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I'm Henry Olson and welcome back to The Horse Race. This week we speak with Karlyn Bowman about what the polls are showing after last week's debate and the president's COVID diagnosis and whether partisan response bias is to blame. We also talk with Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the key swing state of Wisconsin, including his analysis of the recently released Marquette Law School poll.
And we look at three ads that examine how different campaigns try to talk to the ticket-splitting voter. The horses are at the starting gate. They're off.
Well, it's been a busy week in the polling community. There's been loads of national polls, state polls, probably some local polls, too. And the person who reads them all is Karlyn Bowman from the American Enterprise Institute. She's joining me back again on our new weekly feature, Poll Barometer. Karlyn, welcome back to The Horse Race. Thanks so much, Henry. Delighted to be with you. Well, thank you.
don't, don't Bogart that news on us. What, what does it say? How is the president doing? And what do you think is causing whatever changes you're seeing? Well,
Well, the president, in terms of the polls that I'm looking at, has been in about the same place that he is right now for a very long time. If you look at whether or not people approve or disapprove of the job that he's doing, that number hasn't moved much in a long time. And that's something I pay a great deal of attention to as we get closer to an election campaign. He's still in the low 40s holding his base, but that's not enough to win the win election.
That said, the polls have fluctuated a great deal. You had a Zogby poll at two. You had a CNN-SSRS poll at 16. So you had quite a bit of fluctuation in the national polls. And I think that's probably why it's better to average the polls at this particular time, just because they are, as you suggested, all over the map.
So what does the average say? I mean, obviously, Trump has been behind in the head to head race against Biden all along. But is the curve, as they said early in the pandemic, flatten the curve? Is the curve flattening against him or is it moving in his direction? Oh.
I actually think it's staying pretty steady. You read the polls too, Henry. But if you look at the real clear averages, and I glance at them once or twice a week, it seems to be a pretty steady Biden lead of around seven points. But depending on which polls you look at, that could be a little larger, a little smaller. That's a very comfortable lead. Of course, we need to be looking at the state polls. And this afternoon, we've already had new polls in
Florida, Pennsylvania with Biden, again, with a solid lead at this point. That must be worrying for the White House because those are two states where he needs to do well. But yes, Biden has a solid lead. I'm not sure it's growing a lot, but I'm not sure that it's receding in any way. So some people...
warned right after the debate that polls that came out shortly afterward could be subject to something called partisan response bias. Can you tell listeners what that might be and whether or not you're seeing any evidence of it? Well, we see some evidence in polls on occasion where a candidate or a president's supporters decide not to answer a poll if they
If their candidate hasn't done well. And so that's what we may have seen after the debate. I think a lot of Trump supporters felt that he didn't do well at all in that debate. And so in that case, they may simply refuse to answer the polls. And that may have caused the widening that we saw in some polls overall.
So that's what it is. So if that were the case, then some of the polls that we've been seeing that have the president like the CNN SRI poll that has Biden head by 16, that could be one reason where polls would be showing a widening Biden lead. But it's far from conclusive that that's actually what's happening.
Absolutely, because you had other developments in the last week that were very important. Obviously, the president's COVID diagnosis, going to the hospital, getting out of the hospital relatively quickly, saying what he said when he came back to the White House. So this campaign is moving so fast that it's really hard to say what's influencing what in the polls.
So what should we expect from the vice presidential debate? In the past, have vice presidential debates moved the presidential level polling needles appreciably? Very rarely do vice presidential debates move the overall needle about this race, because in the final analysis, people are voting for the president. They're not voting for the vice president. And even though this particular debate has more weight given Biden's age and Trump's age, too,
I still don't think it's going to affect the overall results unless there's some sort of a major gap that really shakes up the race. But absent that, I don't think it'll affect the overall race. So then what do you think the next thing that might register in the polls would be is aside from we seem to be getting an unusual event almost every 48 hours? Of course, that could matter. But is the overriding question the stability of these polls as opposed to the variability?
