Lordy, There are Tapes
Just as I was ready to hit send, I heard the tape of Trump admitting in March that he knew Covid-19 was deadly and bluntly stating he was going to intentionally downplay the threat. It’ll take a few days to see how it plays out in the polls, but it can’t be good.
I can’t help but see the Boaters for Trump debacle at Lake Travis this weekend where the big boats swamped the small boats by acting like asses as a metaphor for the entire Trump presidency. The good news is no one was hurt and a significant portion of the country really doesn’t like that crap.
POLL UPDATES
There have been a string of polls released since the last update, including five new national polls released this morning showing Biden up anywhere from 6% - 15%. The polling averages haven’t changed much, but Biden’s holds onto his lead:
Real Clear Politics Biden up by 7.1 pts nationally
FiveThirtyEight Biden up by 7.8 pts nationally
SWING STATES
The polls released in the last 48 hours favor Biden at national level and in key swing states. The map below tracks the FiveThirtyEight state averages as of this morning: < 2% in brown, 2% - 4.9% in pink or light blue, 5% - 9.9% in red or blue, and > 10% in dark red or dark blue. It remains a horrid map for Trump, an incumbent with only 123 EC votes locked in with less than two months to election day. I didn’t expect it to change much until the debates, but the tapes from Bob Woodward may weaken Trump’s number further down, time will tell. Speaking of debates, NBC News reports this morning that Trump hasn’t done any formal debate prep and isn’t planning to. The sub-head on the story reads, “Some allies of the president worry that the cavalier approach to a debate with Joe Biden could backfire.”
HOW’S TEXAS?
I know it’s hard to believe but we have yet another respectable poll showing Texas in play. The Morning Consult poll out today shows Trump and Biden tied. FiveThirtyEight’s state poll average has Trump with only a .8% lead. Furthermore, Trump has not led in Texas by double digits since March. People have asked me if it is worth putting energy into Texas, and the answer is clearly yes. I’ll provide a list of links to organizations doing GOTV in Texas in the next update.
GOOD NEWS FOR TRUMP
I’m kidding. There isn’t any. In addition to being an incumbent president with lousy favorability ratings and trailing in national polls by 7+, the Trump campaign is broke! According to the New York Times, the grift and the legal bills have added up and left the operation cash strapped. News of the low bank balance explained an oddity the press noticed before the convention. The Trump campaign started pulling TV ads off the air, initially saying it was to assess messaging in the wake of a change in campaign managers. But after the convention, they went dark in a slew of swing states including Arizona and Michigan with vague statements of going back up when early voting begins. In the meantime, Biden is not broke, reportedly raising $365 million in August.
LAW & ORDER
How did Trump’s plan to win back “suburban housewives” by using racist tropes to scare them work? Not well. It turns out a plurality of voters think Trump is an architect of the chaos not the solution. The CBS YouGuv Battleground Tracker shows 49% of voters in swing states believe Biden is calming the unrest while 47% believe Trump is encouraging it.
I’ll wrap up with a finding from the same CBS/YouGuv poll that gives me hope we can find our way forward as a society on the other side of the election in November. A clear majority of voters prefer police reforms over punishing protestors.
____________________________________________________________________________
TOOLS
FiveThirtyEight’s election poll averages. The best source for daily poll updates, broken out by national and state.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/national/
The Financial Times presidential election tool. I really like the layout and they pull from Real Clear Politics poll averages, which lean more republican, helping me to avoid confirmation bias.
https://ig.ft.com/us-election-2020/
Real Clear Politics includes pollsters that FiveThirty Eight considers too republican partisan and excludes from its model, but still worth looking at.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_biden-6247.html
270 to Win has an easy interface to build maps and it is where I plug in information I pull from the other sites.
https://www.270towin.com/