Saturday, September 19, 2020

Strong Polls for Biden, Trump Moves Beyond Base: This Week in the 2020 Race

Results from surveys in seven battleground states show Joe Biden ahead. Both candidates participated
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By Astead W. Herndon and Annie Karni

Welcome to our weekly analysis of the state of the 2020 campaign.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. participated in a CNN town hall near Scranton, Pa., on Thursday.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

The week in numbers

  • Joe Biden continues to dominate the paid media landscape. On broadcast television, the Biden campaign spent $36.5 million over the last week, while the Trump campaign only spent about $14.7 million, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm. The Biden campaign has a similar advantage on Facebook, where it spent $4.2 million over the past week, while President Trump’s team spent $2.4 million.
  • A series of New York Times/Siena College surveys in seven battleground states generated mostly positive news for Mr. Biden, who didn’t trail in a single survey. Mr. Trump failed to reach 45 percent support in any poll. Support for Mr. Biden ranged from 45 percent to 55 percent.
  • With Mr. Biden pushing back on the president’s aggressive law-and-order messaging, 53 percent of likely voters in Minnesota and Wisconsin said they thought that Mr. Trump had encouraged violence in America.
  • In Wisconsin there was evidence of some possible receptiveness to Mr. Trump’s tough talk: It was the only state polled in which voters were just as likely to say that urban rioting was a bigger problem than racism in the criminal justice system, not the other way around.
  • But of those more worried about riots, nearly one in five said they planned to vote for Mr. Biden.

Catch me up

For large portions of this presidential campaign, the two nominees have been insulated from everyday Americans. Mr. Biden’s cocoon was one of the campaign’s own making, as his campaign prioritized caution and safety during the pandemic over travel and in-person events. Mr. Trump has expressed frustration at the lack of his signature rallies, so much so that he has held several rally-like events in spite of the advice of public health professionals and some in his own party.

This week was likely the closest both candidates got to a semi-normal campaign trail in months.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden each participated in town hall forums, moderated by ABC News and CNN, which included questions from voters that could not be shrugged off with claims of fake news or media bias. Both candidates also visited Minnesota on Friday, in a push from each party now that early voting has begun in several states. Mr. Trump hit Nevada and Wisconsin as well, while Senator Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate, made stops in Philadelphia and California.

In a word, it was all a bit normal.

Two town halls offer window into debate

President Trump on Thursday during a rally at Central Wisconsin Aviation in Mosinee, Wis. Al Drago for The New York Times

The two town halls this week also served as a preview of what the presidential candidates might look like at the general election debates.

Just like Mr. Biden’s convention speech, his CNN town hall was a reminder that the former vice president is not in a deep state of mental decline, as the Trump camp would like voters to think. At one point, he even recognized one of the voters who had been chosen to ask a question — a retired police chief from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., whom Mr. Biden remembered meeting.

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Two nights earlier, Mr. Trump was unrepentant when forced to defend his administration’s handling of the coronavirus, in a setting that did not include shouted questions from reporters. At one point, he even blamed Mr. Biden for not instituting a national mask mandate, despite his holding no official position from which to do so.

  • Trump thinks the debates will turn things around: The president has been telling aides for months that he is counting on the debates to provide him with a boost. But Mr. Biden’s most recent big moments show someone more in command than he was in the Democratic primary debates.
  • Why Trump doesn’t prepare: Typically, candidates study a policy prep book that is hundreds of pages long. Trump aides have scaled that down to fewer than 30 pages, many of which simply have bullet points about issues likely to come up. So far, according to a campaign official, there are no formal debate preparation sessions set. Instead, whichever aide is traveling with the president has been peppering him with questions on the go.
  • Debates are still risky for Biden: Mr. Trump won’t play by the rules. And when he feels like he’s losing, he will go low. A conventional debate prep binder does little to steel a candidate against an onslaught of personal attacks, in Mr. Biden’s case most likely about his son Hunter. And while the town halls offered a preview, they were fairly tame compared to what is expected to come.

