G Elliott Morris
@gelliottmorris
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editorial director of data analytics @abc news + 538. author of STRENGTH IN NUMBERS: how polls work and why we need them .
Joined July 2009
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this is not the type of off-year elections you'd expect with a democratic president at 39% approval. Just sayin
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progressive utopia ohio approves both legal weed and abortion protections tonight
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The “70% of Americans support a ban on abortion after 15 weeks” statistic I keep seeing quoted must be cherry picked or come from private issue polling. In all the surveys 538 has collected on this in 2023, the public is 51-41 against a federal 15-week ban
Life is the first of the unalienable rights. True leaders protect and progress Life rather than look or run the other way. Pro-lifers must lead with compassion, not judgment. A 15-week national standard for abortion is a concession, is common sense, and in line with the opinion…
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It looks like the "Uncommitted" percent in the Michigan Democratic primary is going to be ~2-3 percentage points higher than in 2012. I am sure everyone will cover this responsibly and nothing will get blown out of proportion!
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Broke: “Biden is the Democratic nominee because elites control party nominations”
Woke: “Biden is the nominee because nobody serious ran against him”
Bespoke: Biden is the nominee because he is popular among Democrats and delivered key policy wins for ideological moderates
what's more likely: the entire Dem political caucus is being controlled out of smoke rooms in DC, or that plenty of Dem Governors/Senators/Congressional Reps thought about running against Biden but decided against it because they polled it and realized they'd probably lose badly?
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SOTU addresses typically vanish from media diets & the public consciousness within a few days. But there are rare instances in history where they have moved the mark, usually via sustained favorable media attention. Early headlines suggest Biden may get a real boost from tonight
WASHINGTON (AP) — Biden, in feisty State of the Union address, hammers Republican lawmakers on immigration, tax policy and gun control.
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this sounds partisan to say but if you look at the political science research, perceived “charismatic leadership” of candidates is a key mediator of support — & probably more in primaries v general elections. That Ron DeSantis keeps making news for being cringeworthy is not good
Maybe the worse retail politician ever. Just brutal to watch
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biden is winning 400 electoral votes next year
WaPo Scoop: The IRS has built an e-filing prototype that could compete with tax-prep software giants with a pilot program coming in January (via
@jacobbogage
)
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Trump vs Clinton polling average on March 4, 2016: Clinton +12
In 2020, the final 538 polling average had Biden +8.4 pts, RCP average had Biden +7.2. Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 pts, but the Electoral College tipping point state by just 0.6 pts.
Eight months out, today’s 538 Biden approval: 39/56. Today’s RCP average: Trump +2.3.
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“If engagement on TikTok is any indication”
it is not
If engagement on TikTok is any indication, a Democratic presidential primary held today among people under 50 would result in a landslide for
@marwilliamson
, the bestselling author now making her second bid for the nomination.
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an alternative hypothesis: voters hate biden, but would vote for him anyway
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so, as they say... some personal news
Thrilled to welcome
@gelliottmorris
to the
@ABCPolitics
/
@FiveThirtyEight
team!
His interview with
@tedstew
on what's next in data journalism and election forecasting -
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Biden is now about even w/ Trump in national polls, and the swing-state averages are well within the uncertainty intervals from potential poll bias.
Are some people going to admit their "Biden is doomed, just look at the polls, he should step down" takes were perhaps premature?
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Robert F Kennedy Jr running for president as an independent is highly likely to eat away more votes from Trump than Biden
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Based on referendum results in Ohio, it looks like about ~20% of Trump voters are willing to cross party lines and vote for abortions protections when it's put up to a vote. If that doesn't convince GOP politicians not to run on this issue, I don't know what will
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Something to note about this number is that YouGov has more controls for partisan nonresponse than most (if not all?) other pollsters that have published surveys in the last month. YMMV & n=1 but to me suggests the race is more stable and more Biden than the conventional wisdom
2024 National GE:
Biden 45% (+5)
Trump 40%
.
@YouGovAmerica
/
@TheEconomist
, 1,293 RV, 9/23-26
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increasingly convinced that the index of consumer sentiment has become contaminated by partisanship and is not a useful measure of consumer psychology anymore (“not useful” in that it is a very weak predictor of aggregate spending and saving behavior)
The US has the fastest growth rate of any G7 country.