For me, when you average the polls and you see how stable they've been for a very long period of time, and you see in the last 335 national polls since July 1 that Trump has been above 45% and only 23 of them, that's extraordinary stability. And so in that sense,
If you average the polls, you'll probably get a better idea of where the race is at this particular point. But I think most Americans have made up their minds and they made up their minds very early, probably about Trump's character. Which, of course, makes that last debate perhaps the final nail in the coffin, because if there was anything that was going to put an emphasis point on what many people feel is problematic about the president's character, it was Trump.
exemplified in spades on the debate stage. Yes, we certainly saw it on the debate stage. And I think the final two debates are still on schedule, are they not? And so it's possible we could see something entirely different. But I think people's minds are made up. So we're seeing a fair bit of early voting. At what point do pollsters begin to really incorporate the
early voters and differentiate them from the election day voters? Well, we're already seeing that in certain polls. We had a couple of polls last week that asked people whether they'd already voted. Did they have any trouble voting? I don't know whether they asked the horse race, but they're certainly asking that question about whether you've already voted. Michael McDonald, he keeps track of turnout statistics at the University of Florida. He argues that you can't compare what we're seeing to 2016 because we didn't measure
early and absentee votes as early as we're doing right now because so many people are voting absentee. But certainly a large number of people are voting absentee and the pollsters will factor that into their analyses. So one thing that scares Republicans in particular is the Senate, that there's a lot of Senate polls that are out there in races that the Republicans
to win, hold on to the seats that they've got. Is there any sort of glimmer of hope that you see in any of these polls, or is it still the same sort of thing we've been seeing all along, that if you're running for Senate, you're pretty much where the president is and there's not a whole lot of differentiation? Absolutely. That's what we're seeing in all of these races. There will be one surprise. There always is one surprise. But that said, I think that we
many of these Republican Senate candidates are severely behind and have been for a very, very long time. As our friend Michael Barone pointed out, many of them are running behind President Trump in their states. You could have a surprise or two. There's a sexual scandal in North Carolina. Could that change the shape of the race? Possibly. But again, the Democrats have been ahead in that race, and we'll have to see whether anything affects his margin. So,
At what point do the polls – well, they are always snapshots in time, as pollsters like to tell us. There are certain snapshots in time that are highly predictive of the only time that counts, which is the post-election day count. At what time do you look and say between early voting increasing and historical patterns –
we probably already know who the winner is going to be. Well, you certainly look at the polls as close to the election as you can get. You look at what the pollsters are doing in terms of tightening the screens as they try to figure out who actually is going to turn up on Election Day or who's already voted. And that's already happening. A lot of the pollsters have moved from a broader registered voter sample to a likely voter sample. And that's significant. And so pretty soon, I think most of the voters will be looking at a tighter screen of
And again, the last few weeks of the campaign, if the polls have been any guide thus far since September, it's going to be a pretty stable race. But as you said earlier, there's one momentous development after another in this campaign. And you just don't know what's going to happen 48 hours from now. Well, is there one poll that has a better track record than another? I mean, that's one thing that...
People try and, of course, the pollsters try and claim that they're the accurate ones. But has there ever been or not ever been, is there currently a poll that does the horse race that somebody can look to and say, yeah, the averages may be more reliable than any particular poll, but not?
