992: Polling Paradox
Y Right, Donilon's Payday
"To keep friends, avoid talking about politics, religion, or money,” goes the saying.
A corollary we’ve realized is that in politics, no one talks about money.
This made the recent Biden book tidbit about his consigliere, Mike Donilon, travel widely on social media:
In 2022, explaining the rationale for a second Biden term, Donilon revealed the altruism that directed him towards a life of public service: “Nobody walks away from this. No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.” For his selfless contribution to safeguarding democracy, Donilon demanded an astonishing $4 million fee, a figure difficult to square with his party’s ostensible commitment to gender equity considering that Jennifer O’Malley Dillion, the actual campaign manager, had a $300,000 salary.
Large payments, often (intentionally) obscured in the thicket of LLCs and sub-vendors in campaign finance filings, have never really broken out as a campaign issue despite occasional media attention. We’ve written before that the marketplace is predictably bonkers.
A highly fractured industry with a few dozen outliers making big paydays is not conducive to a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem. Which may be one reason why the progressive left, built atop hundreds of unions and nonprofits, proliferated over the past two decades.
It benefited from entrepreneurs chasing power instead of a payday.
A trio of reads on election data:
In The Atlantic,
writes that Polling Was Quietly Still Bad in 2024:put some key questions into context:Pollsters seemed to finally get it right in 2024. After years of bad misses, they said the presidential election would be close, and it was.
In fact, the industry did not solve its problems last year. In 2016, pollsters famously underestimated Donald Trump by about 3.2 points on average. In 2024, after eight years of introspection, they underestimated Trump by … 2.9 points.
Many of the most accurate pollsters last year were partisan Republican outfits; many of the least accurate were rigorous university polls run by political scientists.
The “best” pollsters in 2024 were some of the worst in 2018 and 2022 (so how good will they be next time?)
The “best” pollsters in 2024 dramatically overestimate Republicans compared to other surveys (are they good, or just lucky?)
The “best” pollsters in 2024 are also the shadiest about their methods (if they’ve solved the problem, why won’t they show their work?)
Novicoff adds another paradox:
The problem is that people expect the most from polls when elections are close, but that is when polls are the least reliable, given the inevitability of error. And if the act of answering a survey, or engaging in politics at all, correlates so strongly with one side, then pollsters can only do so much.
Which is a good segue to go back to the more accurate Catalist data.
Lakshya Jain, writing in WaPo, broke down why waiting for this data - instead of just exit polls - is so important. And found a few corrective storylines, including:
Gender
Lots of reporting before November focused on a widening gender gap in many polls leading up to the first presidential election after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This is why AP VoteCast’s initial estimates came as a surprise, as they implied the gender gap remained stable in 2024, and that Donald Trump drew a roughly equal amount of additional support over 2020 from men and women. Catalist, however, suggests that these numbers were extremely off base, and that Trump’s gains were concentrated almost entirely among men: Though he gained just two points of ground with women, he gained nearly 11 points with men, widening the gender divide by 9 percent on margin. This marks its sharpest increase in at least the past decade of U.S. politics.
Gender x Education
White, college-educated voters shifted to the right, and by significantly more than White, noncollege voters did. In fact, Kamala Harris barely underperformed Biden with White, noncollege voters, which raises a whole new set of questions about where the party goes from here.
Much to address in the 992 days before the next presidential primary, dudes.