Here’s some more analysis of the state of the race. It provides a combined look at the many data points showing that Trump is weaker than 2016 by every measure.
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1. Campaign Numerology
This is the point on the ride where everyone freaks out and decides that the polls
must be wrong. That you can’t trust the numbers. That something real is happening that isn’t being captured in the data.
Maybe there
is something happening that we can’t see. It’s possible.
But I doubt it. Because the most striking thing about the global view that both the national and state polls give us is how much they make sense in the context of one another.
The cross-tabs of demographic support make sense given the top-line national levels. The top-line national levels are consistent with what we see in almost all of the state level polling. And almost all of the horse-race polling is consistent with the long-running job approval numbers of the the president.
There’s a lot of signal here. And it all points in the same direction.
Before we start, never forget the foundation of this race: Donald Trump began his presidency on the wrong side of voters. He was elected with 46 percent of the vote and started out in a -3 million vote hole.
Did the data from his term ever look like he was adding to that coalition?
No.
People have
never liked the job Donald Trump has done as president. Not one bit.
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So what would you expect the national numbers to look like for a president who began his term with 46 percent of the vote and was then substantially net-negative on job approval for four years? You would expect his national support to be lower than 46 percent.
Presto.
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Now, if Trump’s national average has dropped, you would expect to see him losing ground with various demographic groups when you look at the cross tabs.
In 2016 Trump was +7 with voters over 65 and -13 with women. No matter what poll you look at, Trump has declined with both.
Pew has him at ±0 with seniors and -16 with women. Pew’s poll is n=10,543 so it’s a pretty good sample, but you see this trend basically everywhere. Trump has gone backwards with seniors and women (among other groups) and hasn’t really gained appreciably with anyone aside from Hispanic males.
So if Trump’s national numbers are down and his numbers with many demographic groups are down, then we’d expect to see him losing ground in state polling, too.
Have a look:
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Note that none of these states are the big battlegrounds. We’re looking only at places Trump won comfortably in 2016 and that have, for the most part, very favorable demographics for him. And they’re exhibiting the same trends we see everywhere else: Trump’s position declining relative to 2016.
When you look at the battlegrounds, you see the same again:
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By now you should sense a pattern. No matter which way you look at this race, Donald Trump is in a measurably worse position than he was in 2016.
The Trump people will tell you that all of these numbers are wrong. The polls are skewed. The samples are bad. There are shy Trump voters who don’t show up.
Maybe? But there is no actual evidence for any of that.
Ask yourself this: Is Trump showing a 9 point decline in West Virginia because of all the shy Trump voters down in the hollers?
On the other hand, all of the available evidence collected over four years of survey work points in the exact same direction:
A president elected with a minority vote share spent four years being deeply unpopular, lost ground across most demographic groups, and is now on track to finish with an even smaller vote share, both in states he won in 2016 and states he lost.
It’s not that complicated.
Click to expand...