But this one is first among equals. Well, you have the problem that several of the best pollsters have sort of dropped out of presidential polling. Gallup and Pew are not doing it. Of course, their track records over a very long period of time were pretty good. The real problem that you have today, we used to have, for example, the CBS News New York Times poll that was thought to be very accurate.
goes back a very long time to the 1970s. But CBS now partners with different pollsters than they partnered with before. And it's conceivable that for those of us who are not on the inside, they may be using different methodologies. Some of them are using online polls now. That wasn't true, let's say, eight or 10 years ago. And so it's really hard, I think, to compare the polls. Some of the
sites, I think the New York Times sort of rates pollsters in terms of the way they conduct their polls, but that's a different question than the record of accuracy. So a few of the polls, the major network polls where the partnerships have not changed over time are probably the ones that I would look at most carefully to answer that question, but I haven't done so systematically. As a parting thought for us today, I
What sort of things do you think that the person who tries to follow the polls should be looking for more than anything else? Is it the averaging question or is taking...
trying to remember as many of these things as possible rather than moving up and down according to the latest thing that comes across on the 5 o'clock news, or is it something else? I would definitely look at the averages at this point because, as we've seen in this week alone, you have polls that are wildly different, giving us wildly different pictures of the race at this point, and I think all you can do at this point is average them, and so that's what I would do. Well, Carla, thank you again for your insights, and we'll have you back next week on The Horse Race.
Thanks so much, Henry. This week, joining me on State of Play, it's Craig Gilbert, the Washington Bureau chief and a political reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and probably the best person in the country to talk to about what's going on in the hyper-competitive swing state of Wisconsin. Craig, welcome back to The Horse Race. Great.
Great to be with you. Well, for the second time that I've had you on in a row, we got lucky. The best poll in the state came out on Wednesday morning. So we get to share this with our viewers when it's fresher than fresh. What does the poll say? So in the head, in the matchup between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, it shows Biden with a five point lead, 46 to 41. And the libertarian candidate who's included in this poll at four percent
I'm really not much change from a month ago where Biden had a four point lead. In fact, if you go back to May in this particular poll, Biden has consistently led by four to six points, unvaryingly. And so this has been the great theme of this particular Wisconsin poll, which is a good poll and a frequent poll. And that is amid all the ups and downs and the roller coaster ride we're having in this race. You know, the fundamentals don't change.
But that's an interesting question, too, is that why don't the fundamentals change when we've been seeing the national polls in the last week following President Trump's widely panned debate performance moving significantly in Joe Biden's direction?
Yeah. And by the way, this poll was entirely conducted after the debate, on the heels of that debate. It was conducted both before and after the news of the president's positive COVID test. But yeah, I would also add to your question the fact that
Wisconsin has been, was at the epicenter of the debate over race and policing because of the shootings and the unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. It's also at the epicenter of the pandemic. I mean, we are seeing kind of a ground zero effect in Wisconsin right now with respect to surging caseloads, which are just fueling a lot of political debate over masking and fighting between the governor and the legislature. So
Wisconsin's not only in the middle and the epicenter of the presidential election, but it's been right in the middle of these great upheavals and these pretty fierce political debates and issues, yet still.
Again, stability. And I think that the easiest explanation is just to kind of go back to how polarized the state is. This is a 50-50 state. I mean, we see it, you know, time again in every poll. It's half Republicans, half Democrats voting.
We've talked about, you know, three of the last five presidential races being decided by less than a percentage point. But it's such a polarized state. And I know from talking to voters, a lot of Trump supporters do have qualms about him in Wisconsin. They're not all rah-rah. But, you know, a lot of those people don't want to vote for a Democrat either. So that's – you get this –
You get this sort of dug in, entrenched, you know, dynamic in the race where it just takes a whole lot to move the numbers. But on the plus side for President Trump, does that suggest perhaps that among the 9 percent undecided and the 4 percent for the libertarian, that there might be some people who, just like in 2016, decide in the last year,
dying days of the campaign or since people vote early in the week before the campaign, they do their mail-in ballot, that the devil they know or from the party they know is better than the devil that they don't, no matter how many qualms they have about Trump. So I don't think you can discount that, but I'm not sure I would bet on it either, only because, you know, there are clearly some differences between 2020 and 2016. I mean, obviously, you
Joe Biden doesn't have the negatives that Hillary Clinton had. And we see that in the polling numbers. This was actually the first poll that Marquette had done where Joe Biden had a net positive favorability rating in Wisconsin. So his numbers are getting a little bit better. And we're also seeing Trump's share of the vote actually decline a little bit, even though the margin hasn't changed. I mean, he was at 41%.
