A Gut Check on the 2024 Election

A lot of accusations are flying around about this election being stacked against Harris. Let's consider some of them!

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

As the 2024 presidential race remains in coin flip territory, there is one commonality among Republican and Democratic politicos: both groups of partisans have a vested interest in painting Trump as the favorite.

The reasons for Republicans to do this are obvious: Trump wants it so. He cannot lose at anything or his whole veneer of invincibility starts to crumble. This is why he has never been able to acknowledge his 2020 loss, or even losing to Ted Cruz in the 2016 Iowa caucus. And whatever Trump wants, his GOP lackeys will provide. They clearly believe that hyping data points showing momentum on his side will translate into actual momentum on his side.

For Democrats, the reason to paint Harris as the underdog is also straightforward: they want to scare the ever-living shit out of the anti-Trump majority of Americans and mobilize them to vote. Trump can mobilize his base like no one else but he is even more successful at mobilizing the opposing base. Painting Trump as having momentum will also get out the anti-Trump vote. This is a delicate tightrope to walk; say that Trump is convincingly ahead and turnout would be depressed. Say it is close, and Trump might win but every vote counts, however — and maybe Harris can maximize her turnout.

The effect of this bipartisan rhetorical move, combined with the extremely close polling as of late, has caused some folks to lose their damn minds. And not the rationally ignorant voters either! I am talking about the obsessed elites, the political junkies, the folks refreshing FiveThirtyEight on the regular.

As Axios’ Zachary Basu noted a few days ago, “educated elites who should know better — billionaires, elected officials, journalists — keep falling for fakes, conspiracy theories and outright lies. Human gullibility is not a new phenomenon. But social media and polarized politics are exposing it at industrial scale, fueled by a poisonous cocktail of bad actors, media illiteracy and plummeting trust in traditional news.”¹

Most of the examples Basu cites are from wealthy, crackpot Trump supporters like Bill Ackman and Elon Musk. But I am also seeing hair being pulled out by left-of-center folks insisting that the system is biased against Harris and in favor of Trump.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has some sympathy with such a conclusion — but believes that some of the particulars contained within their bill of indictment are, well, nuts.

Let’s start with the hyperbolic particulars. For example, the prediction markets have recently and unambiguously moved towards Trump — RealClearPolitics shows an average of 60 percent on Trump winning. Given that the polling and the punditry still show the race as a dead heat, some might take this as a definitive sign in a political world obscured by the fog of statistical margins of error.

Democratic critics, however, like to point out that both the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times ran stories concluding that, “A small group of anonymous traders has propelled a dramatic surge in Donald Trump’s perceived chances of winning the US presidential election in prominent prediction markets,” in the words of the FT’s Sam Learner and Oliver Roeder — particularly Polymarket.

So the prediction markets are likely stacked against Harris — even Nate Silver, who advises Polymarket, is discounting that information. But the truth is, prediction markets do not matter. No marginally attached voter is going to know about these markets, and no invested voter is going to place great faith in them outside of the darkest MAGA corners.

So sure, feel free to discount the information provided by prediction markets. But do not worry too much about them either.

Another source of Democratic anxiety is the number of GOP-tilting pollsters “flooding the zone.” According to this argument, conservative polling outfits like Trafalgar, Rasmussen, and InsiderAdvantage are putting out polls that skew rightwards — presumably as a means for nudging polling aggregators like RealClearPolitics or FiveThirtyEight in favor of Trump.

No doubt, some of these pollsters, like Rasmussen, should be heavily discounted for their opaque collaboration with the Trump campaign. It is also true that these kinds of pollsters are responsible for about a quarter of all polls that have been published recently. But FiveThirtyEight’s G. Elliott Morris recently took a look at the averages and comes away unpersuaded by this argument:

In most places, the pollsters in question are indeed more pro-Trump than other pollsters. However, this has just a mild effect on our averages, moving them toward Trump by just 0.3 points on average. (The biggest difference is in Pennsylvania, where our published average gives Harris a 0.1-point lead over Trump, but the nonpartisan average gives her a 0.9-point edge.) That's not a significant difference in a world where the average polling error in presidential elections is 4.3 points, and it's small enough that it could easily be attributed to sampling error or some methodological factor other than partisan bias. As a point of comparison, our averages regularly move by 0.1-0.3 points on a daily basis, and we don't recommend that anyone read into those shifts.

Josh Marshall also looked at the same data and came away with a similar conclusion:

The better aggregators and averages down-rate these pollsters to the point where they don’t have as much impact on their averages as you might imagine. I’m thinking particularly of aggregators like 538, but others as well…. The point is that while the zone flooding is happening, it might not be affecting the average from the better aggregators as much as you think.

To address what people are talking about right now, there’s little question that the tightening in the polls we’ve seen over the last couple weeks is not, for the most part, driven by zone flooding polls. It shows up in the higher-quality polls as well. That doesn’t mean it’s “right.” That tightening is very, very small. It might as easily be statistical noise, some non-response bias. But it’s still there after you strip out the junk polls. So if you’re thinking that that slight tightening we’ve seen in the last couple weeks is driven by junk GOP polls, you’re on very weak ground….

So what that all comes down to is that yes, zone flooding is happening and it probably (though it’s obviously hard to quantify) helps shape election narratives, enthusiasm and possibly actual results. But it’s also important to know these qualifiers, like the fact that the averages and aggregators — at least the better ones — have gotten wise about this at least to an extent and fortified their methodologies against it.

Marshall also writes, “To the extent that the flood of these polls shapes narratives or demoralizes Democrats, it’s headlines and what gets shared on social media that counts as much as averages.” But AS WE ALL SHOULD HAVE LEARNED BY NOW, social media is not real life.

So, does this mean Democrats should breathe easy?! Of course not — FFS, you’re Democrats!! Of course the system is a little bit biased in favor of Trump. It’s just biased in the more obvious, more immovable ways of the world.