Why You Shouldn't Panic About the Polls
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Welcome to a special episode of Pod Save America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. This is the first of four bonus pods I'll be hosting on Sundays in the lead up to the election.

These episodes will be focused on something that keeps us all up at night, polling. What's a good poll? What's a bad poll? And how can you tell the difference? If you like these episodes, I highly recommend you sign up to get my subscriber show, Polar Coaster, by subscribing to Friends of the Pod at crooked.com slash friends or through the Apple podcast feed. It's where we dig really deep into polling. It's a great way to support Crooked Media. And we have a 25% off discount for annual subscriptions right now.

In today's episode, I'll be talking with Kamala Harris' senior campaign advisor, David Plouffe, about the state of the race, the Harris campaign's targets in the last 30 days, and how the electoral map is shaping up. And then with ECHI's research partner, Carlos Odeo, to discuss the latest with the potentially most consequential vote of the entire election, the Latino vote. David Plouffe and I worked on the Obama campaign together. He was Obama's campaign manager in 2008. He was the first president of the United States to have a vote on the Latino vote.

He was senior advisor in the White House, and when he left, I took his old job. There is no one whose political instincts I trust more, so let's get into it. Here's David Plouffe. Dan Pfeiffer, always a privilege to talk politics with you. Okay, we are in the middle of a quadrennial tradition. It's October. There is panic in the streets. Axios today says the blue wall is crumbling. The vibes are everywhere. Every anxious Democrat in town is calling every political reporter in earshot to vet their concerns.

Where do you see the race right now and how has it changed, if at all, in the last couple of weeks? Well, Dan, I think from the time Kamala Harris became the nominee, we saw a lot of movement, you know, five, six points depending on the state. But what we've seen for the last few weeks and the data is consistent this week is basically a tied race in seven states. And I don't think that's going to change.

So, you know, I think it's 47-48 for each of us. I'd still rather be Kamala Harris than Donald Trump because I think she's got a slightly higher ceiling. I think she's got a better ability to win more of the undecideds based on who they are. And I think Donald Trump is much more reliant on first-time and infrequent voters this time. I think he's got a fragile mathematical foundation.

problem there. So you put all that together, but the reality is, you know, Donald Trump barely won in 16, but won barely lost in 20. He's a little stronger this time than he was last time. So he's going to get 48% of the vote. And so I know for all of us that want to see Kamala Harris win, we wish there was an easy pathway. That pathway does not exist.

This is basically going to come down to, you know, history would suggest it's not going to come down to several thousand votes in seven states, but it's going to come down to a very narrow margin. And so I think the question for people who've already done so much is,

quite frankly, is what else can be done? Because every ounce of effort spent by anybody, sharing content, making calls, making another donation, traveling to a battleground state matters because this thing is going to be decided on the margin. So I think the freak out is because there were a bunch of polls, I'd say in the last month that showed a lead for Kamala Harris that was not real. It's not what we were seeing. We've seen this thing basically be tied, let's say since mid-September.

So this is the race we have. It's the race we expected. I don't think it's going to open up for either candidate. I think it's going to be close all the way in. And I would just remind everybody, whether it's internal data or public data, you know, a poll that shows Donald Trump up 48-47 that then shows us up 48-47 is essentially the same thing. This thing's going to be decided on the margins in these few number of states.

That's very validating because that's like the core principle of this podcast is a poll that shows you up to and a poll that shows you down to shows the exact same thing, which is a very close winnable race. Let's talk about the persuadable voter universe, the undecideds. How big is that universe and who are those voters? It's not that big, but, you know, it's probably a true undecided. And let's be clear about that. That is people that we certainly believe they are going to vote.

And they yet have not decided between Harris and Trump. You know, that's like 4%. Then you have a little bit of soft Trump support, soft Harris support that I'm sure both campaigns are spending time on. Then you've got people who might be deciding between Harris and third party or Trump and third party.

or whether to vote at all. So you've got to treat them all as a unit, right? You've got to run a campaign to reach those undecideds and hope more of them in a tied race. If more of them fall to your side, that's a huge deal. And we think we can do that. And then you've got these other questions around, you know, turnout and third party. The third party number is going to be pretty low, but it's not going to be zero. So, you know, the question is in some of these states,

You might be able to win it at 49, but you might have to go closer to 49.5, 49.7. And in every state, it's a variety of people. This is not like there's one cohort. It's like most of the undecideds are suburban women between the ages of 40 and 60. You've got young, you've got black, you've got white, you've got brown, you've got non-college, college women.

So, from a campaign perspective, it's challenging because you've got a bunch of different types of voters who receive information in a bunch of different types of way that you've got to reach. And you want to be in their communities. You want to be in their social media feeds. You obviously want to do advertising. Hopefully, they'll see the candidate where, as you said,

have seen and have commented on where Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are going to go everywhere. There's an audience, basically, you know, of people that we think will be decisive in this election.

And, you know, I think in previous campaigns, sometimes you have a like a diverse group of people who make up your undecided universe, but you have a commonality in persuasive messages. Right. For us in 2012, it didn't matter whether we were trying to get Latino voters or rural white, white, rural, non-college educated white voters. It was the economic message is what brought them to the finish line for us. Do you have that here or are we sort of in a more fragmented space? We have a slightly different approach to each of these groups.

Well, the economy is at the top of the list, of course. And I think we've made big progress on that from when the race started in terms of people saying, who do you trust to look after people like you? Who has economic plans that will help people like me? We've, in some places, taken the lead on that. And we're down double digits. So economy is huge. And that's contrast. Trump's plan will raise taxes by $4,000. It'll blow up the deficit. It'll create inflation. And of course, it'll be targeted towards the wealthy. So that's very important.

