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Working Hard And Closing Strong, Putin's Many MAGA Puppies, Some Notes On The Early Vote

New Episode Of Closing Strong Is Out!/Welcome New Subscribers!
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Happy Friday all. And a good Friday it is! Let’s make this a big weekend for Harris-Walz and Democrats across the country. The VP is out there leaving it all out there on the playing field for us. We need to be there for her and make every day of these remaining days a good day!

I start today with the campaign’s enormous rally last night in Atlanta. 20,000 people, Barack, the Boss and the next President of the United States. Enjoy as much of it as you can watch. These events are inspiring, wonderful, joyous and what a winning campaign looks like:

I strongly recommend making the campaign’s daily events - live, recorded or those lucky enough to see them in person - part of your information diet in the home stretch. No better way to understand what voters in the swing states are seeing. Here are the main events today, from the campaign:

Vice President Harris will travel to Houston, Texas where she will give remarks on the serious consequences of Trump’s abortion bans to women’s lives, and will be joined by women who have faced the direct impacts of these extreme laws, as well as by Rep. Colin Allred. Vice President Harris will also record an interview with podcaster Brené Brown.

Governor Walz will campaign throughout Pennsylvania, including in Philadelphia for a political stop and campaign reception before traveling to Allentown for a campaign engagement. In the evening, Governor Walz will deliver remarks at a Harris-Walz campaign rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Following the rally, Governor Walz will travel to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mrs. Walz will deliver remarks at campaign events in Green Bay and Marinette County, Wisconsin and hold an evening rally in Marquette, Michigan with actress and singer Mandy Moore.

The 2024 Election - I Would Much Rather Be Us Than Them - Got a lot of stuff for you to read, watch and listen to this weekend:

  • A recording of my appearance on Alex Wagner’s MSNBC show last night. Alex, Dan Pfeiffer and I had a great discussion about the election - polling, the early vote, and the big story that broke last night about Elon Musk’s illicit and dangerous relationship with Vladimir Putin. It is above. Enjoy all.

  • My new video presentation and Hopium post on the election. The video and post are a very comprehensive deep dive on where things stand and are well worth your time.

  • Our new Closing Strong episode with Nevada Senator Cortez Masto talking about why she thinks we will win there despite the early noise, a really interesting look at the third party vote (or lack thereof), and Tara and I do our regular roundup of the week’s electoral developments. Strongly recommend for those who want to go deeper into the Nevada early vote.

  • Yesterday Tom Bonier and I joined Ben Meiselas of MeidasTouch for a really detailed look at the early vote and recent polling data. This is a must watch for the data nerds in Hopium land.

  • This week I also sat down with The Center for American Progress for a wide ranging and wonderful conversation for their The Tent podcast. Enjoy this one too!

My latest 2024 election toplines:

  • Non-red wave national and state polling has been remarkably consistent and steady since the debate. The VP leads by 2-3-4 points nationally, and we are closer to 270 than Trump. Her favs/unfavs are far better than Trump’s, which can matter for late-breaking voters. She’s also closed the gap on the economy with Trump - a huge achievement. The flood of red wave polls in recent weeks (over 80 polls, 31 different orgs) have tipped some of the averages but do not be fooled. The race favors us and is not slipping away.

  • With our field/grassroots and financial advantage, our superior campaign should be able to reach more voters and close stronger than the Rs in the home stretch. The organized opposition to Trump from prominent Republican leaders in the home stretch is also going to matter.

  • The early vote got better for us as the week went on, and as I write below, I think we should be pleased with where we are today. We are doing best in GA, MI, NE-2 and WI, and are competitive everywhere else. It’s trench warfare peeps, and we just have to keep fighting and keep making everyday a good day. Learn more about my take on how the power of the Democratic grassroots has the ability to create “two elections.”

  • Since Dobbs, we’ve been the party overperforming polls, not Republicans. Trump and Republicans, like their fascist allies in Europe and France this summer, have underperformed public polls repeatedly in this and the last election cycle. Will it be different this time? I wouldn’t bet on it.

