Problems for Biden in the Battleground State Polling
May 29, 2024
For the past several months, we have seen and heard bad polling news for Biden nationally and in battleground states. Despite what Trump and his supporters keep saying the national polling average is essentially tied, and has been for a while. The battleground states have been polling poorly for the president, but down-ballot Democrats have come off fairly well.
The organizing challenge for Democrats in battleground states
Democrats are considering the possibility that there will be a reverse coattails phenomenon at play this year. The conventional wisdom is that down-ballot candidates get a boost from the top of the ticket in their party, whether that’s president or governor. This is the coattails phenomenon. In the battleground states this year, Democratic candidates for Senate (and in North Carolina’s case, governor) are outpolling Biden, sometimes by a lot. Organizers are working on running up the score with Senate candidates in hopes that will push up Biden’s numbers. The idea is that there are a group of voters who can be turned out and, if they are, will vote Democratic. Using a highly local grassroots effort to turn out more voters for the Senate candidate will bring out more voters for Biden. This might be a better model than trying to turn out voters who should support Biden while at the same time persuading them to vote for him.
Not all Democrats are convinced there is a reverse coattails happening this year, including the candidates. Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) thinks his race will get tighter as more people get to know his opponent (because he is not as well-known as Casey is). Some Republicans think we’ll see voters “coming home” and supporting the GOP candidates as the election approaches. If these folks are correct, there is not any room in the electorate to push up Democratic Senate numbers and it may be more likely they will come down a little. Democrats did try this approach in 2020 in North Carolina as Gov. Roy Cooper (D) was comfortably leading while Biden was losing. Biden still lost, but it was close. Perhaps the organizing effort did help, but just fell short. Whether it’s reverse coattails or coattails, it’s not some magic formula that’s guaranteed to work. Campaigns matter, but so do candidates.
The question we might ask is Biden really underperforming like this. And, if so, why? The answer to the first question seems to be yes. Siena has been polling samples of likely voters in the battleground states they have surveyed.1 The answer to the question of why is a harder one, but may be at least partially explained by the number of disengaged voters pollsters are seeing in their samples.
Disengaged voters seem to be controlling the narrative but will they vote?
Disengaged voters are not exactly non-voters, at least not in the sense that they say they will likely not vote. They are often registered to vote and suggest the will vote but don’t like their options. They are not exactly the double-haters we sometimes hear about; those folks who don’t want to vote for either candidate. Plenty of the double-haters are very much likely voters. We have seen them finally decide their vote in the last week of an election time and again, but they were always going to vote.
The issue of the disengaged voter really complicates analyzing this election. According to Nate Cohn, “disengaged voters are driving the overall polling results and the story line about the election.” This is a little different than the non-voter problem, but it is related. We still don’t know whether we are missing people who seem unlikely to vote, but will. Pollsters like Siena and other survey researchers like Pew are finding more disengaged voters, folks who are so tuned out to politics that they think Biden is responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade.
One thing we are seeing in the polling is that a lot of these disengaged voters who say they are not supporting Biden are coming from typically Democratic base constituencies. So, this might also address the question of whether Black and Latinos are shifting to Republican Party. But there is still the error margin problem of sub-group polling (discussed here last week). The error bars might just be too high to concern us now. However, when we keep seeing the same thing in the polls in repeated attempts it is dangerous to disregard it. The error could be in the magnitude more than in the directionality.
These disengaged voters are going for Trump in the polls, but - as the graphic above shows - when controlled for the 2020 vote Biden regular leads among registered voters. This is interesting because Biden has generally polled better with likely voters this year than registered voters. It also suggests something that will not surprise anyone: these folks are probably not going to vote. Yet, they continue to drive the polling narrative because, I suppose, they are responding to surveys and saying they might vote.
A lot of disengaged voters do not want either party’s choice, even though Siena’s polling seems to have to going more to Trump than Biden. But, despite Kennedy and others being in the race to act as an outlet for a protest vote, an unmotivated and discouraged voter is highly unlikely to vote. And that’s what a disengaged voter is. This is one reason why we may see the polling shifting towards Biden as we get closer to Labor Day.
Some pollsters use sub-group samples from national surveys when polling battleground states, which has a high degree of error involved. Others have polled across battleground states to create one sample, which is frankly useless because the value battleground states have is in who wins them individually and collects their electoral votes. A sample across different states tells us nothing useful about who is winning or losing in those states. Siena, however, is using the gold standard - statistically valid representative samples of likely voters from each state. That is why we have to take these polls seriously.