Health care is important both from an economic lens because voters, as you know, look at it, you know, usually first and foremost through an economic lens and then a health care lens. So you've got Trump going to cost people a lot more money and also tens of millions of people lose coverage. Huge issue. Abortion is important to some of these voters, particularly on the turnout side. But there's also the character traits, which is, you know, who do you trust to be a strong leader?

You know, who's stable? And again, I think we've made huge progress in that regard. So, you know, the ads we're running this week, not solely because we're running a lot of different ads, a lot of different people, you know, have people who worked for Trump speaking about how unstable he is and how unfit he is. And we also have a bunch of, you know, military leaders and Republicans saying that Kamala Harris has the strength and judgment to be commander in chief. That's important part of the message.

You know, at the same time as you're driving economic contrast, health care contrast. And we're also at a point in the news, she does this in interviews. We still do it, you know, in some of her ads. You know, Trump is 100 percent universally known. Now, he's not it's not 100 percent universally known the damage he'll do to the country. We've got to remind people of that. But, you know, even things like Kamala Harris's biography, there are still some voters out there who will decide this election that aren't sure she was a prosecutor.

you know, that don't understand what she did there, don't understand her middle class upbringing. We've made a lot of progress there. So I think we filled in a lot of that circle. So, you know, I think that it's a bunch of different things. And with data, you have a sense of what messages matter the most. But it's not it's not just let's compare economic plans and values. That is, of course, at the top of the pyramid. But we've got to do these other things, too. And obviously, they're taking wax at us. So we have to make sure we're defending our flank where we see damage being done.

When you're looking at your internal polling, right, there are always certain character trait measures that you view are essentially correlated to victory.

Right. For us in previous campaigns, it's been fight for people like you, you know, working to increase jobs, to grow jobs or whatever it is. Are there a couple of things in there that that you guys are looking at that you want to share with us that are there you think are important to winning over that last group of persuadable voters? Well, that economic question is core for us to fighting for people like you. And is that fights for you as opposed to trust in the economy? Fights for you. You know, who will look after the middle class?

Who will offer ideas and plans that will help people like you and your family? So all those types of questions are important. And in many battleground states, we've actually taken a lead. Strong leaders are always important in a presidential race. This is not a legislative race.

And I think you always have to remember that, that strength. People, as they're making this decision, imagine you during crisis. Imagine you behind the Oval Office desk. And so that's certainly something we pay attention to. Some places where I think we entered the race with a big deficit on who's best on costs and inflation, on immigration, on crime. We've seen Kamala Harris make huge progress in those areas, but we'd like to make some more.

So, you know, but but but that like look after you fights for people like you is huge. And it's particularly important because Trump's out there saying, hey, I had the best economy in the history of the world. I'll just bring it back, which, of course, is bullshit and not true. But, you know, when you remind people that everything he's going to do is shower the tax cuts for the wealthy, you're going to pay for it. Middle class voter.

You are going to pay $4,000 more a year because he wants to talk tough on this tariff, doesn't know what he's doing, but you'll pay the price. You know, tens of millions of people lose health care coverage. That means everybody's going to pay more. These things matter. I guess the other thing I'd make on the strong leader thing, there's a really important part of this for Trump. And this is where your listeners can help share content, ads, interviews where Trump seems unstable because the argument is, listen, he's the oldest person ever to seek this office.

He's clearly not as stable as he was, and he wasn't particularly stable back then. He won't have anybody around him stopping him, okay? Like Laura Loomer, Marjorie Taylor Greene, these are the people he listens to. Project 2025 gives him no guardrails, and the goal here is sort of absolute and unchecked power, and that scares voters.

So when we think about, you know, messages against Trump, there's economic messages for sure about how he's going to screw working people and take care of the wealthy and hurt our overall economy. Like every economist who's looked at his plan says it will increase inflation, blow up the deficit and add cost to middle class people. It's like a trifecta of terribleness. Health care and abortion, clearly huge contrast. But this leadership thing about just imagine him

basically unstable, with no guardrails, with unchecked power, to not do anything to help you but to seek revenge is really, really important. Are we going to see more of that in your advertising? I know most of the ads to date have been positive about Kamala or just contrast on her bio, the economy, and some immigration stuff.

I know you have this ad running with Olivia Troy and some former Trump people that is related to sort of his response to the hurricane. Are we going to see more of that sort of like go big picture contrast with Trump on instability, sort of the larger, you know, because you sort of some of the advertising, and this is not a critique of it, but is could be run against a normal Republican. Trump's obviously not a normal Republican. Is there an effort to maybe raise the stakes down the stretch here?

Well, I think, you know, some of our most effective ads have been on abortion, have been on women's health care, have been on health care generally, the ACA. We ran a really important ad, I think, coming out of the debate on that that tested really well and got great response to it. And that's unique to Trump. What's interesting, of course, is most Republicans aren't talking about ripping up the ACA. This is kind of unique to Trump.

And since he tried to do it 60 times, we can believe he'll do it again. You know, we've got an ad on the air now with national security officials, you know, talking about his former national security advisors, his defense secretary's warning that he's not fit to lead, that he's unstable. So that'll be part of the argument. I think what you have to do is we all have to raise the risk of a Trump second term.

some of that's policy risk what he would do the economy some of that's on abortion nationwide abortion ban appointing more conservative supreme court justices ripping health care away from hundreds of millions of people in this country but it's also on this leadership and this character so that it'll be part of the mix going forward for sure when you and i used to work together you used to describe a presidential race as a series of governors races in the battleground states

Is that still how you see it? Even though politics is much more national now, there's not the local media is less important than it used to be. Trump clearly thinks it's national because he's doing events at Coachella and Madison Square Garden. But how do you sort of see that interplay between a localized race and the national political trends?

