Political Polls and Party Strategy 2021: Political Polling Somehow Still a Thing

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Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

I apologize for posting something that might have already been discussed pretty thoroughly, but NY Magazine's interview with David Shor seems like a pretty decent distillation of every argument the "wonks" will be making about how Democrats need to appeal to more moderate voters.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/david-shor-analysis-2020-election-autopsy-democrats-polls.html

quote:

On the determinants of winning, there�s a lively debate within the Democratic Party right now about what went wrong down-ballot in 2020 and what to do about it going forward. Several moderate House Democrats, who represent light-red districts, argue that the party suffered from its association with unpopular left-wing demands like �Defund the police� and ideological labels like �socialism.� They seem to suggest that all party members must distance themselves from radical social movements. Progressives, meanwhile, have argued that the Black Lives Matter protests actually aided Democrats by driving a surge in nonwhite voter registration � which, when combined with the work of organizations like Stacey Abrams�s New Georgia Project, and canvassing efforts like those spearheaded by Ilhan Omar and Rhasida Tlaib � spurred an increase in nonwhite turnout that was indispensable to Biden�s victory. They further maintain that the Democrats� problems with rural white voters stem from the party�s tendency to �shy away from conversations about race�: You can only neutralize white racial resentment by directly confronting it. Instead of keeping �issues of economic justice and racial justice in separate siloes,� the party must reframe racism as a greedy elite�s strategy for �dividing and conquering� workers. Finally, the left argues that the party must increase its investment in organizing infrastructure, using the so-called Reid machine in Nevada as a model.

How well do either of these analyses line up with your own views?

I think it�s important for us to be clear-eyed about what happened in 2020. We�re not going to know exactly what happened until there�s more analysis of precinct results. But I think that the county-level data we have tells a pretty clear big-picture story. Which is that we won the presidency because, one, while we lost non-college-educated white voters, we kept those defections to a relatively low level, and two, a bunch of moderate Republicans who had voted for Trump in 2016 decided to vote for Biden this time.

Turnout was up, but it was up for both parties. According to Nate Cohn�s estimates, Black turnout was probably up by around 8 percent, but non-Black turnout was up by something like 15 to 20 percent. So we had the highest-turnout election in a century, and despite that, we still only won because a bunch of people switched their votes in our direction.

quote:

If the most effective possible campaign intervention only nets you two points max, that seems inauspicious for Democrats making enough inroads with non-college-educated whites to compete in the Senate.

Right, so everybody in politics likes to debate the particulars of campaign tech and strategy. But elections are won or lost primarily on the basis of these broad structural forces and each party�s national brand. Which are related.

So the median voter in the presidential election is about 50 years old, watches about six hours of TV a day, and mostly gets their news from mainstream sources. And that means that, if you want to influence what this person believes, you�re probably not going to get them at the door or even through a paid message. They�re going to form their opinions based on how the media reports on and characterizes the parties.

You can see this in Georgia. Nothing really unique happened there. The state behaved as you would expect given that we had already bottomed out with non-college-educated whites and had room to grow with college-educated whites, who were alienated by the GOP�s Trump-era brand as conveyed by mainstream reporting. And we know that this is a national, structural phenomenon � and not primarily a product of state-level actions or micro-targeting � because the gains we made in the Atlanta suburbs were nearly identical to gains we made in similarly educated counties in other parts of the country.

So how do you change a party�s national brand?

This does get to your earlier question and to this very real tension that exists right now in the Democratic Party. Voters are now determining their opinions about parties in a unified way and not reading about individual local candidates. There�s arguably less local news. But people�s consumption of local news has definitely decreased, while their consumption of national news has increased. So it�s hard for candidates in redder areas to differentiate themselves from the national party than it used to be. This is part of why ticket-splitting is declining.