With tensions like these within the Trump administration …

Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, during a Senate subcommittee hearing.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

This week had the president doing battle not so much with political adversaries, but with expert voices from within his own administration.

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Dr. Robert S. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Congress that a vaccine would not be widely available until the middle of 2021, contrary to the president’s promise of a big breakthrough before Election Day on Nov. 3. He also said masks were potentially more useful than a vaccine for battling the spread of the pandemic and returning to normal life.

“I think he made a mistake when he said that,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “It’s just incorrect information.”

On Thursday, a former member of the coronavirus task force, Olivia Troye, came forward to explain she had resigned because the president was only concerned with his own re-election chances and sought to downplay the threat of the virus. In response, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, tried to discredit her by calling her a “disgruntled former detailee who typically sat in the overflow room of the task force.”

  • The call is coming from inside the house: From Mr. Trump’s own admissions to the journalist Bob Woodward, to current and former administration officials undermining trust in his statements about the coronavirus and the timing of a vaccine, the president is wasting precious days doing battle with himself and his own current and former officials.
  • It’s hard to dismiss everyone as disgruntled: Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster also spoke out this past week, saying in an interview that withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and partnering with the Taliban have made the country less safe. Another former official criticizing the president, this time on policy, threatened to undermine recent efforts to portray Mr. Trump as a peacemaker.
  • Trump continues to berate anyone who doesn’t fall in line: On Thursday night, he publicly rebuked the director of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray, after Mr. Wray warned of Russian interference in the election and of white supremacist violence.

Does door knocking matter? Depends whom you ask

A La Familia Vota worker distributing fliers on a resident's door in Las Vegas.Bridget Bennett for The New York Times

Democrats love to fret, but after their shock in 2016, what was already a party susceptible to nervousness has hit new heights. The latest fear is not driven by money (the Biden campaign has that) or party unity (pretty safe) or advertisements (the Biden campaign is spending big), but door knocking, and whether the campaign’s reluctance to invest in a field operation during the pandemic will hurt it come November.

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Our colleagues wrote recently that several county chairs and local party officials have expressed their frustration with Mr. Biden’s campaign, saying they have pleaded for more investment in organizers, volunteers and visibility merchandise, such as yard signs. It comes as Mr. Trump’s campaign has boasted about knocking on a million doors a week, with a particular focus on swing states.

Here’s the thinking of Mr. Biden’s campaign:

  • There are other ways to reach voters: In a digital age, campaigns have targeted ways of reaching voters that go beyond the traditional door knock. Ads that match specific demographic traits, text messages and phone banking can offer greater precision and accuracy. If the purpose of a door knock is to reach voters, some argue that the campaign can do that more efficiently without risking the health of volunteers and voters.
  • Joe Biden is not Bernie Sanders: Organizing has a particular resonance among members of the progressive left, who are often seeking to shift the makeup of the voting electorate and introduce candidates who have newer ideas and less name recognition to a national audience. This is distinct from the challenges Mr. Biden faces in November, because of his sky-high name recognition and brand durability among Americans. In the Democratic primary, Mr. Biden won several states on Super Tuesday despite barely having field operations there. That electorate differs from the general election makeup, but the principle holds. Mr. Biden is relying on positive earned media and ads to reach reliable and likely voters. He is not seeking to reshape the electorate’s makeup.
  • The fears are from the political class, not the base (with a caveat): In private, many of Mr. Biden’s political allies say the complaints of the local officials are their own projections onto the electorate. Specifically, they argue that officials are used to having field offices and yard signs as a way to cement their status as liaison between community and their campaign. However, some national Democrats think they have a point, and argue that the lack of field operations for Mr. Biden’s campaign could leave opportunities on the table to help some down-ballot candidates. It comes down to who you believe: Are the local officials correctly sensing a mood shift in their communities, or is Mr. Biden’s campaign reaching them in nontraditional ways?

What you might have missed

Nick Corasaniti, Isabella Grullón-Paz and Giovanni Russonello contributed reporting.