And the US has the lowest annual inflation of any G7 country.
And Americans hate it!
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Not sure I've seen someone make this comparison yet:
At this point in the 2008 election, McCain was leading Obama by a point and a half in in general election polls
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yesterday i spent $100 on chicken thighs, potatoes and a $90 bottle of whiskey. you don’t have to think that hard to figure out why people are upset at biden right now
I continue to be baffled at why these numbers look so grim for Biden when he's got a better legislative and administrative record than any single-term President in my life. How has messaging gotten so bad or ineffective all the sudden?
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Biden has had a few bad months in the polls and the press. Concerns about his age are not likely to disappear, but last night's speech is an example of how campaigns can shift media and voter attention to other issues. This was the real start of his general election campaign.
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pretty bleak picture for the GOP 10-20 years from now, unless the party changes its policy endorsements and messaging to shrink the gap in Gen Z/Millennial voting behavior
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the washington examiner reporting is not accurate. dealing with rasmussen is long overdue. we will have a story out on this soon and i won’t comment more until then.
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I do not think this is hard to grasp. "Republicans pick new Trump-endorsed MAGA Speaker, the most ideologically extreme in recent history — and increase odds of government shutdown next month" is a good headline for Democrats.
After Dems helped push Kevin McCarthy out of his speakership, it would interesting if they/we end up with a Speaker Jim Jordan—a man endorsed by Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump. Congrats?
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Biden has seen no State of the Union poll bump yet. In fact, today's updated approval rating average is a new all-time low
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so far dems look on track to hold the KY governorship and win both ballot measures in Ohio (though it's early). IF that happens it would fulfill 2/3 of my personal criteria for a "great" dem night (KY Gov, OH issue 1, & VA HoD)
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seems like a bad business move for a company that makes the vast majority of its money on ads?
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DeSantis's decline is pretty remarkable in terms of shifting public opinion. Losing support from 20% of Republicans is close to ~14 million people deciding they don't like you
(for the nerds) 2024 GOP primary polling aggregation in Stan (in-sample trends)
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not picking sides but i’ll just note there’s lots more conversation about this one single poll than the months of surveys with Biden up, albeit within the margin of error, that have been released this year
Buried lead from new WaPo/ABC poll: Trump,leads Biden by 7 (!) points, 49-42%, in general election matchup.
Will be generating quite the conversation at the White House.
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we are in a world where news consumers need to stop thinking of political polling as the science of survey sampling, as random draws of marbles from a bag, and more as complex models of statistical inference that rely on lots of assumptions and are prone to many types of error
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We know y'all have been waiting for polling averages and forecasts for Biden v Trump 2024. It takes a lot of work to make sure that everything is set up correctly, especially with a new model. So thanks for your patience.
Without further ado...
🥁
🥁
🥁
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My former colleagues at The Economist have Biden polling ahead of Trump now for the first time since September 2023. My own average is not so optimistic, but it's clear Biden has gained ground over the last few weeks
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this might be a contrarian opinion in some circles now, but my hard prior is that getting indicted for federal crimes is not good for one's odds of winning an election, regardless of who you are
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New QPac poll has independents 20 points in favor of prosecuting Trump for charges around the 2020 election
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hindsight bias etc etc but the decline and fall of ron desantis was one of the easiest political predictions ever and if you didn’t see that coming i dunno what to tell you
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thank you but i am not a “guru” i am a journalist
With Nate Silver Exiting, ABC News Finds Its Next Data Guru in G. Elliott Morris
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Biden +12 in New Hampshire is not exactly consistent with the current national polling. Closer, in fact, to what we’re seeing in specials
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The big problem for DeSantis is that his backers + staff are disproportionately educated, politically active, & terminally online relative to the avg GOP primary voter. We saw this early in polling crosstabs and he has not managed to expand his appeal (quite the opposite in fact)
“DeSantis now faces a troubling reality: the more people see of him, the less they seem to like him”.
Huh. With videos like this being boosted by his campaign, I can’t imagine why.
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reminder that the sample sizes for these subgroups are often in the double or single digits
2.
@TheAtlantic
: In last decade, “Young single men have been moving to the right, even as their female peers have been moving even further left.”