And that does create some awkward trade-offs. Like, it is now true that what a left-wing congressperson in a deep-blue district says will get transmitted adversarially by the Republican media, and to a significant extent by the mainstream media, to people who disagree. And those people won�t say, �Oh, this left-wing congressperson, well, he�s crazy. But Max Rose? He�s dope.� They�re just going to say, �Oh, Democrats support socialism now, because there�s this one socialist congressperson.�

I think the reality now is that whenever any elected Democrat goes out and says something that�s unpopular, unless the rest of the party very forcefully pushes back � in a way that I think is actually very rare within the Democratic Party currently � every Democrat will face an electoral penalty. And that�s awkward. But I think it�s a natural consequence of polarization and ticket-splitting declining. I think progressives try to get around this awkward reality by saying, �Well, Republicans are going to demonize us no matter what we say or do.� But I don�t think that kind of nihilism is justified. What they say actually does matter. Parties and candidates that say less controversial things, and are associated with less-controversial ideas, win more elections.

I think that the only option that we have is to move toward the median voter. And I think that really comes down to embracing the popular parts of our agenda and making sure that no one in our party is vocally embracing unpopular things. I know that sounds reactionary. But moderates don�t have a monopoly on popular ideas and progressives don�t have one on unpopular ideas. There are a lot of left-wing policies that are both popular and transformational. Worker co-determination. A federal job guarantee. There�s still a lot we can do.

The idea of having to tack constantly to what 55 year old television news watchers want is pretty depressing. I guess that's why I feel like it's probably true.

Main Paineframe posted:

The question here is this: what does he mean by "recovery"? Does he mean a return to the pre-COVID economy, or does he just mean returning to having a sufficient yearly GDP increase? The classes which were well-off enough to keep their jobs will certainly ramp up spending, but that doesn't mean the millions of jobs lost are necessarily going to return in the same way. COVID-19 has been a big incentive for employers to revamp and automate, reducing human roles and physical presence wherever possible. This involved a lot of up-front investments that wouldn't normally be worth it, but now employers have already made those investments, so many of the changes will likely stick.

From how I read those comments, particularly the bolded part, he is seeing more of a big GDP increase with less debt loads to overcome than in 2008. It's not necessarily a prediction of a full return to the old status quo.

quote:

Finally, while Biden should make the most of good economic news, he should try to build on success, not rest on his laurels. Short-term booms are no guarantee of longer-term prosperity. Despite the rapid recovery of 1982-1984, the typical American worker earned less, adjusted for inflation, at the end of Reagan�s presidency in 1989 than in 1979.

And while I�m optimistic about the immediate outlook for a post-vaccine economy, we�ll still need to invest on a large scale to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, improve the condition of America�s families (especially children) and, above all, head off catastrophic climate change.

So even if I�m right about the prospects for a Biden boom, the political benefits of that boom shouldn�t be cause for complacency; they should be harnessed in the service of fixing America for the long run.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2020 21:42

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 05:00

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

OddObserver posted:

I guess what bothers me about this is, well, shouldn't the GOP be tarred with their Peter Kings and Ted Cruzes and the likes? That may speak to gaps in media strategy or the like.

Probably media strategy and maybe the fact that some "swing" voters kind of like people who tell them it's okay to pay less taxes and be more racist?

Liberalism is a harder sell (in my eyes) because you have to sell doing something whereas conservatism basically sells what many people want to do which is a mix of nothing and being mean to people you don't like anyway.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2020 22:49

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

dwarf74 posted:

Wasn't there a film canister election recently - like 2018 maybe - and they had to scramble because nobody loving makes film canisters anymore?

That was the Virginia election Blue Footed Booby was talking about.

https://qz.com/1171726/david-yancey-wins-virginias-house-election-in-photos/

https://twitter.com/gmoomaw/status/948947033708224512

# ¿ Nov 26, 2020 05:20

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Charlz Guybon posted:

Wasn't his run derailed by the death of his son?

From what I remember, Beau's death was the largest factor at play, but there were also signals from other parts of the party that they had already fallen behind Clinton, so Biden thought his candidacy would be a non-starter. Obama wasn't as encouraging about it as people expected either.

