What's Driving Kamala Harris' Surge in the Polls

[CaptainTruth]

While Harris has closed the gap at the topline level — in national polls, the race is essentially a dead heat — Harris has made eye-popping gains with traditional, core Democratic base voters while also appealing to independents, which is an incredibly difficult needle to thread, especially for a candidate whose favorability ratings were 15 points underwater before replacing Biden.

Harris has registered gains across a wide range of demographic categories, but the improvement has been especially pronounced among young voters, non-white voters and women voters. Taken together, the numbers suggest that the Harris swap has largely repaired a fraying Democratic coalition, has repaired the party’s image presidentially among independents, and has dragged the election back to a tossup, at the minimum. In short, she has managed to do something that every candidate can only dream of: appeal to her base without turning off swing voters.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/21/kamala-harris-gains-polls-00175262

[EYESORE 9001]

1. Burnt umber burnout?

Perhaps it’s just that people are tired of all his shit

[underpants]

2. I think that's a big part of it.

Everyone wanted something new. Also, I wonder if the youth vote is accurately being weighed in here. That and a few Repubs trickling off here and there could be the difference.

The press is pissed off (it fills airtime and copy) she won’t kowtow to them and Trump’s people are trying to pry him away from the press as much as possible.

[BrianTheEVGuy]

4. Not to downplay the ticket

But I think Trump fatigue is a major driver of much of what we are seeing these days.

[barbtries]

28. the country is exhausted.

the cloud of trump has covered the sky for 9 long years; the sun just came out. it's irresistible.

i do think that even his die hard cultists must be exhausted by the incessant insanity and chaos that accompanies this terrible person.

[pat_k]

3. Still a toss up. As Simon Rosenberg and Joe Trippi pointed out

. . .in the latest Strategy Session, we have a long way to go. The country remains dangerously and evenly divided.

Trippi:
We gotta keep doing the work. No matter what this thing looks like, no matter what it is, we keep doing the work. They keep doing the crazy, we keep doing the work. And run it up everywhere we can. And fight everywhere, including Texas and Florida.

Rosenberg:
If I can say one last point. . . Everyone's gotta realize what Joe just said is so important. Right now, the people that I'm talking to who are canvassing and making phone calls -- so it's exciting, people are interested. You've got this new candidate, new dynamic. Imagine if you are a marginal voter and you kinda have this new excitement, and then the campaign calls you, or the campaign knocks on your door. Not only is this exciting, but they care about me!

What we are hearing anecdotally from people who are making calls and canvassing, and texting right now, is that the reception is unbelievable. And people are like "thank you for calling me," "I want to volunteer." People are volunteering to volunteer. They are not even having to be asked.

So I think there is this dynamic right now that this huge grassroots army that is already deployed is also moving the needle. It's turning people from potential voters, marginal voters into our supporters. And then that is creating what I call this virtuous cycle of participation. This virtuous cycle is now beginning to kick in in the election.

So anyone who is thinking of working, make your plan now. How are you going to close? Early voting starts in 38 days. What are you going to do? Don't wait. Be active now. It's an amazing time to be talking to voters right now. The response has been incredible. And early vote starts in 38 days. Have your plan now for how you're going to give, how you're going to volunteer, and how you're going to vote on day one. It 's important that everyone vote as early as they can in the early vote. If you do that our campaigns move on to lower propensity voters. It increases voter turn out

See https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219332188
It is a great panel!

[RobinA]

5. I Guess For Me

a dead heat is not a surge. My big question is why is it a dead heat when Trump can't string four coherent words together and Harris can make sense. The only policy I really care apart right off the bat is the policy where the candidate makes sense for four years and promises not to be a dictator. This is not an election of lofty goals.

[CaptainTruth]

8. There are 20+ point swings with certain groups...

...a 20+ point swing is a surge.

[pat_k]

30. 28 years of FOX news

Last edited Wed Aug 21, 2024, 06:40 PM - Edit history (2)

FOX and its regular viewers are perhaps the most insidious and destructive force we face as a nation. The rest of the right-wingnut media, conspiracy insanity, white nationalist growth in social media, worship of fascist murderers, and on and on, all flow from almost three decades of FOX.

I have seen smart, reasonable, sane people lose their minds when they start watching FOX.

Twenty years ago, my partner's mother moved to Florida. This is a woman with an amazing background. She went to law school and passed the NJ bar when that was an incredibly rare thing for a woman. In younger days she was on a roller derby team. She and her husband were active in their local Democratic Club (when there were such things).

Around 2005, something strange started happening. She would say the most off the wall things. Like that unions had destroyed the economy. Like that social safety nets killed ambition and had created a snowballing cycle of poverty

I was floored. My partner (Senator here on DU til his death in 2011) figured it out instantly. He said, you watch FOX down there, don't you? The answer was yes, everyone did.

