Don’t believe the polls! (Except these two)

Pew Research and The New York Times/Siena polls may have their flaws but they’re telling us something we should be listening to...and you'll hear about them in the debate tonight.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Kamala Harris has been on a rocket ship since she became the presumed nominee for the Democratic party. Her historic momentum continued until that nomination was accepted at the convention in Chicago. And while that rocketship of momentum has slowed a bit to more human levels, we’ve entered the stage where things are getting real…real fast.

Make no mistake there’s still a lot of good happening in the polls for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. But you follow me for honest sober assessment and that’s what I want to provide here (Yes, I still believe the fundamentals of the race for Harris…take a deep breath, put your phone down and go outside and feel the sunshine on your face).

Pew Research, regarded as the gold standard of Hispanic public opinion released a massive national poll and the findings show little movement in the Presidential race with 60 days to go. Pews results show Latino voters favoring Harris at 57% to Trumps 39%. The latest national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted among 9,720 adults (including 8,044 registered voters) from Aug. 26 to Sept. 2, 2024

These results are only slightly different than 2020 results where Biden captured 59% of Latinos to Trumps 37%.

Pews numbers line up closer to major national public polls from media outlets like (NYTimes/Siena that came out this weekend showing Harris at 55% and Trump at 41%) than Democratic and progressive affiliated organizations. This same trend occurred in both 2016 and continued in 2020 and the 2022 midterms. For all the criticism of the public polls with Latino voters they’re consistently getting it more accurately with Latino voters than partisan Democratic firms.

Here’s a top level look at what Pew Research found:

While Harris has consolidated base constituencies like Black and youth voters, Latinos have remained stubbornly set in a middle to middle-high 30’s range. Again, this is a high historical range for a Republican to be at in September of an election year. Like, historically high.

It’s not great. It’s not deadly. I think Democrats are leaving too much on the table but alone this poll of Latino voters isn’t raising alarm bells. BUT, it’s not the only poll showing this upper 30’s range and that’s not good.

While there’s been a lot of criticism of the NYT/Siena poll as being either an outlier or leaning Republican I would rather stick with a small handful of quality polls and learn from them than chase down every poll being fired out right now. I follow a lot of data scientists on Twitter and watching them debate the polls that come out is equally hilarious and maddening. They’re very much like the nerds in high school who could tell you everything you could possibly know about girls but had never actually been on a date.

Bottom line: The credible public polls of Latino voters are showing Trump at a historically high level of support with Latino voters. Higher than 2020. Not great.

A couple of things to pay attention to here:

First, a really interesting age split among Latino voters in the Pew Research poll was pointed out to me by a really smart guy named Dean Bonner from the Public Policy Institute (PPIC). Dean is an associate survey director and co-author of the esteemed PPIC statewide survey in California, so Dean knows polling and he knows how to poll Latino voters. He pointed out a peculiar anomaly in the Pew findings. Namely that the poll had older Latinos more supportive of Trump and younger Latinos more supportive of Harris. We call that a “split”.

Here’s the split:

Hispanics over 50 years old are breaking for Trump more than those under 50.

While this might seem logical for white voters, or frankly any voters, who we typically assume grow more conservative as they get older, this actually flies in the face of everything we’ve been seeing and reading about Latino voters as of late.

It is younger US born Hispanic men that have polled the most supportive of Trump over the past few years. This finding is the opposite of that.

It’s just one poll so we’re not gonna make too much of it but we are sticking a pin in it to see if any other data follows.

There is potentially good news in both the NYTimes and Pew polls - Harris still has high levels of voters saying they don’t know enough about her to make an informed opinion.

A tweet from my friend Ron Brownstein pointed this out in the NY Times/Siena poll

Let me translate the tweet from Ron: 3 in 10 voters say they need more information on Kamal Harris before they make a decision, that goes up to 4 in 10 for Black and Latino voters and all the way up to nearly half or 5 in 10 voters under the age of 30.

This is a very big deal and something you should pay attention to tonight when watching the debate. All of these have been traditional base Democratic constituencies up until the last few years. Yes, these voter groups have been moving more Republican lately and yes, lower information voters are breaking consistently for Trump - But I’m still buying the idea that more than half of the voters in all of these demographics break for the Democrat here and thats good news for Harris.

A good debate performance and a big spending advantage can fix that undecided problem in short order in a way that will move her numbers higher.

To be sure this large swath of ‘uninformed and undecided’ voters can cut both ways. It is more likely those undecideds turn more negative than positive because she is a politician after all. We’ve reached the point in the campaign where the most watched voter is not the ‘double hater’ - it’s the ‘undecided and uninformed’ voter that’s gonna decide this thing.

Now it should be said that Latino voters are historically late deciders. And they also have a strong history of breaking towards Democrats when they do decide. But we shouldn’t be in this position. Harris should be at least where Biden’s numbers were in 2020 and she’s not.

Time is getting short.