Well, sure, there's no borders anymore, or maybe never, but particularly now. But let's be clear, Trump's doing this. One, he's a New York guy at heart, and I'm sure he's always wanted to play the garden. Could be his last chance, I guess. Yeah, I'm sure there'll be echoes to what the famous rally that was held there in the mid-30s will see. But I think he's also starting to have pretty poor crowds.

In these battleground states. Interesting. So I think the act is getting a little tired in these states, so he's going out. So I think, you know, the way we look at it is that's why you do national interviews, whether it's, you know, Call Her Daddy or Stephen Colbert or other podcasts that we're going to do. Those are not based in battleground states. They reach battleground states. I think where it's a governor's race is your schedule has to be really smart. Your obviously operational organization has to be very intensive.

And then local media, particularly local television, still matters a great deal. So I think but it is particularly true around the operation. And it's hard because, you know, you're not running in one state. You're a national campaign. And even though there's been races historically where there was more battleground states, you

you know, there are seven. It's a lot. So you've got to make the doors you're knocking kind of the the ground game, the surrogate game. You know, you that all is still very state specific. But it's a presidential campaign as a blend of what happens nationally because voters tend to see big moments nationally and process them. But also they want to see you show up in their town and

you know, talking to local reporters. But more than anything else is to have people who represent your campaign in the community, knocking on doors, being out there trying to, you know, convince people to vote. So I think definitely the national overlay, that's always been the case. I think it has intensified with the way people get information. But I still think at the end of the day, listen, you know this, it's always humbling when you're a campaign professional, when you tell people how little the campaign matters. Meaning,

A good campaign is not going to turn a 54 or 46 loss into a win. It's impossible. But if you have the best campaign on the ground and you think you execute best against your goals, it can give you a half a point or a point, which of course this race very well could come down to. So that's what you're doing all this for basically. There's a lot of concern out there among folks about the possibility of another polling error where the polls are underestimating Trump support.

I mean, the public polls were way off in 2020, but even the Biden campaign polls where data was off in the sense that he was campaigning in Ohio and Iowa at the very end there. And those states ended up performing just like they did in 2016.

How are you guys thinking about that? Have you adjusted sort of your modeling or your polling to try to ensure you don't have a similar situation this time? Right. So I'd say I wasn't part of the campaign in 20, neither were you. But I think their data was much better than the public polls. That's why they weren't going to Florida and Texas, for instance. Right. Because they didn't see a pathway, even though public polls were suggesting that it was essentially tied. Right.

So we spent a lot of time on this. I think what you the lesson you'll learn, because, of course, you know, Republicans were their strength was overrated in 2022. 18 was probably a blend. So I think what you want to do is make sure that you're being very conservative. And I think we are.

So I don't think we're sitting here with internal data showing a really tight race where we'd rather be us than Trump. And it's based on undercounting either his vote share among certain demographics or his turnout. I think we've all learned that lesson. So but I'd say a couple of things. One is I think Kamala Harris may surprise at the end of the day with either straight up Republicans or independents who are essentially Republicans. We're seeing continued strength there.

Um, and that matters a great deal given how big those cohorts are. So, you know, and we're being conservative there as well. We're not overstating our numbers internally, but I think you see the leading edge of things that could be quite positive. And then again, I think Trump is just incredibly reliant on voters who've either never voted before, haven't voted in a long time, never voted Republican. So, you know, that's a big challenge.

Um, you know, as we look at the race, we, we give him credit for doing a good job there because my view on Trump basically to break it down is, you know, if you think he's going to get a hundred votes in a precinct, you probably just assume he gets 110. So you can win a race where he overperforms. So I really can't speak to the public polls. I spend very little time looking at them. I, as I know you do, I just don't. And most of them are horseshit.

Um, you know, some of them may be close, but generally I'd say any poll that shows Kamala Harris up four to five points in one of these seven states, ignore it. Any point that shows Donald Trump up like that, ignore it. This thing's very close. It's a margin of error race. Uh, but again, I'd rather be us than him because I think we, uh, have the ability to get to 49 and a half or 50, uh, a much more confident about that than Donald Trump, but it's going to be close all the way in. So I think we're doing what we can to, uh, to be conservative. Yeah.

in the data. And obviously, you know, we're a campaign that has a bunch of different sources of data as we did in the Obama days. You know, you have traditional polling where traditional pollsters are calling, you know, six or 800 people. Some of that's calling, some of that's online panels, but we're also doing the larger data sets, you know, where you have a larger amount of respondents. And

And that's always good because not only do you have a little more confidence in the overall numbers, but then you've got enough respondents so you can really look under the hood at different ethnicities, different age, education, to make sure that we think all that makes sense. But listen, I think it may be that our internal data is exactly right.

But if I were to hazard a guess, I think it may be undercounting her strength amongst Republican-leaning independents. So we won't put that in the bank, but let's hope that's right. Are you guys projecting turnout at around 2020 levels? And do you think the electorate looks similar? I guess that's sort of been the baseline everyone's using is 2020 was almost essentially a tie race. You lose a point with one group from Biden's 2020 numbers, then you're losing. And if you gain a point, then you're ahead.

But obviously a lot changes in four years, and this was a pretty tumultuous four years. And we have obviously a very different candidate in Kamala Harris. How much is the electorate the same or different, do you think, from 2020 in terms of turnout and composition? Obviously, you'll have more younger voters as a percentage of it, just as people age into the electorate and people age out of the electorate. But I think that turnout is the hardest thing for any campaign to predict.

So, obviously, you've got historical data, you've got polling, so you're asking people whether they're going to vote or not. You draw some conclusions based on that. We're beginning to get early vote data in, who's requested ballots, who sent them back in. In a lot of states, within 10, 12 days, we'll have people voting in person early. So that's really when you begin to get a sense of how many people who are first-time voters are showing up in that early vote universe.