If he had just run anyway, things could have been a lot different.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/why-joe-biden-didnt-run-for-president-and-why-hes-not-ruling-out-2020

https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/run-2016/2015/10/21/joe-biden-didnt-run-because-he-couldnt-win

From what I understand, Biden never "let go" of wanting to be president back in 2016, but he just was not ready to deal with everything he needed to deal with for it.

Also, from what I remember, a big source of the distance (if not animosity) between Julian Castro and Biden was exacerbated by Castro hopping on the Hillary Clinton train very early.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2020 16:07

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Rea posted:

I wonder what the pretty sizable gap between Ossoff and Warnock's margins is about, assuming this poll is even close to accurate.

That could be down to demographics/identity politics. To me, Ossoff isn't as charismatic and he screams "elite, suburban white guy." Ossoff seems to be tacking very centrist too to appease the suburbs. Given how much of the Democratic base in Georgia is still African-American, I could see how that might be dragging Ossoff's numbers down a bit.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2020 16:12

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

paternity suitor posted:

What's going to be hard for Democrats is to hold the coalition of reasonable suburban folks and more left wing AOC type folks, but it's no more difficult than the utterly bizarre coalition Republicans have held together for 60years of libertarians, chamber of commerce business people, and Christian conservatives.

I disagree. The GOP has been able to tie big business, libertarians and evangelical Christians together because they all want to be left alone to be as horrible to other people as the free market will allow them to be. It is a party whose main internal ideological disputes center on what degree of "nothing" they want to do.

Democrats on the other hand have to sell an array of active policies with stated ends that people can easily dispute over, especially when those policies involve some level of personal sacrifice, whether that is in the form of tax increases or school resources or property values or general cost of living and prices of goods. The Democrats are a big tent that is constantly in danger of falling down.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2020 16:36

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Pick posted:

The Christian conservatives, however, are absolutely not live and let live. I mean, one of their main positions is denying people abortions.

They like being left alone to be horrible to other people, whether it's through running their horrific private universities or primary schools or letting their charitable organizations discriminate on religious grounds while get government funding. Libertarians and rich people (to the extent that's not a redundant combination) don't care what Christians want as long as they are not personally affected or otherwise able to buy their way out.

You don't want abortion in Missouri? That's cool. I'll just go out of the state. Thanks for okaying the tax breaks.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2020 17:07

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

whydirt posted:

The idea that Republicans want to be left alone is false. They are all hierarchical and want to be in the top group. Being on top feels like being left alone because you have power to ignore those below you.

Their base is full of people who were already on top and want to be left alone to stay on top?

At this point, maybe this is all a matter of perspective and life experience. I might be too colored by my own experiences growing up in a very Republican county in a (at the time) Republican state.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2020 17:49

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

The biggest challenge for Democrats that I don't see ever going away as long as economic trends hold is that Democratic voters are all clustering around the same areas and leaving lots of states with less and less voters who will help overturn local GOP dominance. Liberal kids move to where the jobs are, so you get tons and tons of blue voters moving from the south or the midwest to live in and around places like NYC or Boston or DC. You've seen states like Virginia become more reliably "blue" from the local level on up, but that also has meant other states becoming redder and redder as time goes by (and giving the GOP time to gerrymander districts to keep things that way).

I don't know how to fix this.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2020 21:54

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

zoux posted:

Normally I'd agree with you but, performative or not, the fact that a majority of the House Republican caucus endorsed making Donald Trump president-for-life does cause me some heartburn.

Tangentially, is it absolutely bonkers to anyone else that they are doing all this for Donald loving Trump? Like if it was some successful general or conservative hero or something I could get that but it's the most ignorant, garish, venal, embarrassing person who's ever lived, and they all worship the ground he walks on. Especially after they got the 6-3 court, like what else do they think they can wring out of this guy.

To be fair, most of the Republican heroes of old would not have asked the party to do this. Not even Nixon. Trump brought big Boomer energy to the GOP and it's sticking.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2020 22:14

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Apologies for the potential double post, but what can we draw from the early voting numbers coming out of Georgia so far, if anything?

