IF he's winning those demographics why isn't he above 50% and more then 6 points ahead of Biden? Also why is Biden still getting 43% despite loosing those 2 demographics?
Simon, it's so funny - just as I was reading your comments on yesterday's post and wondering if any Hopium would drop today, right in my inbox comes this post lol. Seriously thank you for the reminder. I know any number of click hungry outlets will have a field day with that CNN poll. As you say, I will in fact, keep calm and campaign on !
I refuse to believe Trump is up in any polls when Nikki Haley - who wasn’t even in the POTUS race as she dropped out! - got a sizable chunk of the Republican vote in the PA primaries.
It seems as if whenever there is good news for Biden, another poll comes out in the other direction. Do they just poll the same people they interview over and over? The Trump voters that hang out in diners who are still voting for Trump?
Seriously though. It does feel that way doesn't it ?! It can be a real mind fuck. That being said, I'm viewing more of these polls /headlines as reminders not to wait. Like others have said, we made the mistake of waiting for Mueller. Too many have wanted to wait for Jack smith. And I'm always fighting temptation to wait for the polls & headlines to say what I want them to. Yet we cannot wait for any of that. Every time I see another dour story about Biden's age, or a lackluster poll, I look at it as a reminder to take nothing for granted.
💯. I will talk about Biden's achievements and record and put it up against Trump's any day. I don't join in on any Biden bashing even among friends. I find when I am strong and not ashamed of my support for Biden, it, at a minimum, gives others pause and they stop bashing him. I say those are talking points that I don't buy into.
The generally static nature of the polls is something wild. What would it take for Joe Biden to move off 39% approval? The public reacts to literally nothing, good or bad. At least not in a way the polls are picking up.
If memory serves me, I think to get to a mean average one discards the two polar extreme data elements. That said, I have lost patience with pollsters and their biases in question formulating. They are also craftily screening out some voters by types. Land lines? My daughter thinks that landlines have to do with a boat. We need to get the voters out. We need a massive effort on young voters. Clinton had the lead in all the polls. I hope to move on from the polls.
Many pollsters have started using methologies that use fewer landline calls... but the downside of that is, none of the new methods have proven nearly as effective as landlines used to be. A lot of pollsters are just flailing right now. They do whatever it takes to get their results close to everybody else's with a half-plausible methodology so they can be "serious" pollsters.
I see something different. I see fraud. I see pollsters manipulating to make it look like a horse race. That way they create clickbait. No younger person has a landline. NONE. Excluding the younger demographic does what? Magnifies the influence of the right. Etc. winnowing down cities canvassed and using more rural voters does what? Magnifies the influence of the right by excluding minorities in the canvass. One good poll accumulater now excludes Rasmussen from their aggregate.
You provide the context, Simon. Some of my Michigan friends freaked out earlier this year with a Detroit News poll showing Trump up by 8 in Michigan.
Fairly useless polling (registered instead of likely voters - and long before folks would pay attention. Look at what’s happened since the SOTU address?
Most folks will start paying attention around Labor Day. By then, the choice will be as clear as light v dark; good v evil.
Agree, Gary. Timing is everything. I'm in Michigan, and the Dems are revving engines (a bit of Motor City fun 🤗). The R's in this state are in chaos. Former Rep. Peter Meijer, a sane R candidate who voted to impeach T over J6, just dropped out of the Senate seat race against Dem. Rep. Elissa Slotkin. (Replacing Stabenow.) This is a big deal; Slotkin's chances just improved, IMHO. Plus, Big Gretch is putting on the heat for Michigan Dems. You ain't seen nothing yet!! GO BLUE 💙
Go Green! Sheila… thanx for sharing your insight. I commute monthly between one week in Austin and 3 weeks in Frankenmuth… I think Bidens strong labor (UAW) policies and Whitmir’s strong organization will help, of course. I don’t know where the Gaza mess and Michigan Palestinian/Arab community will be this fall. No one does.