  • The Senate remains a brawl, and there is a great deal of optimism about what we are seeing in the House races. The VP is heading to Houston today a big speech on abortion rights and reproductive freedom, and to support Colin Allred who has made it a race in Texas.

  • Our candidate isn’t unraveling on camera every day, and ducking challenging interviews and debates. Our candidate isn’t a rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon, the oldest person to be the nominee of an American political party and the most dangerous political leader in all of our history. Our candidate, the Vice President of the United States of America, is strong, winning, optimistic, committed to opportunity and freedom, is for the people and is working unbelievably hard to win this election for all of us.

Here’s my rough calculation of national polls released since Monday, October 14th:

  • Independent Polls - Harris +2.6 (including today’s NYT poll)

  • Right-aligned polls - Trump +1

I am not going to comment too much on today’s NYT poll (tied 48% to 48%) as I don’t like to do deep dives into any one poll, but the electorate they found is much more Republican than is likely to be the case; Trump’s favs were way too high (too R again); and their youth numbers again 17 points more Republican than the most recent Harvard IOP youth poll.

I want to reiterate how much of a stretch it would be for Trump to be competitive in the popular vote this year. In the last 4 Presidential elections we’ve averaged 51% of the vote, Rs 46.5%. A Republican has only won the popular vote once in the last 8 Presidential elections, twenty years ago. Polls showing Trump tied or ahead, or Party ID tied (as the NYT does in this poll) are way, way out there on a statistical limb. It may happen but Trump making a go of the popular vote is running up against an unbelievable amount of history, our strong performances in recent elections, his bleeding of Republican voters this year and his historic and deeply evident ugliness.

Moving on…..

Here is today’s Washington Post battleground state polling average (more highly curated to exclude junky and right wing polls). We win this election.

OK, I am ready to start doing more granular analysis on the early vote. It has been hard to analyze the early vote this time for 1) 2020 was a COVID election, and thus not a great baseline to make comparisons 2) States have changed their voting rules, and the variance in how people vote early state to state makes comparisons a bit challenging 3) Republicans have made the early vote a priority this time (they did not in 2020 or 2022) so the early vote patterns are very different than the last two elections 4) Some of our core Democratic vote, young Dems, will be showing up in the unaffiliated column this election. 5) Wisconsin’s voter file does provide enough information this year to make apples to apples comparisons to either 2020 or 2022 6) given all this we just needed more vote to come in.

So, with all these caveats, here we go. Using TargetEarly’s modeled party feature, we now know the national early vote has been running 5-6-7 more points more Republican than 2020. We expected this, but just didn’t know how much more Republican the early vote would be. So what I am going to share now is how each of the 7 battleground states, plus NE-2, are performing against both 2020 and a new stat I’ve developed - performance against 2020 compared to the early vote nationally.

This morning the early vote is running 6.9 points more Republican than on this day in 2020. Here is what I have for 1) compared to 2020 at this time 2) performance against the national early vote. In the aggregate of the 7 battleground states we are running just 0.6 behind 2020, and 6.3 points above the national early vote. Friends this is very good. The power of the Harris-Walz campaign and the Democratic grassroots is driving the early vote, and helping us perform before above the national baseline. This is what we would have expected to see given the superiority of our campaign. This is the 7 state battleground aggregate:

Here’s how the states break down:

  • Michigan - We are running 12.1 percentage points above 2020, and 19 points above the national baseline (this is really good)

  • Nebraska-02 - We are running 9.1 points above 2020, and 16 points above the national baseline (this is really good)

  • Wisconsin - We can’t say for sure at this point, but it is likely running at levels similar to MI and NE (I will explain this in a future post)

  • Georgia - We are running 1.7 points below 2020, and 5.3 points above the national baseline (we made strong gains in GA this week)

  • Arizona - We are running 5.4 points below 2020, and 1.4 points above the national baseline (we made strong gains in AZ this week)

  • Pennsylvania - We are running 6.4 points below 2020, and 0.5 above the national baseline