# ¿ Dec 16, 2020 19:26

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Bootleg Trunks posted:

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1339404465531723776?s=20

I hope Bootleg Trunks doesn't mind me sharing this post from the dedicated Georgia runoff thread. I thought it was worth posting here too since it's a poll.

quote:

Those prioritizing the economy are breaking for the Republican incumbents, while the Democratic challengers are leading with voters who see the coronavirus, health care and social justice as more important.

The Emerson College survey polled 605 people Dec. 14-16. It has a margin of error of 3.9 percentage points.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2020 20:37

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Charlz Guybon posted:

I'm a bit surprised that the over $200k cohort is split down the middle

Educational background starts becoming more of a differentiating factor, I imagine. Maybe increased amounts of domestic and world travel due to work and study? More likely to have a nuanced view of macroeconomics as opposed to loving nothing but trickle down?

# ¿ Dec 22, 2020 10:16

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Centurium posted:

Largely because he is young and new and willing to lose races to promote the idea that those races are contestable.

Back in the completely different strategic world of two months ago, the Loeffler/Isaacson seat was the potentially winnable race. Loeffler was a soft candidate and the seat had no real incumbency advantage, and Warnock was still something of a change up pitch to go after it.

Ossoff took on the other race "knowing" that he almost certainly would lose, but was building a brand as a Democrat willing to fight in the hard races and lose but by less than history would lead you to expect.

Now, he's in the stronger position because his seat has a full 6 year term while Warnock will only get the remainder of Isaacson's term (2 years).

Did anyone else go against Ossoff in the primary?

# ¿ Jan 6, 2021 15:17

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

vyelkin posted:

Eagerly awaiting President Ossoff's election in 2068, I guess.

Ossoff plagarizes a Jeremy Corbyn speech in 5, 4, 3...

# ¿ Jan 6, 2021 15:45

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

DTurtle posted:

As close as a lot of elections are, Republicans losing even 20% of their supporters (either by going hard Trump or by losing the hard Trump vote) will mean electoral death at a national level and in a lot of states.

How much do you think continued years of mind-numbing right wing media (either traditional or online/social) counteracts that though? I think that whole ideological support apparatus is very effective at keeping the death spiral from happening by normalizing even the most extreme GOP positions.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 14:34

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Concerned Citizen posted:

Montana Democrats have suffered under the delusion for years that the state is a purple one that they keep underperforming in rather than a deep red state they've been overperforming in. Ultimately, they were done in by an enormous surge in turnout - it turns out that sporadic voters in Montana are more GOP leaning than they thought.

So basically Texas without the demographic light at the end of the tunnel?

# ¿ Jan 10, 2021 20:26

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Bird in a Blender posted:

Yea, I just want to add that younger people voting for the more liberal candidate hasn't really been true until very recently.

I know I've posted this before somewhere, but to summarize, this is party voting lines by generation, and it's a few years old. Look at GenX, in 98, the oldest GenXer was 33, which would be equivalent to 2014 for Millenials. In 98, GenX was practically evenly split between the parties, but Millenials are voting like 15% more for the Dems. The GenX and Boomer lines are practically flat, Silent is a slight uptick towards Republicans, then you see Millenials, and they are steadily increasing towards the Dems, so either the younger millenials are that much more Dem leaning, or millenials are just moving that direction as they get older. I'm going to assume the younger millenials are just that much more favored to vote D.

The issue for Dems is more about clustering of their voters and how the senate works against them.

From what I remember, Gen X also votes very differently depending on which portion of Gen X you're looking at. You're talking about a generation born between 1965 to 1980, which in turn leads to very different formative experiences ranging from which politicians they were raised to idolize to how bad or good their post-college job prospects were.

Being 22 in 1987 with a BA or a BS was very different than being 22 and graduating right in the middle of the dot com bust and seeing your military buds getting sent to Iraq.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2021 21:18

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

My Youtube feed is pretty heavy with �Why I�m leaving California!� videos and it did make me wonder how much migration from the �People�s Republic of CA� was affecting voting results in other states. Are there any worthwhile pieces you guys can share on this?