How many of them, you know, didn't vote in 20? How many of them are people who voted in 20 but not in 22? So I think right now our assumption is it's going to be, you know, in the 2020 range. Obviously, in the Biden Trump race, I think the belief is it would have been a lot lower, maybe as low as 140 million.

This is a more interesting race to people. I think that Kamala Harris has created a lot of energy on our side. The enthusiasm gap has obviously been eroded that Trump had in 2024 1.0 campaign. But as we look at it, obviously, we're trying to make sure that what would it take to win if national turnout's 145, 150, 155, 160, 162.

And again, the one thing that I think is pretty constant, and I think most observers of this would agree, sort of neutral observers, there are a handful that you could really trust to have

smart, both data and take on this, is his sort of base of foundation is built on a rickety element, which is all of these people who don't have vote history, who may say in a poll they're going to vote. But as you and I know, that's the toughest thing to do in politics, is to get that cohort all the way through the funnel. You know, it's weird hearing you and I have this conversation about Trump because this is the argument people made against Obama in 08.

But the difference here is we, and you in particular, understood that and then built a massive field operation to account for that challenge. And that's something that, based on all the reports, Trump has not done. No, it's a very decentralized. And listen, we believe in empowering people, right? So if people want to go and organize on their own, that's amazing. But I do think it's pretty light given where this race stands, which is he cannot win.

unless he does, I think, a pretty extraordinary job of turning out that cohort. Now, we obviously have, maybe we're less reliant on that, but it's still incredibly important. Obviously, we've got massive turnout needs and challenges in our base.

um, you know, of every, you know, type of voter and, and got to max that out. So, um, but, but we like what we're seeing in the early vote data so far. We particularly like what we're not seeing on the Trump data, which is there's not an army of kind of incels showing up in early votes in their voting history. So, uh, you know, maybe they'll show up on election day. We'll see. But, but so far there's not a leading edge that, uh, that's something crazy as a foot there.

Last question for you. Harris campaign has pushed really hard for a debate. You accepted debates. You challenged him to debates. Last night, Trump said he was not doing a debate. He has also, as of the recording of this, not yet accepted the CNN town hall. Just what's your reaction to his refusal to debate and how, if at all, does it affect your campaign strategy going forward?

Well, Dan, I could spend three hours talking about what's going on here with the psychology. I mean, I think what's clear is his campaign know what's happening. They knew what happened in the first debate. They don't want him to debate again. I also think they see his rallies, which are like a disaster.

And, you know, what's interesting to me is, you know, we've used some of his rally footage and ads. We'll do more of that. But when we do particularly qualitative research with swing voters or voters that aren't sure if they're going to vote, a lot of this stuff, you know, they see it. That's the world we live in. Right. Somebody shares some crazy thing he said. Like, by the way, the thing he said that, you know, Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala Harris was born that way. A lot of voters saw it and a lot of voters didn't like it.

That speaks to the both lack of character and instability. So I think his campaign sees how he's performing, yes, on the debate stage, but around that they want to keep him off.

I think whether he generally believes he won the debate or not, I tend to think he's convinced himself he did. There's got to be in some, you know, the dark addled recesses of that brain, some kind of subconscious understanding that he doesn't want to get humiliated again. So I'm not even sure he'll do the CNN debate. He's rescheduled Univision for next week. Kamala Harris is doing it. We're talking on Thursday today from Nevada.

We'll see. I wouldn't be surprised if he bails on that. I mean, he might just want to stay basically in his safe space from now to the end. But we're going to, you know, we're, you know, as you've seen, you've commented about this very smartly, like the world has changed the way you reach voters, even from when we work together has changed a lot.

Uh, and you know, some of that's direct interaction. Some of that's putting out content that maybe people who worked in politics in the 1980s don't understand, but somebody who's a 22 year old likes and will share and we use it to get motivated. So we're going to keep doing that. Um, and you know, we've had an active week this week. Uh, they'll keep building on that just to reach these voters because there are, you know, people who generally know they're going to vote, they have a plan to vote, right?

And people who've decided who to vote, they're probably going to vote earlier. They have checked into the race for months. But this last group of people who aren't sure whether they're going to vote or who they're going to vote for, the delta between what they know about this race and positions and Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and the rest of the electorate is pretty far. They see stuff.

So we want to make sure that we're in their feeds or we're in their podcasts or, you know, we're advertising in smart ways so that at that moment where they be making a decision about whether to vote or who to vote for, we're putting our best foot forward. And obviously the ground game is part of that as well. Trusted people from the community making the case is incredibly important. So I, you know, I think that we're not going to get the debate with Donald Trump, I don't think.

So that moment is not going to be there. So we can bemoan that or we can just deal with it like adults and say, okay,

What's plan B? And plan B is, I think, to be everywhere we can in smart ways and make the case about who would be a better president for the next four years. Because that's really where voters are. I mean, Bill Clinton famously said elections are about the future. And they are. And I think we've got a decisive advantage on who do people think has best plans for the future. By the way, who understands the future?

who would be a more stable leader on women's health care, massive advantage on health care, generally massive advantage on some of these economic questions around fighting for like you advantage. So we just got to continue to press that case. But Democrats and those that are helping because this is a big coalition, Democrats, independents, Republicans, people you and I used to square off with are in the tent now. This is going to be really close. I mean, Donald Trump's going to get 48 percent of the vote everywhere, maybe 48 and a half.