The Texas House Dem Leader stopped by my Austin office last week. Just catching up. At some point he mentioned Gov Whitmir and Texas Democrats. We drafted a letter from the House Dem leader, which landed in Whitmir’s hands by Friday. Subtext: 2028.
Yes -- GO GREEN (in all ways) too! When it comes to national prez race, we're all Michiganders, together. Frankenmuth is on our list to visit soon; moved to AA 3 yrs ago. Such a cool state 😎💙
Please reach out, Sheila, so we can visit when you check out Frankenmuth. My native Texas wife fell in love with my hometown, so she moved … and I commute
I recall that the Michigan GOP is dead broke, and its current leader is only a slight improvement on Karamo (he’s Pete Hoekstra, who ran a really stupid racist campaign against Debbie Stabenow and lost big time). Meanwhile the state Democratic parties are in very good shape, and the Biden/Harris campaign and Democrats in general are really stepping up their ground game.
There hasn’t been a Republican Senator elected in Michigan since 1994. (Spencer Abraham! I looked it up!) That was, as all of us know, a *big* red-tsunami year. That senator lasted one term before he was ousted. Peter Meijer was probably the only candidate who could make Elissa Slotkin nervous, and, of course, the MAGA crowd isn’t having him. So I am 99 44/100 certain Michigan will have Senator Slotkin (D) next year.
Huge Whitmer fan! Absolutely foresee her having the potential to be the first elected Female President in either 2028 or 2032 especially, if/when Biden wins.
I think the big issue we have here is this outlier poll is conducted by a news media that can publicize it, bigly. The 20+ polls where Biden leads don't have that kind of exposure.
Simon, I hear you about CNN, next to Fox, the worst news organization, sniping at Biden constantly.
But here is their headline on the website this morning: "More than 60% of voters say Biden's tenure has been a failure," and this subhead: "39% view his presidency so far as a success, but more than half say Trump's term was a success." We need to call them out. How could such a poll be designed to come up with those results. Are we to believe that voters thought Trump did a fine job during COVID and Biden did a lousy job? We all know that the four main (non-Fox) websites (ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC) do not cover the initiatives of the White House and Biden's Administration. And then they give us crap that the Biden people need to do a better job of communication. Bullshit. I see it. You see it, but they won't cover it. If a tree falls in the forest.... I don't think they believe that Trump will do what he is saying he will do, or what is in Project 2025.
I do not think there is any way that this could be viewed as an objective poll if they left out independents. But we do not know the sampling - skew Republicans - skew rural. Pretty sure most polls under sample 18-29 because they are harder to reach.
Just more clickbait Keith. I believe it to be more clickbait designed to attract eyeballs. Profit is the motivator. And as hard as it gets for me it at times, I'm learning to live without the validation of polls/studies or headlines telling me what I want to hear or attempting to make tea leafs out of everything. It's hard, but i think if Biden and more importantly all of us willing to help lift our standard bearer up do a good enough job communicating - studies like this one will be irrelevant. I think most of us are or were distressed at the state by and large of the polling, and Simon and others are here to remind us all that we have more agency than we think. Remember neither money hungry media outlets nor the " studies" they peddle need to have the last word! We can and must see to it that we will!
CNN seems to want to turn itself into Fox, Jr. My guess is that they know their primary audience is aging and dying off - who under 70 watches cable news on the reg? I am early GenX, so rapidly losing that “middle aged” plausible deniability LOL, and I never watch cable news unless I’m stuck with it at the car dealership or doctor’s office or wherever. (Thank Asclepius that my own PCP’s office is TV-free.)
CNN is desperate to get those eyeballs back, because younger generations and middle-aged generations just do not watch TV news anymore. So they figure “Fox, Jr.”, is the way to go. But the people who want to watch Fox…are already watching Fox, and won’t switch.
Don't know if your familiar with the comedian Bill Burr, but I think about 2 years ago now he went on a rant against CNN insisting they were just as bad as Fox, saying something to the effect of " they want him to come back..." I believe it. The way I see it, it's up to us to see to it that they DON'T GET what they want!