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Friday, September 18, 2020

On Politics: Will Michigan Polling Avoid Another Miss?

There are big differences from 2016: Pollsters have made adjustments, and voter enthusiasm is high.

Welcome to Poll Watch, our weekly look at polling data and survey research on the candidates, voters and issues that will shape the 2020 election. This week is the first in a series of entries looking at polling trends in individual states, with an eye to how pollsters are adjusting after the miscues of 2016.

Frustrated with their options and startled by an 11th-hour letter from the F.B.I. director castigating Hillary Clinton, undecided voters in 2016 broke hard for Donald J. Trump, while many in key Democratic constituencies simply stayed home.

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In the four years since, things have swung heavily in the other direction. College-educated voters and women voted overwhelmingly Democratic in the 2018 midterm elections, flipping the House blue. This year, the president’s inability to contain the coronavirus has added to many voters’ frustration with him, and he has struggled to find a message that can draw back Americans at the political center. With voter enthusiasm surging, political observers say this could be the highest-turnout election in the country’s history, despite the pandemic.

For all these trends, there may be no better microcosm than Michigan, a state that tipped for Mr. Trump in 2016 by just over 10,000 votes — making it the geographic and symbolic center of the country’s political realignment.

A poll released Friday by The Detroit Free Press showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. leading Mr. Trump by eight percentage points in the state, roughly in line with his advantage in other polls — powered by the same anti-Trump sentiment that helped Democrats flip two suburban House districts in 2018.

Still, the Republican base in Michigan is strong, and it shows up at the polls more consistently than Democratic voters. That was part of what carried Mr. Trump to victory in 2016, when voter enthusiasm was low across the board.

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This year, however, conscious that their ballots could again help decide the election, Michiganders of all political persuasions report being heavily motivated to vote. That’s a bad sign for Mr. Trump, who has never received a predominantly positive review from the roughly four in 10 Americans who identify as independents.

“Donald Trump didn’t win Michigan because there was a surge of Trump voters,” Richard Czuba, the founder of the Glengariff Group, a Lansing-based polling firm, said in an interview. “He won Michigan because there was a dearth of Democratic voters.”

Mr. Czuba gathers public opinion data each election year to calculate the average level of voter motivation, as reported by respondents using a 10-point scale. This month, a Glengariff poll for the television station WDIV and The Detroit News found that motivation levels in Michigan were nearly off the charts: Both Democrats and Republicans were averaging around 9.8, with independents not far behind at 9.2. In October 2016, the average for all voters hovered around 6.

Voters that year who leaned Democratic but weren’t strongly partisan averaged only 4.7 on the 10-point motivation scale, contributing to weak turnout for Mrs. Clinton in areas where she had expected to rack up votes. Together with some James Comey-driven defections, the result was a polling failure that still reverberates today.

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Avoiding a 2016 polling redux

The polls were so faulty in Michigan in 2016 that they whiffed in both the Democratic primary and the general election, overestimating Mrs. Clinton’s strength both times. In the primary, many polls underestimated young people’s share of the electorate. In the general, many polls failed to correct for the fact that white men without college degrees — a key part of Mr. Trump’s base — are among the most difficult to reach.

A Michigan State University poll just before the election gave Mrs. Clinton a 17-point lead partly because it didn’t weight its data to ensure that it properly represented the share of white noncollege voters.

The perception was so tilted toward a Clinton victory that The Detroit Free Press called the race early on election night in her favor, “Dewey Defeats Truman”-style, reversing itself after all the results had been counted.

But pollsters have sought to correct for the kinds of mistakes that led to an underestimation of Mr. Trump’s strength four years ago, adjusting to account for his support among less educated white voters and in some cases striving to reach more cellphone respondents.

Also working in their favor: Far fewer voters are undecided this year, lowering the likelihood of a late break in one direction or the other.