We just got to get more than that. And I think we've got a plan and an ability and a candidate to do that. But that's just the reality. I think we'd all like it to be easier than it is, but it's not going to be. That's not the country we live in. It's very divided. And Trump obviously has some appeal that other Republican candidates don't have. He also has some weaknesses that we're exploiting, you know, I think particularly with suburban voters and suburban women.

David, Plouffe, great to talk to you. Good luck out there. It's going to be a crazy few weeks and it was great to hear what you had to say here. Go Sixers, Pfeiffer. We're going to take a quick break, but before that, I've got an ask. If you're listening to this podcast, you're already supporting the work we do here at Crooked Media. So thank you for that. Crooked's mission is to create an honest conversation about news politics in the world around us.

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Carlos Odio is a co-founder of Equis Research, a firm that specializes in tracking the Latino vote. With new polling from the New York Times on Latino vote coming out this week and Kamala Harris doing a Univision town hall this past Thursday, there's no one I wanted to talk to more about the state of Latino vote than Carlos. Carlos Odio, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? Doing great. As well as one could, given that where we are in the election, you know, early voting started in Arizona yesterday. So I feel like I'm doing well.

relative to circumstances. I mean, that's really all you can ask for these days because I've talked to a lot of people who are not doing great. So that is good. Every hopefully thoughtful conversation about the Latino vote must begin with the stipulation that the Latino vote is not a monolith. It is incredibly diverse. People with different backgrounds, ideological preferences, different family histories, geographic diversity, etc.,

And so we're going to stipulate that for a second. But when you were on The Wilderness with Jon Favreau a few months ago, which now I think feels like an eternity ago, given we had a different candidate back then, I'm pretty sure. You said something that I thought was a good way to set the table for this conversation, which is Latinos are not a monolith, but they are a group. Can you maybe explain what that means?

Absolutely. So there are great divisions within the Latino electorate and great part because, you know, the Latino community is really a political project. You know, when you are living in your own life, you tend to identify based on your own nationality, you know, especially if you grow up a place that is very Latino like Los Angeles or parts of Texas or Miami like I did or in New York where, you know, I grew up saying I'm Cuban and your friend would say they were Colombian or they were Mexican or what have you.

But the rest of American politics and society tends to put you in this one bucket and you learn quickly where you fit. It's kind of the high school cafeteria metaphor we use, which is you walk in and you say, well, I don't sit at that table. I don't sit at that table. I guess I sit with these kids. And so but there are great divisions that are based on country of origin, based on geography, based on language that you speak. Some people have been in this country for 13 generations. Some are millennials.

are immigrants or the children of immigrants. And yet the movement we have seen in the Trump era cuts across all of those divisions because there is still a commonality in terms of how you are perceived in this country and that's how you perceive yourself and your interests in the context of an election. And that movement, when it cuts across, is it cutting across on educational lines, ideological lines? Help us unpack that.

Excellent question, because I do think there's a little bit of a square peg round hole or whichever way that goes happening here when it comes to education, because education is such a meaningful cleavage among white voters, non-college white, college white worlds apart that people now try to apply it in the non-white context.

And to some extent it works, but not for the reasons people think. At least 70% of registered Latinos are non-college. Among the population overall, it's something like 85%.

It is such a large chunk of the electorate that it obscures anything that's happening underneath. The reality is if you don't have a college education, you're less likely to be partisan. You're less likely to be following politics or very aware of the ins and outs of politics in a way that the swingy voters live in the non-college bucket.

So you would expect them to be the first to move. Whether that's about class or not is a separate question. Some part of it is about class, but it hurts the conversation to oversimplify. Ideology in some ways is way more interesting because a lot of what we saw in 2020 was conservatives essentially going back to their or for the first time to their true quote unquote political home.

You know, where racial polarization comes into play is that you have Latinos, black voters, API voters who identify as conservative but couldn't vote for Republicans, didn't feel like they belonged with the Republican Party and were voting for Democrats because they thought Democrats were looking out better for their interests. That's still, by the way, the case today, even after movement. And yet those were the first people to move or people whose ideology and vote choice had previously not matched. But now we're moving toward Donald Trump.

Were some of these folks were people who were identified as conservative but were voting for Democrats because voting for a Republican was a bridge too far? Or were some of them people who were conservative-identifying Latinos who simply weren't voting because they could not bring themselves to vote for a Republican? Aha, that's the right question. It's both. You had some who were voting with Democrats. It was basically socially unacceptable to vote for Republicans.

And so many of them did vote for, especially in the Obama years, voted for Barack Obama. Many voted for Hillary Clinton, but many others sat it out.

Couldn't vote for the Republican but couldn't also stomach voting for the Democrat either and it's a lot of those who Trump appeals to and so one of the big questions as far as where the Latino vote falls is whether some of the more Trumpian element among an irregular voting Latino Actually turns out for Donald Trump in the way a white working-class male Trump voter came out of the woodwork in a 16 or a 20, you know, I should say

Today, still, about 25% of conservative Latinos are still voting for Kamala Harris. That's a big chunk. That said, for Biden, it was probably 35% of conservative Latinos. And then in past elections, it was higher than that. And so we do see some of the erosion. And a big part of that is, though, the open question of who at the end of the day turns out or doesn't. That's where a lot of the dynamism is coming from in this election.

So Hillary Clinton did very well historically with Latinos. Donald Trump then does incredibly well for a Republican. He makes gains over those four years.

What have you found as to what he did over that four-year period when I think the general sense was he had these cruel and racist immigration policies, he said horribly racist things, identified with Nazis, all these things that you would on paper at least suspect would further polarize the Latino vote against him, but it worked in the exact opposite direction. So help unpack that mystery for us.