The former CEO of CBS, Les Moonves, said that Trump was “bad for America but good for [CBS] business.” This is the bottom line. Biden is bad for business because he runs a competent administration and a tight ship that does not leak. Witness the NYT’s toddler tantrum about how “Meanie Joe won’t talk to us waah waah waah!”
(Moonves, incidentally, was booted due to his being a sexual harasser. I have a feeling there’s a lot of higher-ups who would love to be able to grab ‘em by the redacted without penalty once again.)
Oh I remember Moonves - scumbag. Good point Impossible Santa Wife. I think the media CEO greed/corruption is more nuanced than a lot of people (myself included) realized. I guess I was thought there "principled" class and then the "Murdoch/Bannon" class. Nah there's several intermediate levels of arrogance. That New York Times revelation was both frustrating & vindicating. It makes perfect sense though. And the other thing I constantly have to remind myself of is all of the good, principled individuals who work at these places. One such contributor is Jennifer Rubin who advised in an op Ed last fall to ignore political coverage. I mostly do, and I can only hope enough others do. Who knows maybe if enough people start writing into CNN they and other networks will start doing stories on Project 2025 etc. oh well, I just remind myself that infotainment does not dictate the future. Got 250 more postcards to write for Jacky Rosen. May the wind be at our backs.
I think that the profit motive is there for just about every for-profit news outlet (which is why NPR is good to have around). Moonves said the quiet part out loud, but, Trump was profitable for newsrooms. Subscriptions, views, clicks, etc. increased. And then along came COVID, and people were legitimately frightened and wanted to know how badly their city or hospital was affected, when there would be a vaccine, and all the other things one really wants to know in a pandemic.
With the boring normalcy that is Joe Biden, people are paying less attention to the news. So, wanting their cash cow back and feeling insulated from consequences, the CEO’s come down on the side of pro-Trump. I don’t know how bad the rank and file reporters want him back - probably not nearly as much, as their bosses will gleefully throw them under the bus if the worst comes to pass.
That does not mean there aren’t *individual* journalists with integrity. But they get drowned out or squelched by the “where is our giant orange cash cow!?” cries from CEO’s.
Know what? Even if trump had been a success ( "very fine people" ) it would not be a reason to vote for him. I just got back from a luncheon for my son's graduation, and I heard people saying the only thing they worry about is trump getting back in. And they are not even strong or registered Dems; they voted for W twice. I don't know where they find these respondents, but the LV polls in the swing states are not something to dismiss; good news is they aren't bad, and that's really the ball game; I don't care if trump gets every single vote in TX and FL if we win the states we need. I have yet to see one unbiased expert characterize Biden as a failure. It just can't be done. So why are our voters saying different? All I can say is head down, get to work. We gotta fight for it. A little early yet, but as we get closer I'm getting involved. I'm not gonna sit by and just watch.
It is this kind of information that keeps me coming back to you every time you post on "X" and why I subscribe to your Substack. Of course, Navigator Research is my gold standard, too! Keep up the good work!
A news organization that has a poll at significant variance with other recent polling should cast it as an “outlier” and explain future polling could look different.
I think they polls with Biden down are “clickbait” for us. I refuse to let them change what I do and how I volunteer for Joe. Also, I thought he hit all the right notes at the White House Correspondents Dinner last night.
IF he's winning those demographics why isn't he above 50% and more then 6 points ahead of Biden? Also why is Biden still getting 43% despite loosing those 2 demographics?
Wow. How do they come up with this stuff?
People are harder than ever to reliably reach.
Any poll that has Trump winning women and young people is absurd.
Seriously, I firmly believe that under NO CIRCUMSTANCES ( good or bad) is Trump is winning women or the youth vote!
Simply shocking that it isn’t 100-0. Trump is a monster and Biden is a man for ALL people not just millionaires.
This is really helpful context. I am constantly reminded to keep the errors of polling in mind and their predictive limitations.
Something I think will change voters minds is when Trump shows up to the presidential debate wearing an ankle bracelet. Please let it be.