  • North Carolina - We are running 8.5 points below 2020, and 1.6 points below the national baseline (we made strong gains in NC this week)

  • Nevada - We are running 11 points below 2020, and 4.1 points below the national baseline (we made strong gains in NV this week)

A few additional notes: 1) We’ve seen meaningful gains in AZ, GA, NC, NE-02 and NV this week. You can see the power of our campaigns/grassroots kicking in. 2) We don’t know how many Rs are voting for us in any of these states, though it is likely it will be more than 2020 3) It is also likely that the unaffiliated vote is more D than last time. This means the actual vote so far is slightly more Dem than these numbers suggest, something we are seeing in polling of those who have voted so far.

To sum up - in the battlegrounds we are running at 2020 levels and overperforming the national baseline. Over the past few days the vote has gotten bluer for us in the battlegrounds, as we would have expected given our campaign superiority. It is likely that the current vote is a bit more Democratic than the raw D/R/U split, which means all this is actually a little bit better than the raw data. Taken together it is now very likely that Democrats are outperforming 2020 in the battlegrounds despite the national early vote being 7 points more Republican this year; and these early vote “leads” Rs have been crowing about are evaporating. It appears they got an early boost in some of these states, something they have been unable to maintain, as our campaign superiority and all of you keep making the early vote bluer.

Finally, I think we should feel good about where we are right now. We have a modest lead in the national and battleground state polls. The early vote is good and is getting better. Our more muscular and energetic campaign has a far greater capacity to keep moving that vote towards us in these final days. And perhaps most importantly, I think how this election is closing - with a focus on Trump’s fitness. madness, extremism, misogny and fealty to Putin - is how we want this election to be closing. For fear and opposition to MAGA has been the most powerful force in our politics since 2018, and is now likely to be the most powerful force in this election too. Here’s a new ad from the Harris campaign:

Folks as I keep saying I think we are winning this election but have not won it yet. Winning it is up to us and the work we do in the home stretch. Let’s get to work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Doing More And Worrying Less/Working Hard And Closing Strong In The Home Stretch - Mark Hamill joined us last night for our phonebank!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And we got an incredible amount of calls done for CA-45 and Harris-Walz in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Thank you to all who came. We have one more night of calling left. Sign up today!

  • Tuesday, Oct 29th, 7-9pm - Calls for Christina Bohannan (IA-01), Janelle Stelson (PA-10) and Harris-Walz - Register Here (hope we will hear from both candidates, still working on it)

My one big ask today - donate to or volunteer for Harris-Walz and let’s keep makign the early vote bluer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I want to thank all of you who are self-reporting in on all your remarkable work across the country. Postcards, canvassing, back yard phonebank parties - you all are doing the work we need to do to win. Thank you all. Let’s get to it!

Harris-Walz, Our Presidential Checkmate States and Wisconsin - Learn more about our “checkmate” strategy, and support Ruben Gallego and these three front-line state parties:

Winning The House - Keeping getting very good vibes from our candidates and House Democratic leadership about flipping the House this year. We need to keep working it peeps!

Keeping The Senate Blue - this is a brawl my friends, and we just have to keep working it:

Growing The Hopium Community - We’ve set some goals for the growth of our community so more of us can be doing more and worrying less in the home stretch:

  • Hopium Subscribers - 113,542 this morning, 125,000 goal

  • Paid Subscribers - 13,178 this morning, 14,000 goal

Great work everyone. We are making good progress here. Hopium paid subscribers get access to a weekly live home stretch political briefing and Founding Members will have their own small gathering on Fridays. You can become a paid subscriber and help us hit our goals by clicking on the link below or following this link. The subscription tab includes options for gift and group subscriptions, all 10% off through Election Day!

Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you.

Let’s bring it home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Simon

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Hopium Chronicles By Simon Rosenberg
Hopium Chronicles With Simon Rosenberg Podcast
Expert commentary from a 30 year veteran of US politics. Here we'll be working on strategies to defeat MAGA, tell our story more effectively and ensure freedom and democracy prevail. Expect sharp analysis, live events and all sorts of Hopium!