Yeah. So and the way to understand this is you have Hillary Clinton gets per catalyst 71 percent of the Latino vote in 2016. So you have 71, 29. You then have this change to Biden where it's 62, 38. Right. So Trump goes from 29 to 38 percent. Where we find ourselves today, if the election were today, is that it would probably be

closer to 60-40. We're kind of hovering around 60-40. One of the big questions we can talk about is whether Trump crosses the 40% line or falls below it. That's kind of the game of inches that's getting played right now. But, you know, to an earlier point you made, all we're going to be debating right now is essentially about somewhere between 3% and 8% of Latinos.

Of course, this is what you sign up for when you talk about elections. We're talking about a very small sliver of voters, but they're the ones who are most critical to election results at the end of the day. They are also the ones among whom polling is least equipped to give us a very accurate read at any given point. I wanted to contextualize that we're talking about a small number of people at the end of the day. What Trump did well, so to speak, between those years is you had a set of factors here. The biggest was that the economy collapsed.

came to overwhelm all other considerations. COVID was a very, very big factor here. So in the midst of COVID, people's priorities shifted. I described a kind of conservative Latino who in the past couldn't bring themselves to vote for a Republican, who at the end of the day said, well, all these concerns I have, I'm going to put them aside because if my one consideration is

who is going to be better for me and my family when it comes to the economy, then for this one set of sliver of economically conservative Latinos, Donald Trump was the answer. An election was going to be a referendum on who is better for the economy. Trump, the businessman, whose businessman persona still carried a lot of appeal, still does today.

was going to win out at the end of the day. And that's essentially what you saw happen. And I think to some extent, we are still dealing with the repercussions of COVID era politics. A lot of what we saw were conservative Latinos were most approving of the Trump agenda was in quote unquote reopening the economy, concerns that Biden was going to shut things down.

was in living without fear of COVID. And so that dynamic that you saw play out most dramatically in Florida, you see some aspects of it also in a place like Nevada, where you have an economy dependent on the service industry, on tourism, that was rocked so heavily in the midst of the pandemic.

That's a great answer. I mean, this is obviously one of the great political questions of our time for to figure out for sociological reasons, but also for Democrats to figure out how we reverse these trends, because as you and I have talked about before, the math for winning 207 electoral votes gets really hard if these numbers keep moving even a few points in the wrong direction. Right. We run out. We run out of voters. And actually, the way to understand that is if you took all of the same dynamics from Arizona in 2020,

The electorate stays the same in terms of who votes, in terms of support levels. And you drop Latino support by one point, Joe Biden loses Arizona in 2020. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the margins are so narrow. And then if you were losing voters with the fastest growing population in states, that is not a game you want to play, right? It's how we went from great optimism about Texas to...

less optimist about Texas these days. You know, coming out of 2012 and 2016, Texas seemed like it was on an inexorable path towards being a blue state. And it's been it's in the same place for the last couple elections because we're losing ground with the fastest growing group of voters. But let's let's get back to the overall numbers here, because you as you said, and I assume this is what you guys are seeing, you're pulling that Kamala Harris is sort of right around or at least maybe in spitting distance of Biden's 2020 numbers. Is that right?

She's just a few points shy. That's right. Yeah. And so she's got to make up those points or find other voters somewhere else, basically. That's right. Biden was essentially 62-38 in an average of polls over the last month. You're looking at 57-38. Yeah. Our poll was 54-38. So, you know, in both cases, you have Harris struggling to get past 62.

Trump's struggling to get past 40, but it's shrunken down to where it's a game of these last few inches. You're seeing a lot of stability otherwise, except for this last little morsel of the electorate that's left. Do you have a sense of who that last morsel is? Yes. So it is slightly more male, but not

in a way that is overwhelming, I would say. And I should say that the number of undecideds is small and has stayed small. We also include when we talk about persuadable voters, people who have chosen a side but don't seem entirely set, which still only gets you to 7% to 8% of registered Latinos. So we're talking a small piece here. They do tend to be more married than the electorate overall. It gives you an indication, actually, like some of the most movement we've seen has been with voters who are 30 to 49.

So it's exactly the kind of voter who was around in the Obama years that didn't get pulled off the sidelines in those elections. And so people who are kind of stuck in the middle, they do actually tend to speak Spanish more in the overall electorate, despite some stereotypes to the opposite. They tend to consume media more in Spanish. They tend to be getting news from YouTube more than the electorate overall. So it's not a clear profile other than to say it's kind of the least partisan element of the electorate. It's who you would expect would be

would be persuadable in this moment in time. This is pretty close to the remaining undecided group of white voters, black voters, young voters. That's sort of what we're fighting over, right? People who get their news from YouTube. That's what we're fighting over right now. The people we talk to least. Yeah, that's right. It's like the great paradox, right? Like the people we most need to talk to are the ones that are hardest to talk to. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. Introducing Instagram teen accounts.

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You know, in 2022, we saw sort of a split in how the quote-unquote battleground states performed, like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia. And then, you know, what we saw in California and New York. And I'm speaking broadly, not just Latino vote here, where we saw Democratic underperformance. Are you seeing any differences between Latino engagement or performance in sort of not just Arizona and Nevada, but also the pockets of Latinos in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin? Yeah.

than in sort of the broader national electorate? - There is always state variation. So when I give these national numbers, of course, some states are a little bit above that line, some are below that line. Also what Harris needs to win in those states is gonna differ. So again, Arizona, the margins are much tighter, can't afford to lose very much. Whereas in Nevada, because of a changing electorate, there's more wiggle room.

But largely speaking, though, it's not in the polling, at least what the dynamic we saw in 2022, meaning the movement does seem to shift up and down kind of evenly. Even I should say in Florida, even though the levels in Florida are much worse for Democrats, the in-cycle movement has been equivalent to what we're seeing everywhere else. What are the best messages that Democrats should be using with this last group of Latino voters here?