He's an incumbent president at 41%, not good. And that's down from 43% and 44% several months ago. So we're in this funny place where trailing in Wisconsin, this potential tipping point state by five points can be
interpreted as both a good result and a bad result for the president. You know, a good result, as you said, in that we're not seeing, you know, the bottom fallout for President Trump as suggested in some of the national polling after the debate. But, you know, he needs to be closing the gap and the very stability of the race is
is an obstacle because, you know, he's got to move numbers to close the gap. And this race has been so stable and so unyielding that I think that's going to be a challenge for him as well, is, you know, is moving, you know, he's got to kind of change, you
the landscape a little, or he's got to change the composition of the electorate. And we can talk about that. Yeah, well, that is something I wanted to get to. So maybe we should just jump to that. Is there evidence that the composition of the electorate might be changing now that the registration data are complete? I believe your deadline closed for registration on Monday or yesterday or on Tuesday. What, if any, data are there that the composition of the electorate might be changing? Well,
Well, unfortunately, Wisconsin is one of those states that people where we don't have registration by party. So we don't have that particular evidence to go by. You know, I think a lot of people, there's good reason to think the turnout is going to be up over 2016. Of course, the big question is, you know, are the bigger turnout gains going to be on the Democratic side or the Republican side? Wisconsin, you know, we've talked about this in the past. It's it's the it's
It's the most sort of white blue collar of the key battlegrounds. And even though that was Trump's path to victory, that part of the electorate in 2016, there were white blue collar voters who didn't vote, didn't turn out. And so there's room mathematically for
for him to grow in terms of getting more of those people to turn out. He has not been performing as well in the polling with that demographic, again, non-college white voters as he did in the 2016 vote against Hillary Clinton. And again, probably something to do with Joe Biden not being as unpopular with these voters as Hillary Clinton.
um, was. So yeah, I mean, it's possible for him, um, to do that. I think it's a real challenge because, you know, you're going to have, obviously the Democrats are pulling out all the stops to enhance, to increase their turnout. You know, we've seen in the abs, the other sort of set of numbers we have to look at are the absentee
voting that's going on. I mean, a fifth of Wisconsin has already voted if you're using the 2016 turnout as a baseline. And these people are all voting by mail because that's the only way right now you can cast an absentee ballot because early voting in person hasn't started yet. And the biggest early voting is occurring in blue places. It's occurring in the city of Madison and in the Democratic suburbs around Madison and the Democratic suburbs around the inner Democratic suburbs around Milwaukee.
That's that doesn't tell us who's going to win the turnout war because Democrats are clearly more eager to vote early than Republicans are. But it does put some pressure on.
on Republicans in the sense that they need their voters to turn out on Election Day in the middle of a surging pandemic. And one thing that I remember from 2016 is a lot of the mail voting data was very favorable to Clinton when it was released within the first half hour after a state's polls closed. And then the Election Day
data or the later arriving mail ballots came. And often Trump more than gained that. So Democratic strategists were happy when they hit their targets in the mail vote and then found that maybe all they did was bank votes that used to be on Election Day earlier as opposed to actually increasing the turnout. Is there any sense of which of these things is going on with this tremendous mail-in ballot turnout in Wisconsin?