We had many, many conversations about it. Implored her to stop watching that shit. I don't think she ever did. It was a sort of binding force in their community. She just stopped parroting the crap when we were around to avoid the lengthy, heated, conversations that followed.

Since that time, FOX and its viewer have only gotten more and more extreme to the point that a book like Unhumans, the far far, far, right dystopian nightmare of how fascism can save the world from the progressive Unhumans --a book that glorifies Franco and Pinochet - is blurbed by a Vice Presidential candidate, a former president's son, and other prominent voices you'll find on a mainstream network watched by millions.

These people aren't stupid. They are victims of a highly ubiquitous, sophisticated, and effective propaganda campaign that began with soulless right-wingnuts like Rush Limbaugh on the radio.

I don't have an answer. But I do know that name calling and stereotyping "them" as all idiots just exacerbates the problem. Feeling hated by the people they call "them" only binds them together more and powers their hatred for us.

[getagrip_already]

6. I reject your hypothisis..

This is not a tossup election, although we should treat it that way.

First, national polls dont mean much in an electoral college system.

Second, polls are garbage. They have an achiles heal of not knowing who, or how many, of any demo is going to turn out, and that is how they are constructed. Small changes in a turnout model will result ineasureable changes in the final numbers.

Will it be a red wave election? Blue wave? Roe wave? Youth wave,? Grumpy white guy wave? 2020 election? 2016 election? 2022 election?
Some combination? None of that?

Add to that there is a distinct polling bias. Phone polls only reach predominantly conservative leaning respondants; retiree, stay at homes, work at homes, lonely people who answer every call.

Even online polls are biased because they are.opt in. Pollstets have to trust self reported profiles to try to sort respondents. But was the bot honest?

And finally, likely voter polls dont measure voters who havent recently voted. The young, women who just werent motivated to turn out before, and other voters who are registered but just havent voted but will this time.

That last group is what surprised us in 2016. Nontraditional white male voters who felt disaffected because nobody held their racist/mysogynist views. They turned out in droves. They were invisible to pollsters.

So this whole horserace thing is defeatest. We are not behind. We do need to fight in every battleground state. We do need to gotv.

We need win too big to steal.

[CaptainTruth]

10. I proposed no hypothesis...

...those are not my words, Lakshya Jain & Harrison Lavelle wrote the article & I added no personal comments.

[getagrip_already]

11. Then i rejected your repost of their hypothesis....

By posting it, you accepted it. Its yours since you didnt object to it.

[CaptainTruth]

20. LOL oh come on, you know that's not how it works.

There have been thousands of posts here about things Trump & GOP ReThugs have said & done & I guarantee that all the folks who posted those articles didn't accept what the article said & it wasn't theirs.

Most of us post here because we just want to share info with our DU friends.

[Zoomie1986]

16. Not how modern polling works

Phone polls only reach predominantly conservative leaning respondants; retiree, stay at homes, work at homes, lonely people who answer every call.

You know what? Nothing has changed in polling. Even in the landline-only days before the 1990s, some people complained that the the only ones who answered pols were 'conservative leaning respondants; retiree, stay at homes, work at homes, lonely people who answer every call.' Yet somehow, those polls were more accurate than the ones now. What utter nonsense!

I realize this may shock you, but It was a long time ago that pollsters figured out email, voice mail and texts to reach people who don't answer cold calls, so they wind up reaching about as many and as varied of people as they ever did.

Even online polls are biased because they are.opt in. Pollstets have to trust self reported profiles to try to sort respondents. But was the bot honest?

Oh dear. Seriously? Get ready, because this bit of reality will also shock you:

EVERY POLL EVER DONE HAS BEEN OPT-IN.

Do you seriously think pollsters have ever compelled anyone to respond? Come on. Everyone that a pollster contacts can close the web page, hang up the phone, ignore a digital message, or walk away from an in-person pollster. Or they can choose to respond. When you--and only you--have the power to decide to participate in anything, that is the very definition of opt-in. IOW:

EVERY POLL EVER DONE HAS BEEN OPT-IN.

Maybe what you need to face is that it's ridiculous to cry about people choosing to opt-in, and then using that as an excuse not to opt-in. Maybe if people would stop coming up with ridiculous phantasms about polling and choosing to opt-in instead, the polling numbers might swing more toward reality.

It's never even occurred to you that it's gobsmacking chutzpah to refuse to talk to pollsters out of the belief that they only talk to 'conservative leaning respondants; retiree, stay at homes, work at homes, lonely people who answer every call.' But maybe if you'd respond to the pollsters reaching out to you and take their polls, their polls would yield more accurate numbers.