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huge news for the nikki haley campaign. now she’s only down 47 points
With all necessary caveats about confidence intervals and there being multiple ways to calculate an average: Nikki Haley has now pulled ahead of Ron DeSantis for 2nd place in 538's national GOP primary polling average:
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the r^2 between presidential polls in march and actual vote outcomes in november is 0.25
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Just one poll, but it should be a strobing warning light for Democrats about the ongoing impacts of the Brahminization of their party’s image and the real depth of the appeal of Trump-style auth-right populism to Black and Hispanic working-class voters
To the extent the poll shows a tighter race than '24, it mainly seems to do so because of additional Trump gains among men, Black, Hispanic and low income/less educated voters.
We've seen signs of many of these trends before
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My take: Biden has surprisingly good odds of winning in 2024
We did a pod in March on whether Biden should run again, featuring
@chowardchoward
,
@imkahloon
,
@gelliottmorris
and
@JBennet
Elliott made a good point that Biden's approval ratings are not actually that bad compared with other incumbent presidents
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we are now comfortably in silly territory with these youth voter crosstabs
The just-released Fox poll has Biden only up 71-26% with Black voters and Trump up 58-40% with voters under the age of 30:
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Two points...
(a) Don't compare the turnout in Michigan tonight to turnout in 2012. The electoral rules have changed since and it is much easier now for people to participate.
(b) Definitely don't compare raw votes for a candidate while ignoring the overall change in turnout
Uncommitted vote in Michigan — at 24K — already surpassing last three presidential election cycles on Dem side. And just 16 percent of vote in. Hearing from MI Dems who say Biden needs to pay more attention to state and the number is going to exceed what they thought it would be
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while every vote counts etc and there is entropy is smaller losses, all i can see on this map is how the electoral college effectively disenfranchises tens of millions of americans (those being the disaffected majority- and all minority-party voters in safe red and blue states)
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i’m not in the business of pronouncing which polls are “wrong” or “right,” but there is a spectrum of quality in pollsters’ methods — and these crosstabs show some real funky stuff going on. i would not put a lot of stock in the toplines of a poll w Biden tied among Black voters
🚨 NATIONAL POLL:
@premisedata
PRES:
(R) Trump 44% (+6)
(D) Biden 38%
.
(D) Biden 37% (+2)
(R) DeSantis 35%
——
GOP PRES:
Trump 61% (+49)
DeSantis 12%
Pence 6%
Haley 5%
Ramaswamy 5%
.
H2H:
Trump 66% (+42)
DeSantis 24%
——
1,387 RV (415 R's) | 8/30-9/5
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Robert F Kennedy Jr probably has a better chance of winning the 2024 Republican primary than he does of winning the general election
RFK Jr makes it official in Philadelphia: "I'm here today to declare myself an independent candidate for president of the United States.'
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4 polls released over the last week have the 2024 presidential race tied at a 2 point margin or lower for Trump or Biden. But it’s 400+ days before the election! If you do the math the predictive margin of error for these surveys is over 25 percentage points! Go touch some grass!
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Either we're seeing evidence of the biggest realignment in American politics in half a century, or survey measurement error exists
Disparities x age in last 2 MI polls are maddening:
Net 21 pt diff for younger voters; net 23 for older. Correcting either of these = new narrative.
Quinnipiac:
All: Trump +3
<35: Trump +5
65+: Biden +19
Emerson:
All: Trump +2
<29: Biden +16
60-69: Trump +4
70+: Biden +2
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FWIW I view the general election essentially as tilt/lean Biden right now. In my mind the probability he wins is relatively unchanged over the last 6 months; Much of the reporting about the GOP primary, Israel/Gaza/Hamas and Biden’s weakness with young voters has been noise.
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SCOOP/NEWS: Push for Youngkin 2024 now taking shape as donors and Rs grow alarmed. “Red Vest Retreat” Oct. 17-18 in VA Beach... Billionaire backer Peterffy assures me “money would be there.” Bill Barr telling him to put his “oar in.”
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also maybe we pour some cold water on the poll showing trump beating biden by 12 among voters under 40
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Seems important
Donald Trump’s polling lead over Joe Biden may be smaller than it looks. If you consider only the highest-quality polls, the Republican’s advantage melts away 📈
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Trump up 5, DeSantis down 9 since April NBC poll. The indictment does not appear to have hurt Trump among Republican voters — in fact if anything, it has helped!
