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Welcome back to The Horse Race. This week, we look at polling trends among senior citizens and whether the debate is going to change the state of the race with the American Enterprise Institute's polling expert, Carlin Bowman. And we also run down the state of the Senate races with Inside Elections reporter and analyst, Jacob Rabushkin. The horses are at the starting gate. They're off. Welcome.
Well, joining me again this week on The Horse Race is the American Enterprise Institute's Karlyn Bowman, who is the mistress of all things cephalogical and polling. She's here to talk about what's happened in the last week and what she might be looking about post-debate. Karlyn, welcome back to The Horse Race. Oh, I'm delighted to be with you, Henry. It's finally winding down. Ha ha!
You think it's winding down. I just feel like... I hope it's winding down. Yeah, no, this is the part of Star Wars where you go into the forest and Luke strikes down Darth Vader only to find his own face inside. And you're just left with this entire confusion over what just transpired. Yes, indeed. Yeah.
But what's not confusing is the trend over the last few months. You have some really interesting data on national polling trends and the presidential level. Why don't you share it with the horse race listeners? Terrific. If you go back to September 15th, there have been 189 major national polls conducted since September 15th.
Biden has been at or above 50% in 142 of those elections.
Trump has been at or above 45 percent in only 32. And again, these numbers have been so remarkably stable and you just don't see Trump making up the ground he needs to make up. He needs to be above 45 percent. I mean, that's one thing that's very different about this race is that people like to say, oh, Hillary had this margin on this state and Biden has a similar margin.
But Hillary had those margins in the 40s, that there was a large reservoir of people who said they were going to vote third party or were still undecided. Biden's got these leads and he's consistently over 50. And that's very significant. And we know there are very few undecided voters at this point. And so I think, you know, the stability of this race is really the story of this election.
Well, there's a surprising finding that we've been seeing in polls post-COVID especially, and that is that one of the more Republican-leaning groups of the electorate, senior citizens, aren't quite as Republican. Tell us what the polls say about that.
That's true. Seniors look very much pro-Biden in this particular election. And that is a big change, as you said, from past elections. In the last four presidential elections, seniors voted for the Republican candidate. And here we see Biden with a
pretty substantial lead. I was looking at the new CNN poll from Florida, a state where Trump won seniors last time around, again, a very close state as it always is. Now Biden has almost a 10-point lead in that state, and I think that is very significant. So something has happened. I don't know whether it's all COVID-related. Certainly seniors are more concerned about COVID than our younger age groups in the population. But I think since some of this movement came after that first debate that
Perhaps many seniors just...
We're fed up with Trump at a certain point with his demeanor, with the way he carried himself and didn't see him as presidential. It's hard to tease that out of the polls, but I think it's more than COVID. Well, that one thing we could look at and for next week is now that Trump has another debate under his belt, one where he didn't audition for the role of the psychopathic villain in a Hitchcock film. Yeah.
Perhaps if it's a demeanor versus COVID thing, we'll see some tightening next week. Well,
Well, it's possible that we will. We're so close to Election Day. So many people have made up their minds and I think perhaps just tuned out the election. I don't know what the audience was for the debate. I expect it was smaller, certainly than the first debate. And again, the question in the CNN Instant Poll taken after the debate suggested it didn't change many minds. It moved some people more towards Biden, a few people more towards Trump. But I think over 60 percent said it hadn't changed their minds.
So is that I'm just looking more than 55 million watched the final presidential debate, according to CNN, down from the very high numbers in the first, but still pretty substantial. Yes, that is a big number. So in the past, we've seen debates at the end.
produce supposed winners that Hillary Clinton supposedly won the third debate with the poll, uh, that came out on the instant poll. John Kerry supposedly did that in 2004, but yet neither candidate ended up winning. So, uh, what can we say about these instant polls and how viewers actually view debates that, uh,
Could they be reflective of partisan bias or something else? Or are people able to dissociate what they see on their screen from their voting behavior?
Well, I think a couple of debates had mattered. If you go back to 1980, I think people finally felt somewhat comfortable with Ronald Reagan after his performance in that last debate. Of course, there were other factors. There were hostages still in Iran. They hadn't been released. And Carter kept saying they were going to be released. And so I think people just had perhaps had it with Jimmy Carter at that particular point. Also in 1960, I think both Nixon and Kennedy thought that debate was
was very, very important to the race, to Nixon's loss and Kennedy's win. So we have occasionally seen situations where debates do make a difference, but I haven't noticed that a lot in recent presidential elections, and I think they generally tend to draw partisans. Well, what about the other races that we have races for the Senate going on? What are you seeing in the polls for the various Senate races around the country?
Our colleague and friend Michael Barone made interesting observations about these Senate races at our election watch session that you participated in, Henry. And I thought it was fascinating that he said that so many of these vulnerable Republicans are running behind Donald Trump in their states. And he attributed this to the fact that it was difficult for some of these individuals to establish their own
personality when Trump was so dominant across the country as the leader of the Republican Party. So in that sense, you have a lot of very vulnerable Republicans. And if the recent past is a guide, those dominoes may all fall in one direction.
You talk about that recent past as a guy. I mean, when I was young, dinosaurs walked the earth and people voted the man or the woman, not the party. Increasingly, you know, places where
Ronald Reagan would win the presidential vote and Democrats would go to Congress. That's increasingly not the case. What did the data tell us about whether Senate races are really partisan races with names put on the ballot or whether they are actually races between two distinct individuals?
