The polls are weird rn | Peter Banks

Either 2024 will be the Democrat's 2016 or Trump is relatively to Harris an extremely strong candidate.

Something strange is going on with polling around the 2024 US presidential election. When you look at the Real Clear Polling “no toss-ups” for the presidential election a Trump “blowout” seems to be brewing. 

[image is from 10.29.2024]

The only swing state that Harris is currently ahead in is Michigan and there she is up by less than a point. Even more remarkable is that Trump is currently ahead in the national popular vote which if true would be only the 2nd time that a Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote in my lifetime - the other being in 2004. 

[image is from 10.29.2024]

This is all even though in both 2016 and 2020 the polls seriously underestimated Trump - you can see in the image above that at this point in 2020 for example Biden was up over 7 points, he ended up winning by about 5, and in 2016 Clinton was up nearly 5 points, before going on to win by slightly more than 2. 

Because of this consistent and growing polling lead, Trump is heavily favored in the betting markets. On the polymarket for example, he has a ⅔ chance of winning the Presidency. None of this is strange so far. Trump is up in the polls, and as a result, he is likely to win the Presidency. What is weird is what happens when you look at the Senate races. 

[image is from 10.29.2024]

Looking at Real Clear Pollings no tossup map Democrats are keyed in right now to win every single swing state Senate race, except for Florida which isn’t really a swing state any more than Virginia is. In neither 2016 nor 2020 did a single state split its Presidential and Senate results; meaning that every state that voted for Trump(or Clinton/Biden) in 2016 and 2020 also voted for a Republican(Democrat) if they had an open Senate race. So what can possibly be going on? Well, I think there are 2 possible stories, both of which are in my mind at least equally likely. 

2024 is 2016 for Democrats

The simplest explanation is that 2024 will be the Democrats' 2016. What I mean by this is that the polls are failing to capture real political enthusiasm and so vastly underestimating the Democrat’s strength. It could be a combination of disgust at January 6th and Trump's general blaise attitude towards democratic institutions, continued rage over the repealing of Roe vs. Wade, or something else but for whatever reason pollsters aren’t looking where they are supposed to. 

This is compounded by the fact that Trump has been underestimated in the previous two elections and there seems to be a real fear of “getting it wrong again”. In 2016 the Senate map looked much more favorable to the Republicans than the Presidential. For example, Johnson was only down by 2.7 points in the Wisconsin Senate election - well within the margin of error - whereas Clinton was up by nearly 7 points. As someone who lived through that time, there was a general feeling that “of course Trump is worse than a generic Republican” so the idea that a Republican could, in theory, pick up Wisconsin was more easily believable than Trump somehow massively overperforming the Romney campaign - which included Paul Ryan who is from Wisconsin. That cultural meme of course turned out to not be true and the Senate map which showed an extremely tight election in every swing state was much more accurate than the polls for the presidential election. 

A coalition that wins the Senate map above isn’t even that difficult to imagine because it is just the Biden 2020 result + Ohio. I don’t have much to add here because I don’t know enough about the industry to critique specifics. My bias says that the Senate map is probably more accurate since there is less pressure to bias your results. Nate Silver has on a number of occasions observed that there seems to be a lot of implausible herding in the polls. In a perverse way it is better to be wrong with everyone than be wrong in a unique way. In short, there is a real chance that Harris walks into the office with a trifecta and the MAGA wing of the Republican party is humiliated and forced to spend the next 4 years wandering in the desert. If she does pull this off she should be rightfully seen as someone who managed to skillfully play politics with candidly a shit hand. 

Trump is a uniquely strong candidate/Harris is a uniquely weak candidate

If the polls aren’t biased against Harris then the only alternative explanation is that she is an extremely weak candidate relative to Trump and millions of Americans are preparing to split their ticket in a couple of days. A somewhat extreme example of this is happening right now in Ohio where Sherrod Brown is up in the polls by around a point and Trump is simultaneously up by over 7. If this does end up occurring it would imply a level of vote splitting that is extremely rare in American politics. I’m going to assume for the rest of this section that the polls are correct and steel man the case for why either Harris is much weaker than a generic Democrat or Trump is much stronger than a generic Republican.

