USA Politics

Mosh said:
I guess the good news for Harris is that the polls are juicing Trump’s support so hard that it’s difficult to imagine them overestimating him again (which seems to be the intention). I worry about Trump’s activity in non-traditional media and the “manosphere” because that is an area where I could conceivably see him driving turnout among people who don’t vote or aren’t expected to vote. But generally it’s hard to see another Trump polling miss.
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One thing that's going to be diferent and I don't know how polls will be able to guess it - all things considered, the Catholic vote (small and potentially insignificant as it is) is going to be different from last time, IMHO. While I see the same disillusionment I would personally feel and there are more people openly saying they'll either support a third party candidate or won't vote at all (despite it being more or less our religious duty if an acceptable option is available), still despite his abortion-friendliness (which technically might have made him excommunicated laete sententiae, but whatever), Biden was still a Catholic and closer to the moderate side; I have seen not an insignificant amount of people saying they're definitely voting for Trump this time around, in the circles I move in.
 
22% of the American electorate still identifies as Catholic, but what percentage of that is *functionally* Catholic, I have no idea. But that's good news from Judas for sure.
 
So Nate Cohn wrote a NYT article that gets in to a lot of what I was talking about regarding the popular vote: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/upshot/trump-electoral-college-harris.html

Some relevant passages:
One piece of evidence: Times/Siena polling this year. If this year’s national surveys are aggregated together — including the polls when Mr. Biden was the nominee — there’s a clear relationship between Mr. Trump’s gains and how well Republicans fared in the midterms.

Although there’s less data from the three Times/Siena polls since Ms. Harris became the nominee, they nonetheless show the same pattern: Mr. Trump makes large gains where Republicans posted above-average results in the midterms, but he makes few or no gains elsewhere in the country.
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Why did the Republicans do so well in some places, but not others, back in 2022?

At the time, the best explanation seemed to be about the issues at stake. In many key battlegrounds, the Republicans nominated MAGA-backed stop-the-steal candidates and threatened to take away abortion rights. Where they did, Democrats excelled. Elsewhere, the story was often very different. In many blue states, abortion rights were safe and the threat of a stolen election seemed distant, but many voters were concerned by crime, housing shortages and homelessness, resentful of pandemic-era restrictions and frustrated by a perceived failure of Democratic governance. Many conservative and more religious states, meanwhile, weren’t so upset by the end of Roe and remained supportive of Mr. Trump; there, the “red wave” sloshed ashore, unimpeded.

None of this necessarily seemed likely to affect a national presidential election. But if the 2022 patterns really do hold in this year’s election, it might suggest that the shifts in the midterms weren’t just about the issues focused on by different campaigns in different states, but about how new issues altered people’s political allegiances.

It would suggest that the social, economic and political upheaval in the wake of the pandemic, inflation, Jan. 6 and the end of Roe left a lasting political impact — one that was felt very differently in different parts of the country and among different constituencies.

With the polling predictably focused on the battlegrounds, we may not have a great idea on this until the final results arrive in November. If the results wind up looking somewhat more like the midterms, I won’t be surprised. Much crazier things have happened.
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No, the midterm election didn’t turn out to be a “red wave,” as had been prophesied. Democrats held firm in key battleground states. But a red wave really did materialize in many parts of the country.

Republicans ran far ahead of Mr. Trump’s 2020 performance in New York, Florida and much of the Deep South. They also ran well ahead of Mr. Trump — say, by 5 to 10 points in the House popular vote — in many less competitive states across the South and West, including California and Texas.

As a result, Republicans won the popular vote for U.S. House, even though Democrats were only a few seats away from retaining control of it.

While the evidence is inconclusive, there are signs that Mr. Trump is excelling in many of the places where Republicans won big in the midterms.
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If this all holds true, this could be the closest popular vote margin we've seen with Trump on the ballot and Harris can still win the EC.
 
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