Yeah, I mean, it used to be that that early vote you're talking about in Wisconsin was mostly early in-person voting. And that was a much bigger deal on the Democratic side than on the Republican side.
there was very little voting by mail. So now we have a pandemic, we have a lot more people, you know, it's not going to be 5% of the ballots cast by mail, it's going to be, I don't know, 40%, 50%, who knows, it won't, you know, it'll be a lot more. People right now are voting by mail at 10 times the rate they did at this point, four weeks before the election in Wisconsin in 2016. And they're voting early at five times the rate. So it's kind of like all bets are off. I mean, we, we,
You're right. There's two possible interpretations to the early voting patterns. And one is that, you know, Democrats are just shifting to an earlier vote and Republicans are going to turn out on Election Day and it'll all kind of wash out. And the other interpretation is that, you know, there's some indication that the early voting is some sign of enthusiasm and intensity on the Democratic side.
and bodes well for them, but we just don't know the answer to that. - So what is the law with respect to when absentee ballots can be counted?
in Wisconsin. It differs from state to state. In some states, you can start looking at absentee ballots a few days before the election. Others, you can't start even beginning to assess whether they're valid until the day of the election. Yeah. In Wisconsin, you cannot start until election day, that morning. So there is a scenario for a protracted count. The other...
The thing that's hanging out there in Wisconsin is that a federal judge has ruled that the state should continue to accept absentee ballots for six days after the election, as long as they're postmarked by Election Day. And so that is being appealed by Republicans. And it's before the Seventh Circuit in Chicago. And we should get a ruling on that fairly soon. And then that could be appealed again. But that did happen in the April election. So there is a precedent for that.
So under that scenario, you know, we're not going to get the entire vote even by the morning after the election. We're going to have to wait and it'll dribble in, you know, in the days after the election. So we don't know when we're going to know the outcome in Wisconsin and we don't know how much of a, you know,
red mirage or blue shift there's going to be where the early vote is Republican and the later counted vote is democratic. And Wisconsin's a patchwork. It's one of the only states where elections are administered at the local level. So there's almost 1900 election clerks in Wisconsin, even though there's only 70 counties, 72 counties. And they do things differently. And some cities...
Some cities, you know, take all these absentee ballots and they redistribute them, most cities, to the polling place of the voter. And then they get counted along with the in-person Election Day votes at the same time. And other cities, including the city of Milwaukee, have what they call a central count where they house them all centrally and then they count them all at once. And there you may get like a data dump, you know, late in the evening. Right.
of city of Milwaukee votes favorable to the Democrats. That happened in the 2018 midterms. I remember that. It deked me that I thought, based on the precinct count from the Associated Press, that Walker had eked it out and
Then this data dump of all the absentee votes going into one absentee precinct came in for forever. So one other kind of geeky but maybe important question, which is, does Wisconsin have a cure law that there are states that allow voters after the fact?
to make up procedural defects that would disqualify their mail ballot. So particularly if you have this, nobody can count them till election day. Without a cure law, there could be many people who screw up their ballots and don't get their votes counted. Does Wisconsin have a cure law? So my belief is that it's too late at that point to remedy your ballot.
That, you know, people in Wisconsin are being encouraged if they're voting early to, you know, it's possible to detect a problem with, you know, the ballot because there's an outer envelope if you deliver it early.
But if you deliver that ballot, you know, the day of the election or it gets or arrives the day of the election, then it may be too late. Well, that begs another question, then, if there's half a million or more ballots in, is that something that the clerks of the 1900 voting jurisdictions have the discretion to make?
inform a voter or not, whether their ballot is potentially flawed or... I believe they have that discretion if they detect a flaw, again, on the envelope and it arise beforehand. But again, there is the potential for, you know, different situations to be handled differently because of this bug or feature of election administration in Wisconsin, which can be
both a good thing and a bad thing. You know, it's sometimes sold as a great barrier to sort of hacking and mischief because you've got so many different election systems going on and being administered by so many different people that it would be very hard to manipulate the election vote. But it also, you know, creates some issues of uniformity and also just, you know,
House, how, you know, whether whether this whole thing ends up working like a finely tuned watch or not. I can already hear the dueling MSNBC Fox narratives that the Republican clerk that doesn't send the information out is accused of voter suppression. And the Democratic clerk who proactively tries to cure every ballot is accused of mail fraud.