Simon, it's so funny - just as I was reading your comments on yesterday's post and wondering if any Hopium would drop today, right in my inbox comes this post lol. Seriously thank you for the reminder. I know any number of click hungry outlets will have a field day with that CNN poll. As you say, I will in fact, keep calm and campaign on !
I refuse to believe Trump is up in any polls when Nikki Haley - who wasn’t even in the POTUS race as she dropped out! - got a sizable chunk of the Republican vote in the PA primaries.
It seems as if whenever there is good news for Biden, another poll comes out in the other direction. Do they just poll the same people they interview over and over? The Trump voters that hang out in diners who are still voting for Trump?
Seriously though. It does feel that way doesn't it ?! It can be a real mind fuck. That being said, I'm viewing more of these polls /headlines as reminders not to wait. Like others have said, we made the mistake of waiting for Mueller. Too many have wanted to wait for Jack smith. And I'm always fighting temptation to wait for the polls & headlines to say what I want them to. Yet we cannot wait for any of that. Every time I see another dour story about Biden's age, or a lackluster poll, I look at it as a reminder to take nothing for granted.
💯. I will talk about Biden's achievements and record and put it up against Trump's any day. I don't join in on any Biden bashing even among friends. I find when I am strong and not ashamed of my support for Biden, it, at a minimum, gives others pause and they stop bashing him. I say those are talking points that I don't buy into.
The generally static nature of the polls is something wild. What would it take for Joe Biden to move off 39% approval? The public reacts to literally nothing, good or bad. At least not in a way the polls are picking up.
If memory serves me, I think to get to a mean average one discards the two polar extreme data elements. That said, I have lost patience with pollsters and their biases in question formulating. They are also craftily screening out some voters by types. Land lines? My daughter thinks that landlines have to do with a boat. We need to get the voters out. We need a massive effort on young voters. Clinton had the lead in all the polls. I hope to move on from the polls.
Many pollsters have started using methologies that use fewer landline calls... but the downside of that is, none of the new methods have proven nearly as effective as landlines used to be. A lot of pollsters are just flailing right now. They do whatever it takes to get their results close to everybody else's with a half-plausible methodology so they can be "serious" pollsters.
I see something different. I see fraud. I see pollsters manipulating to make it look like a horse race. That way they create clickbait. No younger person has a landline. NONE. Excluding the younger demographic does what? Magnifies the influence of the right. Etc. winnowing down cities canvassed and using more rural voters does what? Magnifies the influence of the right by excluding minorities in the canvass. One good poll accumulater now excludes Rasmussen from their aggregate.
Of course, Yahoo led with the CNN post. Clear example of how absurd both CNN and Yahoo are as news sources.
I stay away from yahoo. They're a prime example of a search engine that obnoxiously shoves the worst headlines in your face
You provide the context, Simon. Some of my Michigan friends freaked out earlier this year with a Detroit News poll showing Trump up by 8 in Michigan.
Fairly useless polling (registered instead of likely voters - and long before folks would pay attention. Look at what’s happened since the SOTU address?
Most folks will start paying attention around Labor Day. By then, the choice will be as clear as light v dark; good v evil.
totally agree Gary..
Agree, Gary. Timing is everything. I'm in Michigan, and the Dems are revving engines (a bit of Motor City fun 🤗). The R's in this state are in chaos. Former Rep. Peter Meijer, a sane R candidate who voted to impeach T over J6, just dropped out of the Senate seat race against Dem. Rep. Elissa Slotkin. (Replacing Stabenow.) This is a big deal; Slotkin's chances just improved, IMHO. Plus, Big Gretch is putting on the heat for Michigan Dems. You ain't seen nothing yet!! GO BLUE 💙
Go Green! Sheila… thanx for sharing your insight. I commute monthly between one week in Austin and 3 weeks in Frankenmuth… I think Bidens strong labor (UAW) policies and Whitmir’s strong organization will help, of course. I don’t know where the Gaza mess and Michigan Palestinian/Arab community will be this fall. No one does.