From our last poll, there was this dynamic that I think is so fascinating, and you've seen it bear out in other polling more broadly for the electorate. When you ask who is better for the U.S. economy among Latino voters in battleground states, Trump has a three-point advantage. Generically speaking, Trump the businessman still is trusted better on the economy. When you ask who is better for middle and working class families, it's plus 21 Harris.

When you ask who cares more about people like you, it's plus 26 Harris. And so there is this tug of war, right, where if it's a generic question of who I think is going to be better on the economy, Trump has a little bit of advantage. When you bring it down and ground it in specific people, is he going to think about you when it comes time to make decisions? You see Harris's advantage open up or get exploited.

And so, you know, a lot of this is not a mystery. A lot of this is not rocket science, frankly. It's like a lot of blocking and tackling, Dan, that we've always been talking about. Her economic agenda is very popular, even among the Latinos who say that Trump would be better on the economy. Majorities of people who say Trump would be better on the economy

strongly support all of her main planks of her opportunity agenda, whether it's expanding child tax credits, whether it's expanded opportunities for first-time homeowners, whether it's expanded childcare, all incredibly popular, even among people who think generically that Trump would be better. So a lot of this is just about reassuring voters who have frankly been rocked by rising prices that Harris gets it, that Harris is going to be fighting for them.

that she's not some loony radical who's out of touch with their lives and their priorities.

And so a lot of that is just for showing up, frankly. Where does immigration fit in this, right? Trump's running on mass deportation. He's threatening to pull TPS status from people who are in this country legally, wants to shut down the border. The common, I think, largely naive narrative is that would be very bad in the Latino community, but that would seem much more complicated than that. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the interplay of immigration, border security, comprehensive immigration reform, and the overall Latino vote.

Yeah, look, Latinos, like all Americans, want order at the border. There was this period of time in the midst of the Biden term where it felt like we were getting rocked by crisis after crisis. It was rising prices. It was the border, as it was depicted in the news, you know, migrants arriving in big cities. You had wars breaking out all over the place. And then a sense, whether fair or not, that Biden did not have the vitality

to handle these crises. And so in that context, the border was very damaging among a conservative kind of Latino. I think the Harris campaign has run an actually a very good Latino campaign. They have run a very smart Latino outreach effort. If there's one thing I think it's missing, it is the contrast on the other side of immigration. They've done a good job on the border piece in the sense of saying, well, look, we had a bipartisan border bill and Trump killed it. He's not actually looking for solutions.

But there is this contrast on what do you do about somebody who has been here 20 years and is married to an American citizen and American kids that has been entirely absent from the debate.

And literally from the debates, you know, they get asked about the border and it hasn't come up. And in the broader campaign and in the ad traffic that you've seen to date, you know, there's a big difference in how the campaigns would treat someone who has been living and working here for decades. The Harris and Biden proposal was to keep families together. The Trump proposal is to deport those very same people. It is an incredible contrast, by the way, moves even non-Latinos.

Because again, it speaks to a different part of immigration that speaks to democratic strengths. And so people like a balanced both and approach to immigration. Ideally, that would be part of the conversation because it does bring back some of the traditional partisan lines, the lines in the sand that we saw among Latinos.

This is something I've been mystified by because the polling on it seems actually pretty clear that when you raise the stakes, you make it about solving the whole problem. We have advantages. When you focus on just the border, you're only playing defense, right? And you're playing on their territory. We're going to lose a fight on the border. Yeah, that's right. We're never going to win a fight on the border alone. Yeah. And so I just, I'm thoroughly mystified by why they would do it. Can you fathom any reason in polling you've seen about why you wouldn't

Is there a fear about backlash with white voters or whatever it is that would keep you from talking about a broader, like protecting the dreamers, keeping families together, going back to essentially the Obama era message on immigration reform? Man, I don't know. I'll be honest. I think it's straight up fear.

You know, I do think there were some polls that showed there was high support for, quote unquote, mass deportation. Yeah. But man, just just just dig one step deeper. And you can look at the fact that when you ask me is mass deportation in this moment, people literally assume you mean get the border under control. Like people who arrived yesterday. And there is a difference in how Latinos and Americans more broadly perceive someone who just arrived versus someone who has been in this community a very long time.

Right. And the kids, right? And the kids, the dreamers. If you ask, do you think we should deport all immigrants? There's actually 39% of Latinos in that poll support a expanded deportation program. When you ask, should we protect and put spouses of American citizens on a pathway to citizenship? Only 8% oppose. When you ask, should we put dreamers on a pathway to citizenship? Only 13% oppose.

So, you know, again, so much of winning is about picking the right fights, as Dan, you yourself say so well. You cannot be reactionary. You have to pick the fights that benefit you, and you can't allow the other side to reframe it, whether that's on the economy. We can't debate the economy more broadly. Democrats have to be fighting about prescription drug prices.

They have to be fighting about specifics of the economy. And similarly on immigration, you can't debate the border as this impossible problem, but specifics. What would you do about this particular family? What would you do about this specific kid? Because that's where they have advantages.