Starting with Trump being strong: This may be strange to people in my circle but I actually think Trump is the strongest possible Republican candidate. Yes, Trump is crass and doesn’t have a lot of respect for our time-honored political institutions - including arguably attempting to coup our government 4 years ago - but that is what people want. 

The reason for this is actually quite simple, if somewhat culturally uncomfortable. Democrats have been running on a basket of policies that are exclusionary to a large primarily working class group of White(and non-White) American men and Trump is trying to pick up these voters. 

To give a concrete example to this controversial claim, on the Democrat’s main website, they have a section titled “WHO WE SERVE” where they list out nearly every intersectional identity humanly possible from “Ethnic Americans” to “Democrats Abroad”, but two large groups are left out: Whites and men. It is easy to dismiss this as pure vibes - something I will touch on in a second - but it has been mirrored by substantive policy decisions by the Biden administration which they proudly display. I don’t want to get too distracted by litigating a separate issue - if the implicit bias of society towards White men is more powerful than the explicit bias regulators have implemented(sources: board diversity, government contracting, hiring, ect.) - but it is key to remember that there is little public pushback against the system of legal discrimination against White guys that exists.

The exception to this political silence is Trump, who has waged a verbal - if not substantive - war against cultural progressivism for the last decade. Other Republicans have a tendency to cave to accusations of racism or sexism, meaning that to millions of guys, Trump is the only candidate who is actually willing to stand up for their interests. “Sure Trump is a narcissistic lunatic but at least he isn’t a cuck” isn’t far from the way a lot of people I know view this election.  

But since Senate Democrats, from swing states, are far from the hyper cultural progressives of the national Democratic party, tons of people are on track to split their vote in November. Since many people simply trust Democrats, on issues of welfare and abortion, far more than they trust Republicans they will vote for a Democratic Senator to try and keep the government from cutting corporate taxes or pass a national abortion ban, while simultaneously voting for Trump as a middle finger to a system they view as overtly disrespectful. Now I’m not sure where this readership sits politically, but I suspect that they on average sit much closer to the “society serves White men implicitly so we shouldn’t include a section for them” than the “this is an obvious sign of a misandrist and racist - against Whites - society”. But my proposition is pretty simple, no one has a problem imagining that other groups - say Hispanics or Blacks - vote to a significant degree due to topics of “dignity and respect”(vibes) . I simply think that White men do also. The idea that White(and non-White) men might be more influenced by a widespread culture of disrespect inside of left-wing institutions than abortion isn’t completely insane, even if you may find it distasteful.

Trump’s unique appeal to White guys also extends to a ton of minority guys - many of whom I personally know. Frankly speaking, a ton of dudes don’t find the basket of values that either progressives or traditional Republicans are offering appealing at all. If you don’t think that parents supporting a trans child’s gender identity should be a factor when determining custody - as it is in California -  but also are not a member of the three-legged stool of traditional Republicans(religious conservatives, pro-war hawks, and big business) Trump is probably your guy. 

All of this ignores immigration which was a topic Trump has been consistently nativist on in a way that mainstream Republicans simply have not - at a time when immigration is an extremely important topic to the American electorate. Let alone the fact that when Trump was under literal fire he chose to stand his ground and chant “Fight” with blood running down his face. 

Moving to why Harris might be weaker than a generic Democrat. I think this can be neatly summed up in two sentences. Harris was hired to represent the progressive wing of the Democratic party in 2020 and that movement has passed its high water mark. Additionally, the manner in which Harris was selected was frankly insane. 

