Herding Polls and Chasing Swingers
Why everything looks tied, how votes are up for grabs, and who's getting them
Pollsters are herding, voters are persuadable, and depolarizing candidates are closing strong. Five days to go.
First, the herding.
One morning in business school, our accounting professor put up a chart showing companies disproportionately report small profits rather than small losses.
Instead of a normal distribution on either side of $0, there was an outlier bar showing an unusual share of firms just barely made a profit. This ‘discontinuity’ in the data made it seem like the books were, if not cooked, then at least heated up in a favorable direction.1 The distortion occurs as the result of managerial discretion allowed in reporting earnings, a discretion that is accepted industry practice but unsurprisingly ends up typically making management look better.
Something similar seems to be happening in polling, where an unusual share of presidential-level results are coming back exactly tied.
Vanderbilt political scientist Josh Clinton recently demonstrated that poll results can shift by up to 8 points based on decisions made by pollsters. Just like a Chief Financial Officer deciding when to take a write-down or book revenue, pollsters are deciding how much to weight poll respondents by their self-reported 2020 vote or how to categorize a ‘Likely Voter.’
And those decisions seem to increasingly be made to show polls that are exactly tied. The below chart demonstrates this, with the dark bar showing actual results against the lighter gray showing what would be expected in a truly tied race that had a normal distribution.
Credit: Josh Clinton
Pollsters are herding Last year, we told The New York Times that journalists and hyper-partisans had built up a myth that overhyped how divided America is. That content gets clicks and cash for journalists and activists. We termed it “polarization porn.”
This herding adds to that addiction, and is obscuring volatility in the electorate.
Batter Batter Batter Swing Batter
New polling from Blueprint on swing voters in the seven presidential swing states. The biggest takeaway?
Nearly half (48%) of swing state swing voters plan to split their ticket, with another 28% still undecided—suggesting a massive persuadable audience in the campaign's final days who evaluate candidates individually rather than by party.
There’s a lot of convincing to be done still. At the presidential level, much is coming from the “Secretive $700 Million Ad-Testing Factory for Kamala Harris” or the Trump effort to make Democrats pay the price for mistakes of their progressive activists.
Downballot, all those ticket-splitters are helping give real options to moderate voters represented by extreme incumbents.
Winning The Middle
WelcomePAC puts races on the map by backing aggressively centrist Democrats against weird MAGA incumbents in center-right House districts. We believe the electorate is volatile and that districts meeting our criteria can flip from “Safe Republican” to Team Normal in a cycle or two.
Take longtime GOP incumbent Ken Calvert, who is so corrupt that Fox News (!) featured him in a special titled Porked: Earmarks for Profit. While in Congress, Calvert also ran from police after being caught with a prostitute, then lied about it. Corrupt, weird, and in a district that is purple enough to flip.
Enter Will Rollins, a former aide to GOP Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger campaigning with explicit outreach to Republicans. He often talks of growing up in a family of Republicans “back when being a Republican meant standing up to Russia and fighting for fiscal responsibility.”
His appeals don’t just persuade Republicans, they’re mobilizing Democrats too. Despite the district’s narrow Republican registration advantage, Democrats lead by 8.1% on ballot returns, outpacing nearly every swing district in the state.
How about former Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry? His opponent, Janelle Stelson, recently switched parties and this week secured the endorsement of five former Republican members of Congress who served alongside Perry. They are especially effective messengers for the case that Perry is too extreme, just like our Republicans Against Perry's effort featured on PBS NewsHour.
And then there’s Anna Paulina Luna, the Florida freshman with a George Santos-esque biography, who went from aspiring Maxim model to “conservative influencer” as a professional heckler for Turning Point USA. Our “Problem Solver” ad continues to run in support of Whitney Fox, whose bipartisan backing makes this a must-watch race. The race raters at Split Ticket recently moved this race to Toss Up and gave Fox a 45% chance of winning, which even surprised its analysts. Politico has called this “Florida’s Most Competitive House Race.
And don’t forget Derrick Van Orden, the January 6th attendee known who “got a bipartisan scolding” after an outburst at high schoolers in the Capitol. The “yelling and vulgarities” coincided with Van Orden’s congressional office door being left open to reveal a rather wide range of alcohol in various states of consumption.
A poll in Wisconsin’s 3rd district shows Rebecca Cooke with a one point lead over Republican incumbent Derrick Van Orden. After sitting out this race last year, HMP has jumped in to support Cooke with two new ads as part of a $2.6 million TV buy in the district.
Lauren Boebert has been chased out of Western Colorado by Adam Frisch, but the Independent-turned-Democrat continued to beef up his cross-partisan credentials last week when he picked up the endorsement of the Republican Mayor of Pueblo, Heather Graham.
Are there weirdo extremists out there? Sure. But there are also candidates representing Team Normal. Former Republicans and Independents, along with Democrats who know we can reach out to build a governing majority. Who can scare away the Boeberts - and beat the rest.
The voters sure want it, and they are still persuadable. Let’s make sure they hear it.
In more academic terms, “there is a large discontinuity, or kink, in the annual earnings distribution around zero. They show further that this kink results from abnormally low frequencies of firms with small losses and abnormally high frequencies of firms with small profits.“ Why? “Generally accepted accounting principles allow managers discretion within the financial accounting framework to report earnings in ways that enhance the usefulness of financial statements. Of course, managers can abuse this discretion in order to increase their compensation, forestall violations of debt covenants, or achieve some other private benefit.”