Before I let you go, I do have to ask you about your native state of Florida. And the New York Times had a poll out this week. Sorry, sorry, I got to do it. We have to make some progress in Florida. We can't just write the thing off. Agreed. So the New York Times had a poll out this week that had Trump up 13 in Florida. And that's obviously a big outlier from what the averages have been. The

The argument that the New York Times makes for some pretty esoteric reasons I won't get into, but is that there has been a dramatic shift in the state since 2020. You can see evidence of that in the 2022 results. Where do you see Florida right now? So... Sorry. Sorry. No, no, listen. Here's the challenge. Florida didn't really stop being a purple state. The national...

decision by Democrats to walk away from Florida. Starting in 2020, right? In 2020, actually, Florida was outsourced to Michael Bloomberg. The Biden campaign didn't itself run a campaign in Florida at the scale that a presidential normally would. In 2022, there was no national investment in Florida. It was gone, absolutely. And then obviously, you're seeing something similar in 2024. That's a money calculation. That's just Florida's expensive.

expensive for the fact that it is so tricky. And oftentimes the rug gets slipped out from under Democrats' feet in a state like Florida, right? But it's still purple. The dynamics of it are still so. But if you don't show up and you don't play in it, of course, you're going to get a result that is worse than average. So I think

In everything I have seen, there was a little bit of reversion to what we were seeing in 2020. I understand the Nate Cohn, New York Times esoteric argument about waiting on pass vote. We don't have to get into that here. But Nate Cohn has very good reasons that he doesn't wait to pass vote.

And yet what we kind of want to understand is difference from 2020 and how much defection there has been in addition to changes in the composition of electorate. We can look at the composition of the electorate with things like the voter file and understand how much has changed. But you also want to understand how people who voted a certain way in 2020 changed their mind. And-

That's really only happening a little bit on the margins. So you would expect a result that was not 2020, but closer to it. And so Trump winning by 10 seems a little bit outside of what my expectation would be. I mean, I've seen some internal polling in the last few days that was Trump up four. That seems a little bit more in line. That said, almost any result is possible in Florida, given the stew of elements that's

that have conspired to the benefit of Republicans. If anything, you know, a lot of the people who used to move to Arizona and retire in Arizona now seem to be retiring in Florida. So maybe it's all to the benefit of the wider Sunbelt strategy that Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis have kind of sucked up MAGA conservatives into this one state that Democrats no longer really try to play in. I mean, that's the thing I think a lot of

people don't think about when it comes to Florida. As we talk about how in-migration into Georgia and North Carolina helps us because you have all these younger people who are moving to Raleigh, Durham, or Atlanta. But what we don't count in Florida is you have all these older, more likely Republicans from New York and New Jersey who are constantly moving into Florida. And then you do have, it's fair to say, some shifts within the Latino, some pretty dramatic shifts within Latino vote, especially since 2012, right? Exactly. And newer voter, newer Hispanic voters, like the ones who have become eligible to vote who are

not just Cuban, but Venezuelan or Colombian, they're more conservative than previous cohorts. They kind of came into the electorate during the Trump era, kind of caught the Trump fever. So there's a confluence of events. Although I will say, I think decisions made by Ron DeSantis within the state of Florida make much more sense when you understand them as being a shaping of the electorate, not of winning over anybody's minds, but about shaping who decides to go to school in Florida, who decides to retire in Florida, who decides to move away from Florida.

Many of the decisions they make are really about sending signals, like setting up the pro-MAGA flag and saying all MAGA people welcome, liberals not. And I think that does obviously have an effect on the margins. Just in closing here, as we go through the final three weeks of this campaign, what are you going to be watching for specifically when it comes to Latino vote that will hopefully give you some sense of what's actually going to happen on election night? So-

There's going to be a lot of attention on how much slippage there was from 2020. I already referred to it a little bit at the top, that if Biden was at 62, right now Harris is struggling to get past 60. I want to urge people not to fall into hysteria. What I do is polling. I'm not a pollster, but I poll a lot. Polling is inadequate for this moment. Polling can tell us that we're in a 50-50 environment, but it can't tell us which side of the 50-50 line Harris is going to fall on.

It's just not equipped for that. That's not literally what it's not designed to do. It's a little bit like a find my phone feature on, you know, it can tell you that your phone is on your block or in your house, but it can't tell you whether it's under the couch or it's in your bedroom. Yeah.

But at the end of the day, look, assume this is 59-39 among Latino voters and there's a fight for the last inches. I don't expect any vast movement in polling. If there were, I think that would be something worth looking at. I also would urge disregarding early vote numbers. We have been burned by that so many times. And so I try to step back and look at the ad traffic, look at what I'm seeing in the earned media and say, what is the question voters are taking from this?

What are we fighting about in the last few weeks? And Democrats and allies need to be picking the right fights. That's what these last few weeks is about. Are the things that we're debating about the kinds of things that are going to help Harris win this election if it's what's on voters' minds and not allow Trump to do what he always does, which is distract us with side conversations that actually at the end of the day don't help move the electorate, that don't provide new information because what persuades voters is

To vote and to vote for your side is new information. Beating them overhead with what they already know is not it. So what is the new information that comes out in these last few weeks? And how does that frame the choice before voters in the end run? Well, that seems like a great place to end it. Carlos, thank you so much. And good luck over this final stretch here. Hope you stay sane. Thanks. Good luck to us all. Stay safe. Stay sane.

That'll wrap today's episode. Thank you to David Plouffe and Carlos Odeo. I'll be back in your feeds next Sunday with another one of these episodes. And if you're a friend of the pod subscriber, I'll be on your feed again this week for a new episode of Polar Coaster. Thanks, everyone. Hey, small businesses. Sentara Health Plans has a team dedicated to answering your questions, leaving time for other business thoughts like... How did an action figure get stuck in the air vents? Or... What is the ideal human-to-goat ratio for my yoga class?

Knowing your health plan questions are answered, you can now focus on your other business needs. Sentara Health Plans, a dedicated team for your small business. Sentara Health Plans is a trade name of Sentara Health Plans, Sentara Health Insurance Company, Sentara Behavioral Health Services Incorporated, and Sentara Health Administration Incorporated. Exclusion terms and conditions apply. Get away with friends to the laid-back Maryland coast, where you can catch up while casting off and hang ten while hanging out, where a day on board is never boring.

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