The Texas House Dem Leader stopped by my Austin office last week. Just catching up. At some point he mentioned Gov Whitmir and Texas Democrats. We drafted a letter from the House Dem leader, which landed in Whitmir’s hands by Friday. Subtext: 2028.
Yes -- GO GREEN (in all ways) too! When it comes to national prez race, we're all Michiganders, together. Frankenmuth is on our list to visit soon; moved to AA 3 yrs ago. Such a cool state 😎💙
Please reach out, Sheila, so we can visit when you check out Frankenmuth. My native Texas wife fell in love with my hometown, so she moved … and I commute
garyscharrer@gmail.com
Will do 💙
Great. We can chat about public policy, politics and all things Michigan. My wife built a new home 3 blocks from
DT Frankenmuth. Convenient. You have my email above.
I recall that the Michigan GOP is dead broke, and its current leader is only a slight improvement on Karamo (he’s Pete Hoekstra, who ran a really stupid racist campaign against Debbie Stabenow and lost big time). Meanwhile the state Democratic parties are in very good shape, and the Biden/Harris campaign and Democrats in general are really stepping up their ground game.
There hasn’t been a Republican Senator elected in Michigan since 1994. (Spencer Abraham! I looked it up!) That was, as all of us know, a *big* red-tsunami year. That senator lasted one term before he was ousted. Peter Meijer was probably the only candidate who could make Elissa Slotkin nervous, and, of course, the MAGA crowd isn’t having him. So I am 99 44/100 certain Michigan will have Senator Slotkin (D) next year.
👍👍😎💙
You nailed it. Thanx for sharing.
Huge Whitmer fan! Absolutely foresee her having the potential to be the first elected Female President in either 2028 or 2032 especially, if/when Biden wins.
I think the big issue we have here is this outlier poll is conducted by a news media that can publicize it, bigly. The 20+ polls where Biden leads don't have that kind of exposure.
Simon, I hear you about CNN, next to Fox, the worst news organization, sniping at Biden constantly.
But here is their headline on the website this morning: "More than 60% of voters say Biden's tenure has been a failure," and this subhead: "39% view his presidency so far as a success, but more than half say Trump's term was a success." We need to call them out. How could such a poll be designed to come up with those results. Are we to believe that voters thought Trump did a fine job during COVID and Biden did a lousy job? We all know that the four main (non-Fox) websites (ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC) do not cover the initiatives of the White House and Biden's Administration. And then they give us crap that the Biden people need to do a better job of communication. Bullshit. I see it. You see it, but they won't cover it. If a tree falls in the forest.... I don't think they believe that Trump will do what he is saying he will do, or what is in Project 2025.
Did the poll include independents? Just wondering
I do not think there is any way that this could be viewed as an objective poll if they left out independents. But we do not know the sampling - skew Republicans - skew rural. Pretty sure most polls under sample 18-29 because they are harder to reach.
Just more clickbait Keith. I believe it to be more clickbait designed to attract eyeballs. Profit is the motivator. And as hard as it gets for me it at times, I'm learning to live without the validation of polls/studies or headlines telling me what I want to hear or attempting to make tea leafs out of everything. It's hard, but i think if Biden and more importantly all of us willing to help lift our standard bearer up do a good enough job communicating - studies like this one will be irrelevant. I think most of us are or were distressed at the state by and large of the polling, and Simon and others are here to remind us all that we have more agency than we think. Remember neither money hungry media outlets nor the " studies" they peddle need to have the last word! We can and must see to it that we will!
CNN seems to want to turn itself into Fox, Jr. My guess is that they know their primary audience is aging and dying off - who under 70 watches cable news on the reg? I am early GenX, so rapidly losing that “middle aged” plausible deniability LOL, and I never watch cable news unless I’m stuck with it at the car dealership or doctor’s office or wherever. (Thank Asclepius that my own PCP’s office is TV-free.)
CNN is desperate to get those eyeballs back, because younger generations and middle-aged generations just do not watch TV news anymore. So they figure “Fox, Jr.”, is the way to go. But the people who want to watch Fox…are already watching Fox, and won’t switch.
