Name: Most Powerful Women Summit 2024: Election 2024 - Breaking Down The Polls
Uploaded: 2024-10-15
Duration: 9 min 43 s
Description: Presenter: Kristen Soltis Anderson, Political Pollster; Founder, Echelon Insights

Presenter: Kristen Soltis Anderson, Political Pollster; Founder, Echelon Insights

Most Powerful Women Summit 2024: Election 2024 - Breaking Down The Polls 

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So my name is Kristen Soltis Anderson. I am the founder of echelon Insights. We're an opinion research firm that works for brands, advocacy groups and occasionally we dabble in politics. And so every 2 to 4 years around pumpkin spice season as a political pollster, I get asked one question over and over and over and that question is what will happen. What's going to happen in this election? Everybody wants to know and part of that is just natural curiosity. It's kind of like how a kid on Christmas wants to know what's under the tree and they might shake the box to see what's inside. Is it a toy or a lump of coal? Except in my world. The box is Pennsylvania. What's inside? Is it a lump of coal toy? Which candidate is, the lump of coal may vary depending on your political persuasion. But nevertheless, what we're trying to figure out is what is it that voters are going to do when this election season wraps? And the reason why so many people care about this may be curiosity, it may be entertainment for some, but for the women in this room, the reason why you want to be able to see what is going on in the future is because you need to be able to prepare your companies. There are going to be policies that may be different, things that affect your bottom line, things that affect your employees, your ability to do business around the world, that matter whether one candidate or the other wins the election. So I get asked that question a lot because people are rightfully very anxious and know that there are huge amounts of things at stake. But this is not a very easy election to predict. Uh There's a piece written by a variety of folks at Politico. They pulled together about a dozen different academics, uh pundits advocates to all come together and try to figure out what is the Black Swan event that could affect this election? This was a piece from January and it has stuck with me ever since because of the dozen or so things that they talk about, not just one but many of them have already occurred. The article included a number of people who said, I predict that it would be unpredictable but possible for a climate change, filled natural disaster to affect our battleground states in the weeks leading up to election day, one person wrote that they believed the debate over abortion was only going to get more intense. And this article came out just weeks before the Alabama Supreme Court's ruling on IVF. We had some who predicted that there could be a death at a Trump rally or a violent attempt on a candidate's life. Both of which sadly came true at that rally in Butler Pennsylvania. In fact, in that article, most of the things did wind up coming to pass in one way or another, except for one, if you have the aliens making contact on your bingo card, we still have a few weeks, they still have time. But I just put this up here to underscore unbelievably unpredictable. This election has been to say nothing of the fact that the two candidates on the ballot at the top of the ticket are not the two candidates we thought we would have back in January at the start of the year. So knowing all of this, I want to then give some context for how stable this election has been in the face of chaos. So back in 2008, you had an election where you had John mccain, Barack Obama, they were in a race of the, of their lifetimes. And in that race, the polls were all over the place when we took a look at how far the margins were apart on these polls. We found that John mccain at one point in the last two weeks or pardon me, two months before election day, John mccain at one point was up by three and then Barack Obama was up by seven, a 10 point swing. We then also had Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in their election. The swing, there was about about five points. It went from a Romney minus one to an Obama plus four. We had Trump versus Clinton. That was an election where the polls in the closing weeks had about a six point worth of swing and the last election as well, only about four points, but still in those closing weeks, we expect the polls to move a lot. And so then I looked since Labor Day, how much has this race moved? It has not moved at all. I had to go to decimal points in order to show any sort of difference between where this race stood. So that's just to give you some context for how unbelievably stable it is and it is the same way in the battleground states. We see Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan are all races that are not just within the margin of error. They are essentially within a point. Our friends at a ARP put out a poll today of voters in Michigan. It had Harris 46 Trump 46. So as somebody who works in the statistical profession, it would be irresponsible of me to tell you that I knew how this election was going to go. So instead, what I'll tell you is why is this race so close and why isn't it moving at all? So we'll start with why it's so close part of why this race is so close is that the candidates at the top of the ticket are now very evenly matched on two criteria that voters say is incredibly important, who will make the country safe and who will make the economy better back when Joe Biden was at the top of the tickets. My polls show Donald Trump with a fairly sizable lead on a variety of these metrics. But since Democrats made the change, and Kamala Harris became the Democrats nominee, we now can see that you have keeping our country safe and making our economy work better as even and the important metric of being competent and effective has now swung decisively in the democrats' favor. But why then do we still have such a close race if those numbers had moved so much? The reality is that we're incredibly polarized and I want to double click for a second on what our polarization means. Some people think our polarization means that half of America believes one thing and half of America believes the other. At my firm, we've done lots of experiments where we ask people what they think about their different political and partisan views. And we find that the vast majority of Americans take a little from column A and a little from column B. They are not entirely Republican or entirely democratic in their worldview. The reason why we are so polarized is because voters look at the other side and they think these are people that want to harm me and they have the power to do. So. Republicans and Democrats increasingly you their side as losing. And when you feel less powerful, you are more willing to excuse bad behavior of the others in the foxhole with you, you're more willing to do or accept whatever, whatever it will take for your side to win. And that's where we find ourselves today. And so that's why this race is so evenly divided because people across this country really feel set in their tribe and are concerned about what happens if the other side takes power. But then why does the race not move? Well, there are so few people who really don't know how they feel about all of this, that that's why this isn't moving very much so back in May, I wrote a piece about Donald Trump and why his brand image has remained so stable. And part of it is because he has been a factor in American life for decades. My entire time on this planet, Donald Trump has been a celebrity of some kind. And so it's important to keep that in mind when we look at those other races where the polls swung one way or another. It was because voters were still getting to know the candidates at the top of the ticket in this race. We have one anchoring force, Donald Trump who people know how they feel about him love him or hate him. And his views have been locked in place pretty strongly. Even as Kamala Harris has consolidated the views of Democrats has gotten more people within her own party to say that they think that she is a strong candidate and she can do well. But if her brand image is moving and Trump's isn't, then why isn't she decisively winning? Because there is a small but very significant portion of voters who do not like Donald Trump. But nevertheless, say they intend to vote for him. I call these voters the begrudging Trump voters. Again, it's about 7% of them. And they say I don't not like him, but it doesn't matter. I had a focus group where I talked to one voter. She was a moderate former Republican voter in Pennsylvania, but she still said she planned to vote for Donald Trump anyways. And I asked her why. And she said if I go to the doctor and I need heart surgery, I don't care if I don't like the heart surgeon, I just want him to do a good job. And in her view, she thought that Donald Trump would do a good job on the issues that mattered to her. There are a lot of voters going to the polls this year who do not like the candidates that they have on offer, but are nevertheless of the mind that this is an election with enormously high stakes and they're going to participate. So I'll leave you then with one voter who really doesn't like the options available to her either, but has nevertheless decided to vote for Kamala Harris. I don't know if this will resonate with any of you in this room. But this was from a focus group. I did for the New York Times back just a few weeks ago. This respondent, her name is Kay. She's 61. She was a Biden voter in 2020 she said I voted for Biden because I thought he was a little bit more than the lesser of two evils. Harris. I just don't know enough about her, but I don't think Trump can string five words together to make a sentence. He's a global embarrassment. Everybody says if I don't vote, it's a vote for Trump. So I guess I have to vote. I'm not going to love it. I'm not going to enjoy it. I'm not going to have fun. There might be wine afterwards. I wish I could tell you the answer to what will happen in this election. But statistically I can't, the polls are simply too close. All I can do is tell you to be prepared for anything. Thank you.