In slightly more words; many of the writers I read have written about the decline of 2010s style progressivism(Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, Tyler Cowen) and I think they are essentially right. I work in academia - PhD student at Stanford - and I feel like the general vibe here is much closer to the center-left than it was during 2020-2022 when I worked at the University of Chicago - a notoriously right-leaning place in academia. October 7th created a permission structure - at least in business schools - to openly distance yourself from a lot of the cultural leftism of the last decade. If academia - the left tail - is shifting so is the rest of society. Harris, despite recent efforts, is almost the representative of American progressivism. She was one of the most left-wing senators in US history and was chosen for her position as VP during the height of the US racial reckoning by a candidate who openly announced his intention to select a Black female VP. This second point might not be fair to her since obviously Waltz was chosen due to his race and gender and he doesn’t seem to be subject to similar scrutiny - but politics isn’t fair. 

In addition to Kamla representing a brand of politics that the American people are rapidly souring on - she herself is running to the center on about every issue - her very selection was simply put,  insanity. The media - which as Bezo indicated in his op-ed is seen as an extension of the Democratic party - spent months insisting that Biden was mentally fit for office and that people asking questions were grifters. Only for millions of Americans to watch a doddering old man on the debate stage. Then, as Biden refused to step down, a new batch of talking heads emerged to insist that “Biden couldn’t even drop out”. Only for that to not be true and for Harris to be effectively appointed by party insiders. It is impossible to say for sure what would have happened in an open primary, but I have serious doubts that Harris could have won. Her performance in 2020 fell short of spectacular and she has a sort of negative charisma - I love this video of her asking a crowd to shout their own name and then them going silent. I don’t think we can totally rule out that a sizable fraction of the electorate would gladly vote for a Democratic candidate they actually liked - say Obama - rather than Trump but they just really dislike Harris. 

Finally, if Trump has been notoriously nativist on immigration Harris has been extremely progressive. From arguing during her 2019 primary run that border crossing’s should be decriminalized to being assigned by the Biden admin to “deal with the root causes” of migration Harris is in an awkward position of having openly supported policy positions which are now deeply unpopular. When I look at this full picture it seems plausible that Harris could significantly underperform Senate Democrats and go down in history - once the dust has settled - as probably the weakest Democratic candidate in modern history. If Trump does end up winning the popular vote, after January 6th, it will be hard to not place a significant amount of the blame on Harris and the political movement she appears to represent.

Conclusion

We have no idea who will win this election but it is an extremely important one. A lot of my ‘never-Trump’ conservative/centrist friends are hyper-focused on issues of foreign policy such as Ukraine and Israel and this is an area where the president wields huge power. The world seems to feel as if we are leaving the post-war equilibrium that has existed for the last 80 years. America is for better or worse, the arbiter of that system and we seem to have grown tired of it and want to turn inward. What that means for the billions of people who currently live under an effective American Empire is unclear, but it matters a lot. Harris seems set on trying to maintain the current system and winning could hold it together long enough for Americans to change their opinion on the relative importance of domestic policy - but a Trump victory would probably indicate a major global power rebalance. 

On the domestic side, this election is equally important. My entire life has been a series of cultural progressive victories. If Harris wins I expect that to continue for the foreseeable future. She is running to the center, for now, but I expect her to govern to the cultural left of Biden. In contrast if Trump wins I expect him to use the coercive power of the state to take a sledgehammer to a lot of progressive dominated institutions. The President has huge appointment power within government agencies and increasingly corporations(and other large institutions) are governed less by the letter of the law than they are by bureaucratic interpretations of it. A Trump presidency would bring about a huge change in the US domestic policy space - especially if hands effectively regulatory control to Elon Musk as he seems poised to do. Unlike Trump, Elon is probably the most competent human alive today, and I expect him to bring the same frantic energy to reorganizing executive power as he has to running his companies. 

I want to conclude this with my personal opinion on this election. I personally despise Harris, but view her as an effectively harmless apparatchik for a system that for all of its failures has brought about the highest level of material comfort in history. Additionally, Trump's positions on abortion and the rule of law are untenable to me. I plan on voting for Harris on election day, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit it would bring me great personal pleasure to watch the steam be taken out of the progressive movement. Where I sit relative to the American public is something I won’t know until election night.