Well, we're already, you know, we've been down that road in so many other kinds of issues in Wisconsin where, you know, with respect to everything from, you know, how communities treat early voting and, you know, one city has multiple locations or it used to be in 2012, you could actually have a different window for early voting in some communities than other communities. And then you have all the drama of election night where you get, you know,
you get unpredictable things happening. And so there's a long history in Wisconsin of these election night sagas occurring and inspiring pretty fierce partisan debates and partisan arguments and partisan suspicions when they seemingly shift the outcome of an election. - Well, sounds like it's going to be a recipe for contention no matter what happens.
Last question for you. What are you looking for over the next month with respect to detecting a partisan trend or a candidate trend, aside from the final pre-election poll from the Marquette University Law School poll? Well, I'm going to continue to watch the early voting numbers. I do think
you know, again, the if your Democrats want to bank as many votes as they can and and there are places, you know, very democratic places where the numbers are pretty remarkable like there, you know, there's one. It's not a very representative place, but there's one community which is basically
a village contained within the city of Madison right next to the UW campus where you have college professors and other... It's a pretty well-to-do place living. They've already generated more than half the 2016 vote and the election's a month away. The city of Madison and Dane County, the most democratic county in the state, is already...
you know, generated a third of its 2016 vote and the election is a month away. So those are, you know, those could turn out to be signs of just overheated turnout in some blue regions of Wisconsin. Um, so I'll be looking at that, um, obviously following, uh, the polling, um, and,
And then just, you know, talking to voters. I mean, you know, I did talk to a lot of voters after the debate and including a range of voters. And it was pretty obvious in talking to them that even the Trump voters didn't think it was a particularly good debate for Donald Trump. And we're very happy with the debate. That didn't necessarily translate into a big erosion for Trump in the Marquette poll. But again, you know, every day that goes by where he's not, you know, gaining is probably
arguably problematic for him. Well, on that note, I hope that we can have you back, if not directly the week before, then maybe the week before that to give us a final update on Wisconsin. Happy to do that.
This week on Ad of the Week, we're going to take a look at three ads, each of which try and talk to a ticket-splitting voter in a swing house district. The first district is, oddly enough for people who don't know the political demographics of Utah, a district represented by a Democrat that includes part of Salt Lake City and suburbs to the south. This is an ad that is trying to say something about the Democrat incumbent that the incumbent may not want to be told.
Ben McAdams hopes you think he's the Republican. What a joke. McAdams worked for Hillary Clinton. That's liberal. McAdams pushed for higher property taxes and higher taxes on businesses. That's liberal, too. And McAdams wanted to use your tax dollars to cover gender reassignment surgery. That's really liberal. Ben McAdams taxes like a liberal. And spends like a liberal. Because Ben McAdams is a liberal.
I'm Burgess Owens, and I approve this message. Well, this is from his Republican challenger, Burgess Owens, and he is trying to tell the person who is going to vote for President Trump at the top of the ticket that Ben McAdams is not what they might think he is, that he is, in fact, a liberal. And that's important because this is a district that, even though it was heavily, as many Mormon districts were, for the
independent conservative, Evan McMullin, in 2016. Donald Trump did carry this district easily, and he will carry this district easily.
In 2020. So by continually reminding the voter that Ben McAdams is somebody who worked for Hillary Clinton, somebody who purportedly increased taxes, somebody whom they can say that's liberal or that's very liberal, that's reminding this voter, hey, you're a conservative or at least you're not a liberal. You're a Republican. Vote against the guy who isn't supporting your viewpoints.