Don't know if your familiar with the comedian Bill Burr, but I think about 2 years ago now he went on a rant against CNN insisting they were just as bad as Fox, saying something to the effect of " they want him to come back..." I believe it. The way I see it, it's up to us to see to it that they DON'T GET what they want!
The former CEO of CBS, Les Moonves, said that Trump was “bad for America but good for [CBS] business.” This is the bottom line. Biden is bad for business because he runs a competent administration and a tight ship that does not leak. Witness the NYT’s toddler tantrum about how “Meanie Joe won’t talk to us waah waah waah!”
(Moonves, incidentally, was booted due to his being a sexual harasser. I have a feeling there’s a lot of higher-ups who would love to be able to grab ‘em by the redacted without penalty once again.)
Oh I remember Moonves - scumbag. Good point Impossible Santa Wife. I think the media CEO greed/corruption is more nuanced than a lot of people (myself included) realized. I guess I was thought there "principled" class and then the "Murdoch/Bannon" class. Nah there's several intermediate levels of arrogance. That New York Times revelation was both frustrating & vindicating. It makes perfect sense though. And the other thing I constantly have to remind myself of is all of the good, principled individuals who work at these places. One such contributor is Jennifer Rubin who advised in an op Ed last fall to ignore political coverage. I mostly do, and I can only hope enough others do. Who knows maybe if enough people start writing into CNN they and other networks will start doing stories on Project 2025 etc. oh well, I just remind myself that infotainment does not dictate the future. Got 250 more postcards to write for Jacky Rosen. May the wind be at our backs.
I think that the profit motive is there for just about every for-profit news outlet (which is why NPR is good to have around). Moonves said the quiet part out loud, but, Trump was profitable for newsrooms. Subscriptions, views, clicks, etc. increased. And then along came COVID, and people were legitimately frightened and wanted to know how badly their city or hospital was affected, when there would be a vaccine, and all the other things one really wants to know in a pandemic.
With the boring normalcy that is Joe Biden, people are paying less attention to the news. So, wanting their cash cow back and feeling insulated from consequences, the CEO’s come down on the side of pro-Trump. I don’t know how bad the rank and file reporters want him back - probably not nearly as much, as their bosses will gleefully throw them under the bus if the worst comes to pass.
That does not mean there aren’t *individual* journalists with integrity. But they get drowned out or squelched by the “where is our giant orange cash cow!?” cries from CEO’s.
Know what? Even if trump had been a success ( "very fine people" ) it would not be a reason to vote for him. I just got back from a luncheon for my son's graduation, and I heard people saying the only thing they worry about is trump getting back in. And they are not even strong or registered Dems; they voted for W twice. I don't know where they find these respondents, but the LV polls in the swing states are not something to dismiss; good news is they aren't bad, and that's really the ball game; I don't care if trump gets every single vote in TX and FL if we win the states we need. I have yet to see one unbiased expert characterize Biden as a failure. It just can't be done. So why are our voters saying different? All I can say is head down, get to work. We gotta fight for it. A little early yet, but as we get closer I'm getting involved. I'm not gonna sit by and just watch.
Thank you Simon for ALL your work, I am following all you do on Twitter too and tv, I hope you get some sleep...
I think the votes for Joe might be even slightly higher as many on the Republican side are afraid to be too open about any switch to the other party..
Thank you, Simon!
It is this kind of information that keeps me coming back to you every time you post on "X" and why I subscribe to your Substack. Of course, Navigator Research is my gold standard, too! Keep up the good work!
I agree.
A news organization that has a poll at significant variance with other recent polling should cast it as an “outlier” and explain future polling could look different.
I think they polls with Biden down are “clickbait” for us. I refuse to let them change what I do and how I volunteer for Joe. Also, I thought he hit all the right notes at the White House Correspondents Dinner last night.
President Biden advised us to “ move past the horse race numbers”. For those who haven’t seen
his full remarks at the White Correspondents’ Dinner it’s ~ 10 minutes. He rocked it ! 💙
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBtXUXknvtE