“That an actual virus has now infected Trump, his wife, his campaign manager, the head of the Republican National Committee, several advisers, and three senators — many of them at a celebration of Barrett’s nomination — thus throwing all three of the GOP’s 2020 goals into chaos, is a plot twist that would be rejected by any writer as just a little too on the nose.”
- Ryan Liza and Daniel Lipman, Politico
By the end of this week, the following states will have already begun early voting: Alabama, California, Georgia, Illinois, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming.* Indiana begins tomorrow. Arizona begins on Wednesday. The rest of the states have already commenced early voting.
The surprising thing I expected to discuss today is the wide lead Biden has gained since the debate, which is not accounted for in the polling average as one might expect it to be. That’s because older polls still impact the average as well as some mediocre polls that have dropped in the past week (including a poll from Zogby, which is an absolutely terrible pollster who has Biden leading by two points). Still, Biden’s margin in the FiveThirtyEight polling average this morning was +8.2.** Two decent pollsters over the weekend showed Biden’s lead nearly doubling from their previous polls after last Tuesday’s debate. However, something else happened that may become increasingly interesting if not important.
YouGov released polls today surveying a national presidential contest between Biden and GOP Vice President Mike Pence and between Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Pence. Among likely voters, Biden leads Pence by seven points and Harris leads Pence by three points. The poll was in the field over the weekend (after Trump tested positive for Covid). I don’t know if any other pollster is surveying these hypothetical races, but I would not be surprised about it. Despite the crazy efforts over the weekend of a president acting like a child trying to prove to his parents he’s not too sick to go to the amusement park, the indications are that Trump is indeed very sick. It makes sense that folks would start thinking about Plan B’s for the election. There is a wrinkle in this, however.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties have processes for replacing the nominee on the ticket after the nominating conventions should that person become unavailable for any reason. Should Trump resign (he won’t) or be so incapacitated Pence takes over via the 25th Amendment (don’t count on it), his name will remain on the ballot. Even if Trump dies (he might) and Pence ascends to the presidency, the ballot will still have Trump’s name on it. As noted above, 20 states will have commenced early voting by this Wednesday. Absentee and mail-in ballots have been sent to voters in a number of states. It is too late to change the ballot, and the election will not be delayed.***
So if the election cannot be delayed, what happens if Trump resigns, is removed, or passes before Election Day? Here’s where the arcane aspects of our electoral process come in. No one is voting for Trump or Biden, but for a slate of Electors pledged to support them. In your state, those persons might not even be on the ballot. Nevertheless, it is those Electors that get your vote on Election Day. Some states punish Electors who vote for a different candidate than the one who won the popular vote in those states, and the Supreme Court has recently upheld their authority to do that. Despite this, no one can order an Elector to vote a certain way. What does this mean for our current hypothetical (but increasingly greater-than-zero probability) match-ups?
If Trump has resigned or been removed (unless through impeachment) the Electors can vote for him and it will count. He’s constitutionally eligible for another term and even if he doesn’t want another term, he cannot stop Electors from voting for him. If he’s dead, the Electors can still vote for him but something else will happen. Let’s say Trump/Pence wins the Electoral College but Trump passes away at any point before January 20th. In that case, Pence will be president-elect.
The real challenge for the Republicans will be if Trump passes away before November 3rd. The party process of picking a new nominee could still be invoked. And if that happens it will take a feat of party discipline – with hundreds of Electors who are not necessarily strong partisans.**** If Pence is picked as the new nominee (which, if they bother to do this at all, would be the politically smart move), then the challenge will be easier (but see below). If the party picks, say, Marco Rubio as the new nominee it is highly unlikely the gambit will work. Here’s why. Unless the Trump/Pence ticket wins a landslide Electoral College margin, depending on Electors who have no prior restraint on their authority to cast a vote means that there is likely to be so many defectors that no one receives a majority of the vote (or if close perhaps Biden squeaks out a victory). That sends it to the House per the Constitution, which then votes among the top three candidates receiving electoral votes. Each state gets one vote. The Republicans have a slight majority of House delegations in this Congress, but that could change in the next one – which is the Congress that will vote for president should this scenario arise.
Where it could get confusing with the GOP formally nominating Pence – or, as is more likely I think, just assuming he is their new nominee – is if a number of Electors vote for Trump for president and Pence for vice president. Those votes for Trump would not count if he were dead and the votes for Pence for vice president would count. If enough Electors do this, Pence would not receive enough votes for president. This may throw the race into the House also.
To be sure, if Biden wins the Electoral College, it makes no difference how the Republican Electors vote. But, this is one more reason to not dismiss House races. We know the likelihood of the Democrats retaining or enlarging their majority in the House is very strong. But, we should take a look at some states where winning a district or two could switch the balance of the delegation to the Democrats in case there is not an Electoral College winner and the House ends up voting on it. As I noted on Friday, there will be a House-centric post this week. In fact, I plan to start working on it today as time is of the essence with 29 days to go until November 3rd.