New NBC New poll - '24 GOP WH
Trump 51%
DeSantis 22%
Pence 7%
Christie 5%
Haley 4%
Ramaswamy 3%
Scott 3%
Hutchinson 2%
---
General Election Match-ups
Biden 49%
Trump 45%
Biden 47%
DeSantis 47%
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one of the most important things to internalize about these early 2024 polls is that the vast majority of them show trump below his 2020 vote share (true for national & state polls). this is not trump improving his standing, it’s ambivalence from Ds/leaners pulling Biden down
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dropout watch
I'll be clear - if my campaign is not viable after March 5th, I'll wrap it up and endorse the likely nominee - Biden or otherwise.
I will then campaign for them as vigorously as I'm campaigning now.
I'm not here for games - the goal is to maximize the odds of beating Trump.
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huh. i thought polls were hopelessly broken relics of a bygone era and only old people on landlines who didn’t represent blue america answered the phone. but apparently now they’re believable. strange. i wonder what changed
New Politico/Morning Consult poll has Biden up 2, 45-43. In Feb Trump was up 4, so 6 pt shift towards Biden. Another sign election is changing, becoming bluer.
22 polls since late Feb show Biden leading, more details on recent movement below.
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Look, I'm not one to read too much into the voting patterns of the GOP primary; Trump is going to win something like 90-95% of Republican voters come November. But even if 10% of these suburban Haley voters don't turn out for him or vote Biden in Nov, that could be the difference
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new fulton county slogan: “where we take our time counting”
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after looking at the polls and our model coefficients i’ve reconsidered my gut reaction to Manchin not running. it probably makes only a small difference, maybe 5% max, to the chance Democrats hold the Senate after 2024. freeing up cash for Brown and Tester is also good for Ds
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Kenobi over Andor is a mistake
Emmy nominees for Best Limited Series:
• Obi-Wan Kenobi
• Beef
• Dahmer
• Fleishman is in Trouble
• Daisy Jones and the Six
See the full nominees list:
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it’s a sign of how vibes-based these markets are that Trump was ever 25 points ahead lol
Biden passes Trump in betting markets, with some momentum it seems
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these two charts are from the same poll. there are millions of biden disapprovers who would vote for him if the election were held today. when i talk about how presidential approval is a less predictive indicator than it used to be, this is why
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strong case for measurement error here. do we really believe that the young Dems who think “Biden supports killing children in Gaza” are going to vote for… the guy who moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, supports settlement annexation & called to ban Gaza by refugees after Oct?
If you need more evidence that polling at this point doesn't reflect how people would vote if the election were today, but rather a more complex view of the current electoral landscape, and how a poll response can be a form of protest disconnected from the consequences of a vote.
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the takeaways here are two-fold: 1) our institutions have failed us badly; politicians are acting the ways they are incentivized to, and only real electoral reform can dig us out of this hole. And 2), for many of the same and other reasons, the GOP has lost the ability to govern
🌙 A HOUSE IN CRISIS
JORDAN flames out spectacularly.
And NEWS: HASC, APPROPRIATIONS republicans forming coalition to BLOCK Jordan speakership.
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if you're writing Biden off based on the early general election polls, you're making a very big analytical mistake
leaving this chart out of a piece -- tweeting it here for you. at this point in the 1980 election, jimmy carter was polling at a vote margin of 14 points
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pick any other month. please
EXC: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is eyeing holding the UK’s next general election in November 2024 in order to allow the economy as much time as possible to recover before going to the polls
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he's baaaaaaack
Excited to unveil 538's tricked-out delegate tracker, designed by
@kemarriner
and
@bycoffe
!
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not a single young person in the audience
Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy told a group of young Republicans in Urbandale Thursday that raising the voting age will make American youth more patriotic and politically involved.
#iacaucus
via
@IowaCapDispatch
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what is the worst prediction on this map? for me it’s blue arkansas
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Not guaranteed to be predicted etc etc but Democrats are posting very impressive numbers in special elections so far this cycle (sound familiar?)
Republicans just won a special election in Wisconsin AD-24, in the Milwaukee suburbs, by 7 points. BUT the district has a partisan lean of R+23, so this is an impressive performance for Democrats.