Democratic growth

The trend in Michigan toward Democrats over the past four years has been driven largely by white women and college-educated voters, as it has been nationwide. The phenomenon has been most visible in the suburbs just north of Detroit and Ann Arbor, where the pollster Stanley Greenberg first coined the term “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s to describe the moderates who were flipping in large numbers to support Ronald Reagan.

Since then, much of the region has been solidly Republican. But the insurgent Democratic candidates Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens both won decisive victories in 2018 House elections there, turning their districts blue.

“The changes in Oakland County have been shocking,” Mr. Czuba said, referring to a suburban county that runs through both Ms. Slotkin’s and Ms. Stevens’s districts. “Oakland County used to be the breadbasket of the Republican Party. In the 1980s, Democrats would not have even considered winning Oakland County. But now we’re in a position where Oakland County has become a blood bath for the Republican Party.”

Mr. Trump has also been leaking support in the western part of the state, long a Republican stronghold, and home to a heavily religious Protestant electorate. Two years ago in the governor’s race, Gretchen Whitmer won populous Kent County, which includes Grand Rapids, a typically Republican area in Western Michigan that had voted for Mr. Trump. Representative Fred Upton, a Republican representing the southwestern corner of the state, won re-election by less than five points in 2018, the narrowest margin of his career.

The pollster Bernie Porn, whose firm, EPIC-MRA, conducts surveys on behalf of The Detroit Free Press, said that it had found that respondents in Western Michigan registered a drop in approval for Mr. Trump after his photo op in front of St. John’s Church in Washington. But he added that Mr. Trump’s recent emphasis on crime and safety had resonated there in ways it didn’t elsewhere, helping the president recover some support in the most recent Free Press poll.

“Some of the messaging that Trump is using in terms of crime in the cities — that is starting to take effect,” Mr. Porn said.

Voting and the virus

Now nearly two years into her term as governor, Ms. Whitmer has earned high marks from a wide range of voters for her handling of the pandemic. Her approval rating is particularly strong among women, independent voters and those over 65.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly picked public fights with Ms. Whitmer this year, voicing his support for right-wing protests against her coronavirus restrictions. But those restrictions were popular, and although the demonstrators at the State Capitol drew widespread news coverage, polls have shown the majority of Michigan voters — including many in small towns and suburbs — have not been in a hurry to reopen.

“The issue that matters in Michigan is the virus,” Mr. Czuba said, noting that the state’s populous southeast was hit hard in the spring. “That is what’s registering, in a way that the economy used to register.”

He said that when Mr. Trump had attacked Ms. Whitmer, it alienated female voters in particular — more than two-thirds of whom approved of her handling of the virus in this month’s WDIV/Detroit News poll.

“The interaction Governor Whitmer had with the president where he said, don’t talk to ‘that woman in Michigan’ — I think that really galvanized voters,” Mr. Czuba said. “I think it really galvanized female voters.”

As in many states, Michigan’s voting process has been filled with legal squabbles. But the state mostly got one big question out of the way in 2018, when voters approved a referendum allowing anyone registered to vote to cast an absentee ballot. Jocelyn Benson, the secretary of state, has so far beaten back a Republican challenge over her decision to send mail ballot applications to all registered voters during the 2020 primaries, and her office sent out a postcard in August encouraging all voters to go online to request absentee ballots for the general election. In polls, well over half of Democrats have said they plan to vote absentee.

A smooth voting process would remove the major obstacle between a fired-up electorate and potentially record-setting turnout in November. The biggest concern that the Biden campaign would then face is a drop in enthusiasm from voters at the core of his coalition, as Mrs. Clinton experienced in 2016.

In contrast to her campaign, Mr. Biden’s team has made a point of spending time in Michigan and is working to drive up enthusiasm from voters in the Democratic stronghold of southeastern Michigan, particularly African-Americans in Detroit and Flint.

“Hillary Clinton’s campaign totally ignored Michigan,” said Charles Ballard, the director of the State of the State Survey at Michigan State. “Joe Biden was in Michigan two days ago. They’re not going to ignore us this time.”

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