I�d like to know if it�s been a mixed bag with various states getting more blue while Californians might be moving to places like Texas because they want to �go native� and more conservative.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2021 04:02

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Pick posted:

Paula Jean Swearengin, 2020.

I donated to her a couple of times because I felt like she was going to need help and I needed to put my money where my mouth was regarding the 50 state strategy. I kept getting calls from her recorded auto-dialer as a result. Her e-mails would talk about needing more money for TV and radio ads and things like that due to West Virginia being a less developed state.

I'd love to know what the post-mortem on her campaign was. It just seemed like they were really struggling and I'm not sure if that was down to her campaign or just a decayed party infrastructure in unfriendly territory.

FMguru posted:

Have some Number:

https://twitter.com/PatrickSvitek/status/1356995422850547714

Has there been a more self-destructive political act in the 21st century than Beto's 2020 campaign for president?

If only the damage was limited to Beto's own career.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2021 20:28

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Rea posted:

I don't have the link on hand, but there was a 2020 postmortem that said the 2020 polling miss was at least influenced by Dem voters being way too happy to be polled, in contrast with Trump (note: not necessarily GOP) voters who, for one reason or another, saw polling as a method to get them to admit that they liked Trump, in order for some deep state agency to have them hauled away or something.

It's those kinds of voters, the ones paranoid that polls are secretly a way to get them convicted of wrongthink, who, if 2018 is any indication, will have their turnout heavily depressed in 2022. Whether or not that "fixes" polling remains to be seen.

I think this ultimately links back to the piece you're thinking about.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-did-republicans-outperform-the-polls-again-two-theories/

# ¿ Jun 3, 2021 15:20

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

How was Rasmussen the most accurate for 2020? They didn�t have Biden running away with the election, but just dumping a �pro-GOP weight because we feel like it,� didn�t mean they were more accurate than anyone else.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2021 17:10

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

I usually wouldn't get too hung up on CNN, but it's tied to a J. Ann Selzer poll and I believe she's still respected in her methodology.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/21/politics/iowa-poll-joe-biden-approval/index.html

quote:

(CNN)It's the rare poll that makes an entire party sit up and take notice. The new Iowa poll is one of those polls.

Just 31% of Iowans approved of how Joe Biden is handling his duties as president while a whopping 62% disapprove. Biden's disapproval number is below the lowest ever measured by ace pollster J. Ann Selzer for former presidents Donald Trump (35%) and Barack Obama (36%).

"This is a bad poll for Joe Biden, and it's playing out in everything that he touches right now," Selzer told the Des Moines Register.

Biden's approval on pulling American troops out of Afghanistan stands at a meager 22%. Approval for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic is now just 36% among Iowans.

This poll is rightly understood as a blaring red alarm for not just Biden but especially down-ballot Democrats -- in Iowa and elsewhere -- who will be running in the 2022 midterms.

While Iowa is not the pure swing state that it was in, say, 2000, it remains a place where Democrats can and do win -- both in statewide elections and in congressional districts. Democrats, as recently as 2020, controlled three of the state's four House seats although Republicans won both the first and second districts back last November. And both are considered Democratic re-takeover targets in 2022 -- depending, of course, on what the congressional map winds up looking like.

If Biden's numbers are anywhere close to this bad in other swing states -- and districts --- Democrats' hopes of holding onto their very narrow three-seat House majority are somewhere close to nonexistent.
While first term, midterm elections are, historically, very difficult for the president's party in the House, that trend is made far, far worse if the president's approval rating is below 50%. As Gallup wrote in 2018:
"In Gallup's polling history, presidents with job approval ratings below 50% have seen their party lose 37 House seats, on average, in midterm elections. That compares with an average loss of 14 seats when presidents had approval ratings above 50%."

That average is even higher in the wake of the 2018 midterms, where Republicans lost 40 House seats thanks in large part to Donald Trump's approval ratings being stuck in the low 40s.

