Polls in One Place!

It's Groundhog Day.

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1. John Heilemann is the co-author (with Mark Halperin) of two best-selling campaign books, a MSNBC contributor and the latest addition to the editorial team at Puck.news, for which he does a weekly column and a savvy podcast about politics (mostly).

John was, until recently, one of the co-hosts of “The Circus”, a weekly program on Showtime that was riding the roller-coaster of the 2024 US presidential election. Showtime executives, faced with the prospect of covering an election that will draw the largest number of voters in the nation’s history, decided that no one was really interested and cancelled the program.

After a time, John’s column and podcast — “Impolitic, with John Heilemann” — were born.

A recent guest on Impolitic was Dan Pfeiffer, veteran Democratic Party political operative (probably) best known for his work on Barrack Obama’s presidential campaigns. If you’re interested in American politics, I highly recommend Dan’s Substack newsletter, “The Message Box.” It’s among the very best of the “Blue” Substacks.

What follows are (some of) Mr. Pfeiffer’s observations about the upcoming election and why it’s so hard to read.

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Dan Pfeiffer:

If you polled the press corps and most Democrats who are not working for the Harris-Walz campaign, 85 percent would say that Kamala Harris would win if the election were held today. If you ask the people who are actually deep in the numbers and paying really close attention to what’s happening in the battleground states, it’s closer to 50-50. And I think it’s very possible that if the election were held today, Trump would win……

When you dig into the battleground state poll numbers, they’re all toss-ups, every single one of them. There’s not a single battleground state poll where one of the candidates is up or down by more than two points, and most of them are tied, or at one point. And when you start doing the math of what happens if one of the candidates does not win Pennsylvania, it all gets very complicated, very quickly……

The fact that Pennsylvania is harder than Wisconsin just speaks to the change in politics since 2020. Remember, Biden won Michigan by almost three points, Pennsylvania by one and a half, and he won Wisconsin by 0.6 percent. Wisconsin is the one that people keep waiting to tip over into Ohio land, because Trump has made gains with Black voters, younger men, and continues to hold his margin with white non-college-educated voters. 

Pennsylvania doesn’t have a particularly elastic electorate. We can’t go get a bunch of new voters, whereas Georgia has huge swaths of unregistered, very likely Democratic voters, Black voters, younger voters. There’s migration into Georgia from the rest of the South, from younger voters who profile as Democrats. And so Georgia has this growth pot, it’s growing in the right direction. 

But Pennsylvania is static. Harris is still struggling to reach Biden’s 2020 numbers with Black voters, both in terms of support and turnout—in Philly, in particular. Is Harris going to bleed some non-college-educated white voters, and can she make that up with non-college-educated white women because of abortion? This is the problem with these races. There’s no one simple thing you need: You need a little bit from every single pot, and all the pots are in Pennsylvania….

It’s hard, and it gets harder with a candidate like Trump, who is maxing out turnout in rural areas in Pennsylvania in ways Mitt Romney and John McCain certainly did not. Trump is netting more voters from that part of the state than any other Republican going back to basically Reagan. (Source: puck.news)

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