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kansas 2020 election result: 42% biden 56 trump (-14)
kansas 2022 abortion referendum: 59% no (lib side) 41 yes (+18)
net difference: 32
ohio 2020 election result: 45% biden 53 trump (-8)
ohio 2023 amendment referendum: ~60% no (lib side) _40% yes (+20)
net difference: 28
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this is an idiotic waste of time and resources
Folks, are we seriously polling Michelle Obama now? Really?
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Trump is only up two points vs Biden in the average national poll. In every election since 1948 the polls have moved more than that between January and November!
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the last 48 hours serve as a good reminder that you do not need to post a take about everything
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Chris Christie coming in second in New Hampshire would have a good chance of killing Ron DeSantis’s campaign
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One way to think about this question in terms of general election implications: Trump is currently on track for a delegate victory somewhere between Jimmy Carter 1980 and George HW Bush 1992. Both of them lost in the general
So here’s a good (honest!) question for politics Twitter:
If Trump is “not doing well” in SC by winning “just” 60% of the vote, what would you expect for him if he were putting up the numbers he “should be”? And how’d you arrive at your forecast?
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Early exit poll (ymmv) in Ohio: 61 percent say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. 36 percent say it should be illegal in all or most cases
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all of these things are true:
a) individual polls are noisy
b) averages can be biased
c) opinion changes over time
d) trump has a very good shot at winning the electoral college if things don't change
e) you can caution people to not overinterpret polls while accepting (d)
Wise words from
@danpfeiffer
: "Instead of dismissing the polls, we should embrace the idea that Donald Trump can win this election. And then use that frightening notion to re-energize the anti-MAGA majority that delivered victories in 2018, 2019, 2022, 2022, and 2023. Telling…
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the point is not that polls are garbage. the point is that no candidate will ever have the same appeal as the option “someone else”
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My polling average has Biden up ~2 vs Trump for 2024. If you see something statistically different than that, it’s probably an outlier. Then it’s worth asking: Is this a pattern for this pollster? Do the subgroup estimates suggest nonresponse? Do other questions look reasonable?
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i strongly believe 18-30 yr olds would not actually vote for trump if the election were held today, as some polls show. but it would be very bad policy for pollsters to just not release numbers when they don’t “make sense.” better to think about why and do our jobs as journalists
Needs to be said - polls like this Suffolk/USA Today poll should not be released. It is literally impossible, given years of actual voting, for Biden to be trailing with young people and leading with seniors. These kind of polls misinform, not inform, and it needs to stop.
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biden approval is ticking up... and he's closing trump's deficit in the horse race polls
could be noise, but could be a bounce
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Not going to be a popular tweet but Democrats are losing insane ground on the messaging front if they’re losing support among bothth college-educated and low-income non-whites
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Here's my current thinking about a Biden primary challenge:
(1) It destroys the reputation of the challenger
(2) It turns a bunch of currently ambivalent Democrats into formal "losers" when they don't get their candidate
(3) But it could force a new VP pick
I don't think 3 > 2
A serious primary challenge could test and strengthen the president’s reelection campaign.
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is biden joking about getting blitzed? 400 electoral votes incoming
Post-speech exchange on C-SPAN:
JERRY NADLER: No one's gonna call you cognitively impaired now!
BIDEN: I kinda wish sometimes I was cognitively impaired.
(Am not joking about this, roll the tape.)
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The "Biden is too old and should step down" argument is ripe for bad punditry and overinterpretation of small data. Comparing polled candidate matchups ignores name recognition; using approval ratings ignores intra-party polarization; you have to wish-cast a convention, etc
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for the last 5 years i worked for a cosmopolitan, “anti-woke,” neoliberal british newsmagazine and was forbidden from telling you all how i really feel about things. now that i am unshackled i can finally speak my mind! at long last i proudly tweet: english beer tastes like piss
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tweeting bluntly... there is a philosophy among some pollsters that collecting fast, cheap, crap data is OK if you weight the hell out of it. this has been a weak value proposition over the last few elections, & my feeling is we're going to see a LOT of polls like that this year
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If I'm one of the second place candidates who just spent the last 3 months parading around Iowa, I'm wondering tonight: What was this all for?
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