The best news out of this poll for Biden and Democrats is that it is September 2021, not September 2022. Which means that Biden -- and the Democratic-controlled Congress -- have time to turn his numbers around, likely by finding a way to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill and some sort of major budget proposal (although both of those bills have an uncertain path forward at the moment).

But if the President's numbers in Iowa are anything close to where they are today, it is an absolute disaster for Democrats -- and would presage the near-certain loss of a large number of House seats (and their majority) come next November.

I do wonder how useful Iowa is now as a swing state given how its demographics and voting patterns have trended, but this is concerning. The Democrats seem to be facing a big uphill path for maintaining a congressional majority, but that's not necessarily a surprise. Hopefully it's not a wipeout defeat, though.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2021 15:09

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

ShadowHawk posted:

Couldn't it just be more indicative that the Biden coalition (or anti-Trump coalition) is prone to more turnout falloff in an off-year election?

Like it's totally consistent to have wildly different high-turnout presidential votes and off-year governor votes, that's exactly why these states have kept their off-year elections.

I forgot the comparison between Biden's turnout in Virginia and McAuliffe's turnout earlier this week, but McAuliffe actually got great turnout (for a non-presidential year at least), but Youngkin just blew it out the park with the turnout he got in the loyal GOP rural areas. Youngkin overperformed to the extent that McAuliffe needed to reach insanely crushing margins in his own strongholds and that just didn't happen.

A big part of this is Biden's general unpopularity and the fact that more and more, politics on all levels is going to be affected by what's happening on the federal level.

Also, reports indicate massive defections from 2020 in the white suburban female demographic, and that could mean an opening for GOP identity politics shenanigans because Youngkin got insane amounts of momentum and negative coverage for McAuliffe by exploiting that demographic's fears regarding education. At the risk of making a massive overgeneralization, the suburbs tend to vote Democratic to the extent it fits their pocketbook/every day life needs, but there's a lot of social/racial sentiment that is not quite in line with what many Democrats think is the party mainstream dogma. Given the dysfunction in federal congress and the Virginia Dems' own failures to do stuff like eliminate "right to work" laws, the Dems just were not hitting the pocketbook issues hard enough (and McAuliffe's anti-Trump fixation did not help at all in that respect).

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-virginia-election-2020-campaign-2016-1e50b5d47eac70e65bed5be5b9fa7fa4

TGLT posted:

And when centrist Dems lose they, often bolstered by voices in news organizations, blame progressives and not the actual candidates. History doesn't inspire confidence that the party will actually course correct in time for the midterms, which generally trend against the party in power anyhow.

I feel like the centrists are aging out of power or otherwise just not able to get reelected as their tactics get less effective in the purple areas, but this would be my major concern. The party is taking forever to learn lessons that should have been learned back in 2004 or 2016, let alone this year when all the historical patterns indicate bad odds to begin with.

Eric Cantonese fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Nov 4, 2021

# ¿ Nov 4, 2021 19:13

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 05:00

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

Grouchio posted:

New Jersey might not actually be that close.

Turns out, New Jersey decided to let a 2020 law allowing for the early count of mail ballots to expire. As a result, the roughly 500,000 mail ballots are being counted extremely slowly. We don't have an accurate accounting of how many are left, but these are likely overwhelmingly D-leaning, and should pad Murphy's margin (currently at 1.4% and rising).

Overnight, there were a number of small updates to county tallies, and all of them (other than a minor one in Burlington) improved the spread for Murphy. The county-by-county totals still suggest to me that a lot of votes are left out. Like, for example, Murphy is right now only doing 2.6% worse in Mercer County (Trenton) and doing 0.4% better in Hunterdon (wealthy GOP suburbs) than in 2017. However, he's doing 24.7% worse in Atlantic County (Atlantic City). And I looked last night, and Atlantic County hasn't counted a single absentee ballot as of yet.

The CW seems to be that Murphy will win by about 2%, but the numbers suggest to me something more like a 5%-10% win ultimately - which wouldn't be that far off from polling.

Given what the pandemic has done for tourism, I can imagine anyone not being fully on the "open it up!" train is going to do pretty badly in Atlantic City.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2021 20:36

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