You can't have it both ways. If you want them to hear from people like you, answer the phone or text or whatever and help them get more accurate results. Making excuses that you don't answer certain contacts but don't like how the polls turn out is like whining about a candidate you liked losing an election where you didn't vote. The election boards don't care what you think about any political race. All they can do is hold the election, and then count the votes they get from the people who show up. They're not going to waste time and resources asking what people who stay at home think.

Same thing with polling. Don't complain about their results if you can't be bothered to show up and respond when they give you the opportunity to do so. Maybe the reason I get polled so often is because, like voting, I bother to show up and make myself heard when given the chance to do so.

[getagrip_already]

18. Sorry, not true at all

Polling bias, and the inability to reach voters, is real, and it has gotten much worse since the 90's.

Nobody i know answers calls from people they dont know. They dont respond to cold texts. They dont open attachments or follow links in emails.

If you do, and i mean this in good humor, you are an idiot.

As for online polls being the same as phone calls, they arent. By opting in ahead of time, you are self selecting to participate and arent a random person. Thats if you are a real person at all.

Polling is not accurate. What pollsters do is adjust the spread as the election nears so that no matter who wins, it will be within the moe. Its a game they play so they can point back and say they got it right.

Watch. As the election approaches, the polls will tighten and the moe will spread.

[FalloutShelter]

27. Win.Too.Big.To.Steal

[gibraltar72]

7. Hope Joy, optimism.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

21. Exactly

So many voters were getting turned off by the angst.

[lees1975]

9. Though we really can't see inside the polling data, and can't verify their conclusions at all,

This election was a tossup when Biden stepped down, and that's according to "the polls." I think we've seen quite a bit of evidence that we're headed toward a blue wave, if not a tsunami.

[Zoomie1986]

19. We can and do see inside the polling data

And we can and do verify their conclusions. We do those things all the time--and with the help of the pollsters themselves. It's called methodology.

Every single credible pollster provides a report about the exact questions asked in a poll, what demographic groups responded how, and etc. If you wanted to know those details, you've always had to make the effort to find it, but that's shamefully easy in the internet age. In the old days, we had to request that info from the press or directly from the pollster. Now, one can find methodology linked in a press article, or you can go directly to the polling firm's site for it.

What they won't tell you is why they chose the individuals they did for a particular poll; that's pretty much the only proprietary information they have. So they'll tell you why they chose the demographic group breakdowns they did (30% D, 27% R, 43% I)--but not why they chose Joe or Jane Doe to check off a particular demographic block.

[arlyellowdog]

12. Listen to the money

The PACs have internal polls and they use those polls to figure where to run the ads and where to put in volunteer power. It’s D Day and the polls are like the spies figuring out where we put our forces. BUT, unlike the last days of my beloved Joe, the money is pouring in. I’ll canvass in my now pretty safe state, but the for the important campaign workers, polls aren’t to feel good, they’re to help win.

[Cirsium]

13. the swing voters myth

"Appeal to her base without turning off swing voters?" Such a ill-informed, weak and stale take on things, Politico.

70-80% of the public support progressive positions. That is the "base." Communicating to that base is short-circuited by the sort of "reporting" we see in that article. Never mind white suburban women undecided independent swing voters soccer moms whatever.

What is driving Kamala Harris' surge in the polls? The Democratic party message is reaching the public despite efforts by the traditional media to prevent that from happening. Hallelujah. Do try to get with the program, Politico.

[Fla Dem]

14. Kamala Harris!

People who were disappointed that Biden dropped out may have been miffed with her the 1st week or so. But as they began to see her as the Presidential candidate not just the VP, and saw the energy in her appearances, they have begun to come around.

[debm55]

15. I can't even understand why it is close.

[Jersey Devil]

17. She's not Joe Biden

Don't get me wrong. I love Joe Biden and think he has done a wonderful job as President. But, Joe has never been exciting. Even when he won in 2020 he was rather blah, not a great speaker and sometimes just plain boring. I think he won because people were sick and tired of Trump and would have elected anybody who was not MAGA. Add on all the aging stories of this year and his really bad debate performance and his numbers are suppressed from 2020. When you substitute a young, vital, cheerful candidate who is a much better speaker and again factor in the Trump fatigue that is even stronger than it was in 2020 and the result that Harris leaps ahead shouldn't be surprising.

[Skittles]

23. she's not Donald Fucking Trump is more like it

the more he spirals out of control, the more favorable she is seen

[twodogsbarking]

24. He quite likely could be the catalyst. He has exhibited weird behavior.

[Skittles]

25. obviously she is more exciting than Biden

but she is really benefiting from that deteriorating orange freak too

[Kaleva]

31. I agree

[LiberalBrooke]

22. It is women of course.

[JohnSJ]

26. According to the non-partisan Cook Political Report the election is a dead heat in the swing states.

[JustAnotherGen]

29. I'm with Michael Steel

Polls after Labor Day and then only likely voters.