moved in especially aggressive ways to exert control over, or punish, the jurisdictions that resisted him. His 2017 tax bill, otherwise a windfall for taxpayers in the upper brackets, capped the federal deductibility of state and local taxes, a costly shift for wealthy residents of liberal states such as New York and California. He moved, with mixed success, to deny federal law-enforcement grants to so-called sanctuary cities that didn’t fully cooperate with federal immigration agents. He attempted to strip California of the authority it has wielded since the early 1970s to set its own, more stringent pollution standards.”
In Trump’s final year in office, he opened a new, more ominous front in his campaign to assert control over blue jurisdictions. As the nation faced the twin shocks of the coronavirus pandemic and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Trump repeatedly dispatched federal law-enforcement agents to blue cities, usually over the opposition of Democratic mayors, governors, or both. Trump sent an array of federal personnel to Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to protect a federal courthouse amid the city’s chaotic protests; reports soon emerged of camouflage-clad federal agents without any identifying insignia forcing protesters into unmarked vans. Trump responded to the huge racial-justice protests in Washington, D.C., by dispatching National Guard troops drawn from 11 states, almost all of them led by Republican governors. Later he sent other federal law-enforcement officers to combat rising crime in Kansas City and Chicago, a city Trump described as “worse than Afghanistan.”
Trump has signaled that in a second presidential term, he would further escalate his war on blue America. He’s again promising federal legislation that would impose policies popular in red states onto the blue states that have rejected them. He has pledged to withhold federal funding from schools teaching critical race theory and “gender ideology.” He says he will initiate federal civil-rights investigations into liberal big-city prosecutors (whom he calls “Marxist local District Attorneys”) and require cities to adopt policing policies favored by conservatives, such as stop-and-frisk, as a condition for receiving federal grants.
Even more dramatic are Trump’s open pledges to launch militarized law-enforcement campaigns inside blue cities. He has proposed initiatives that cumulatively could create an occupying federal force in the nation’s largest cities. Trump has indicated that “in cities where there’s been a complete breakdown of public safety, I will send in federal assets, including the National Guard, until law and order is restored.”
Trump envisions an even more invasive door-to-door offensive against undocumented immigrants. In an early-2023 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said he “will use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Stephen Miller, who was his top immigration aide in the White House, later added that Trump envisions establishing massive internment camps for undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation. Trump has also promised “to use every tool, lever, and authority to get the homeless off our streets,” and move them to camps as well. (On this front, Trump has said he would work with states, but in practice that would likely involve partnering with Republican governors to impose policies to clear the streets opposed by their own Democratic mayors.)
…As president, Trump seemed to view himself less as the leader of a unified republic than as the champion of a red nation within a nation— one that constitutes the real America. If anything, Trump has assumed that factional role even more overtly in his 2024 campaign, promising that he will deliver “retribution” for his supporters and dehumanizing his opponents. Powered by such fetid resentments and grievances, the agenda Trump seeks to impose on blue cities and states could create the greatest threat to the nation’s cohesion since the Civil War.