The use of gender reassignment surgery, I think, is something worth noting, and that's presumably designed to appeal to the socially conservative Mormon voter in this district. I haven't seen a single ad that talks about transgender or gender reassignment issues from a Republican perspective anywhere else, and that's probably, again, because of the particularity.
demographics here. If you're a Mormon conservative Republican, you don't want to vote for Ben McAdams. That's the message. Burgess Owens and the Republicans want to drive home. There's another Republican-leaning or strongly Republican district represented by a Democrat. That's Minnesota 7 by Colin Peterson. But the attack here is completely different. Let's listen. ♪
Colin Peterson was elected to stand strong for Minnesota, but Collins caved. Votes with Pelosi four out of every five votes. Rides on Biden's bandwagon. I've been on Joe's bandwagon for a long time. If they win, the recovery's over. Biden's $4 trillion tax hike could crush the middle class and kill jobs.
Fire Peterson. Now just another Biden-boosting, Pelosi-backing tax hiker. NRCC is responsible for the content of this advertising.
Notice that here, of course, you always have to go after the individual where they are. And obviously, I guess Colin Peterson didn't work for Hillary Clinton. But this isn't one that uses Colin Peterson's own voice to say that he's on the Biden bandwagon and has been for quite some time. This, plus the use of Nancy Pelosi, is reminding the Trump voter, the Trump voting Republican, that
Colin Peterson may say that he represents us, but when push comes to shove, he is a Democrat. Now, the reason Peterson, who has represented this district for about 30 years, is perhaps in trouble this time is precisely because of the partisan nature of this district. His margins have dropped continuously over the last few elections, even though he has never had a serious challenger.
This time, the Republicans have a serious challenger, former Lieutenant Governor Michelle Fischbach, who's raising enough money to make a race of it. And this ad that comes in from the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee is designed to reinforce that efforts by reminding the Trump voter that.
That if they're voting for Trump, Colin Peterson, the Democrat they may have voted for in the past, is not. He's backing Biden. He's back Pelosi. He backs allegedly tax hikes. And consequently, they should stop splitting their ticket and come home.
Now, there's a third district that we're looking at, and this is another district that's represented by a Democrat that voted for Donald Trump by over 10 points in 2016. This is one by the Democratic representative, Sushil Torres-Small, and it's trying to ask the Republican voting Trump person to give her a shot. Let's listen. I'm a lifelong Republican and doctor at the only hospital for miles around.
When coronavirus hit, we almost went under. Then Xochiltora Small stepped in, securing Medicare funding to keep our doors open. She never asked if we were Democrat or Republican. She represents all of us and gets what access to health care means to rural communities. This year, I'm voting the person, not the party. That's Xochiltora Small. I'm Xochiltora Small, and I approve this message.
I like this ad because it's both subtle and obvious. It's subtle in the sense that the entire ad, except for the mandated closing, I'm candidate name blank and I approve this message, is from a average person. The average person is the doctor who says he's a lifelong Republican.
He makes an argument about the coronavirus, talks about how Torres Smalls, a congresswoman, actually listened and tried to help people regardless of their party. So he says he's going to vote the person, not the party. This is making the appeal to the Trump voter who might disagree with Torres Small on a lot of issues, finding an area of agreement, fighting the virus.
So is small, by the way, shows up masked on a couple of occasions talking to this doctor in this spot, something that, again, drives home the seriousness of the pandemic and makes the explicit appeal to vote the person, not the party. And that's exactly what she needs to do.
Polls for this race show it to be basically a toss-up. Some polls have her up by a point or two. Some polls have her down by a point or two. Every vote that she can persuade with this is a vote she's taking away and is giving her a shot to win a reelection in an extremely tough district.
All three of these ads show how campaigns try to enforce or eliminate party unity, either against an incumbent or for an incumbent. And for that reason, because it can let you see how a cross-pressured voter receives information and has to balance competing demands. That's why these three are the ads of the week.
That's all for this week's Horse Race. Please join me next week for a deep dive into the races for the House with The Cook Political Report's Dave Wasserman, along with our usual lineup of the leading polling and election analysts in the country. I'm Henry Olson, and I'll see you in the winter soon.