OK, back to the real polling…
YouGov (B) did not just survey the hypothetical races; it polled on the actual one too. It found Biden up by eight points. This is the same margin as YouGov’s last poll on September 30th, but three points better than YouGov’s September 24th poll. USC Dornsife’s (B/C) tracking poll has Biden up between 10-12 points (depending on likely voter assumptions). That’s slightly larger, but essentially holding strong. If Biden wins by 12 points, the term Blue Wave will likely not be a strong enough term for the outcome. NBC News/Wall Street Journal (A-) has Biden lead at 14 points. This is six points higher than its previous poll on September 20th.
There are some interesting things in the NBC News poll. For instance, respondents were quite unfavorable towards Trump’s performance in the debate, yet 73% said the debate made no difference to their preference. This is a much higher number than in previous years. NBC News compared this question to ones posed in surveys in 2016, 2012, 2004, and 2000. The “no difference” response in those years was between 47% and 55%. However, this does makes sense in the context of other polling showing that both Biden and Trump supporters are very committed to their candidate.
So why the big jump in Biden’s margin against Trump in this poll? The crosstabs do not seem to be publicly available right now (just the toplines), so it’s not completely clear. But it appears that independent support for Trump is collapsing in the wake of the debate and the karmic Covid wave washing through the upper ranks of the GOP right now. Biden picked up two points in this poll over the prior one and Trump lost four points. Biden’s support in the poll was 53%. Of that, nearly all (51%) reported they would not vote for Trump under any circumstance. The same was more or less true for Trump (39% supporting; 36% will not vote for Biden under any circumstance). It seems fair to assume in light of this, that the 13% making up “Strictly Independent” voters in this survey might be moving towards Biden now.
What this means is that even though most people said the debate did not make a difference, it appears it may have. If you recall the post on Harris and the impact of the vice presidential pick from a few weeks ago, you’ll remember that this is not the first time we’ve seen voters saying that something was (or was not) important yet did not (or did) change their own vote based upon that something. What’s a little more confounding here is that this poll was in the field after Trump’s positive Covid test. So, the results are probably not strictly related to the debate performance.
In the YouGov poll, 94% of respondents claim their minds are made up. Just six percent say they could change their mind before they vote. The difference in the margin from the September 24th poll to today’s is the movement of independents. Trump had a one point advantage in the September 24th poll among independents (40-39), but today that support has cratered. Biden wins 51% of independents to Trump’s 33%. That’s a 19 point turnaround in Biden’s favor. It doesn’t appear that Trump’s debate strategy appealed to anyone who wasn’t already committed to voting for him, which is why general election candidates do not normally play only to their bases.
There was not a lot of state polling on the presidential race this weekend. However, SurveyMonkey appears to have surveyed every single state. Sound impressive? Sure, except that SM is a terrible pollster with an operation more akin to a Twitter poll than a scientific one. FiveThirtyEight rates them a D-. There are only four D-rated pollsters: SurveyMonkey; Swayable; Lucid, and; Google Surveys. Unless we discover after the election that SM has some kind of special sauce that works in our current environment, it’s a pollster not worth paying attention to. There are much better and more scientific online pollsters out there.
The one excellent pollster releasing Senate results this weekend is Siena College (A+). It finds Biden leading Pennsylvania by seven points (49-42 – there’s a rounding error here) and Florida by five points (47-42). YouGov also polled Pennsylvania and concurred with Siena on the margin (seven points) with Biden leading Trump 51% to 44%. YouGov finds the race even in Ohio (47-47), while the Trafalgar Group (C-) has Trump up by four points. Trafalgar, a Republican pollster,***** is not generally reliable and claims to incorporate a “shy Trump voter” weighting protocol. While this is better left for another post, there is essentially zero support for this idea being true. In fact, one pollster explicitly tested it recently and found no evidence for it. Trafalgar’s response is that there are shy voters who won’t even participate. Even if true, there would then be no way ahead of the election to understand what impact they would have. So Trafalgar’s essentially making up its adjustment based on wishful thinking. Finally, Public Policy Polling (B-), which often works for Democrats but is not exclusively a Democratic pollster, finds Biden leading Trump in North Carolina by four points (50-46).
We’ll be taking a look at House races this week as noted above, but we’ll also take a separate look at the Senate races. Hopefully, there will be some new polling this week in the Senate that will help us better understand the political landscape now that there is less than a month until the election.
Notes:
* Alabama and Maine do not have early voting, but allow for in-person absentee voting which is functionally the same thing.
** Except where noted, all the data referenced in this post can be found via this link to FiveThirtyEight.
*** Congress – and only Congress – has the constitutional authority to change the date of the election. However, that authority has constitutional limits. The current president’s term ends on January 20th following the quadrennial election year (currently, that’s 2020). That date is explicit in the Constitution and cannot be changed without an amendment.
**** They may be strongly committed to Trump, but they are not necessarily strongly committed to following instructions from the Republican Party.
***** Identifying Trafalgar as a Republican pollster helps explain the “wishful thinking” adjustment for “shy voters.” It does not mean that just because it is a Republican pollster it is unreliable.