In 2016, every Senate contest was won by the presidential candidate who won that state. So again, we're seeing very little split ticket voting in the way that we once did. I think that's a result of polarization. And I expect that we're going to see that on Election Day. So what that means is what with respect to Republican control of the Senate based on the polls we have now? Well,
There are a bunch of races that we, I mean, I think Georgia's looking closer and closer, so that could take us into January. But that said, I think this looks like it's going to be a very good day for the Democrats. So looking into the last week, what historically has happened? Is there a sort of trend that one sees in the last week that we should be looking for? Or is it really sui generis that each election cycle is its own experience?
Polls usually tighten in the final weeks of a campaign, but we haven't seen that this time. So this is a very distinctive race. Well, I mean, perhaps the president's COVID diagnosis and Hitchcock imitation had something to do with that. It's hard to tighten when the person who's trying to tighten is trying to do his best to demonstrate that it's not worth tightening for. But yesterday he...
Put in a credible performance, I would say. He did indeed. And we heard that there are some big differences between these two candidates and the stakes are high. Yeah. So what you have often talked about certain groups that are bellwether groups. What's the bellwether demographic group that you will be looking at when you do your final election analysis based on the polling?
Well, Henry, you and I both like a group that we call Some College. And I think these are your blue collar voters that you've written so much and so eloquently about. And I think the Some College group includes people who have a technical education, not a four-year college degree, a
a community college degree, and they've tended to vote for the winner in recent elections. Another group that I think is always important are white Catholics, and they look like they like Biden at this particular point, but I'll be watching them because, again, they have a very good track record of prediction in terms of elections. Well, Carlin, I am looking forward to this being as over as it's going to be.
I do feel like this is to continue the Star Wars analogy. You know, we have gone through a new hope, President Trump, and now the Washington empire is striking back. Maybe 2024 will be return of the Jedi, but we don't know who plays the part of Luke Skywalker. Absolutely.
That's a wonderful analogy. Well, thank you. Obviously, I'm a little goofy today, but we've got 10 days to go and I'm already starting the celebrations. I am looking forward to chatting with you again. And until next time, thank you for coming back on The Horse Race. Thank you, Henry. Well, as anybody who's following the Amy Coney Barrett podcast,
confirmation nomination process knows the United States Senate is much more powerful than most second elected bodies in the world, in part because it has the right to confirm presidential appointees, including judges and justices. That makes control of the Senate the most important thing, aside from the presidency, on the ballot this time. And it'll be multiple elections in multiple states as each state's voters decide who to send to the Senate. Here to break down the state of play in the Senate, it
for us is Jacob Rubashkin, a reporter and analyst with Inside Elections, one of the premier election prognostication and analysis institutions here in Washington, D.C. Jacob, welcome to The Horse Race. Glad to be here. Well, let's start with a 10,000-foot overview. What is the state of play in the Senate, and does one party have an edge at retaining control or gaining control?
So currently, the Republican Party controls the Senate. They have a 53-seat majority. They have 53 seats. Democrats have 45, and there are two independents who, for all intents and purposes, count as Democrats in this metric.
So Democrats would need a net gain of either four seats to take a 51-seat majority, which would give them control of the chamber no matter who the president is next year, or three seats –
which would give them the majority if Joe Biden also won the White House and Kamala Harris as the new vice president would be able to cast tie-breaking votes. The current situation in terms of where these races stand, Democrats are more likely than not going to get those seats that they need.
Partially because of where the individual Senate races stand, but also because Joe Biden is such a favorite to win the presidency that it lowers the threshold Senate Democrats would need to take back control of the chamber.
So which seats do you think are likeliest to flip? And are there any seats that Republicans could gain to offset some of the expected Democratic gains? So even though Democrats are more likely than not to take the Senate, the most endangered senator currently is himself a Democrat. And that's obviously Doug Jones, a senator from Alabama who won that heavily contested 2018 special election.
That said, there are far more Republicans who...
stand to lose reelection this cycle. So the most endangered Republican is most likely Cory Gardner, the first term senator from the state of Colorado. We have his race rated as lean Democratic. He's facing a popular former governor in John Hickenlooper and he really has not been able to overcome being a Republican in a state like Colorado which is trending leftward.
We also have this kind of tier of three seats that we look at as slight favorites for Democrats to flip. And those are your seats in Arizona with Martha McSally, Texas.
You're seat in Maine with Susan Collins and you're seat in North Carolina with Tom Tillis. And all of those are still highly competitive races. But with just 11 days to go until voting ends in this election, we view the Democrats there as slight favorites. Now, in each of those cases, Joe Biden is also carrying the state, according to polls in those states.
Our last guest, Karlyn Bowman, suggested that data have been showing that Senate races and presidential contests tend to go in the same direction in states. Is that what we're seeing in the polling? And is that something that you are taking into account when you at Inside Elections are establishing your ratings? It is absolutely important.
where President Trump is in each of these individual states. And one of the reasons why the five seats that we think will change hands, those four Republican seats and then the one Democratic seat in Alabama, why we are more sure about those is because precisely President Trump is losing all of those states.
or winning in Alabama's case. And it is difficult as a Senate candidate these days to win your election when your presidential nominee is losing. It used to be far easier, but in 2016, we saw for the first time that every Senate race and every presidential race in every state went the same direction.
And there's no reason to believe that that decline in ticket splitting will abate this year. That said, one of the things that the Democrats have been fairly successful at is expanding the battlefield and taking advantage of opportunities where progressives,
President Trump may still be up in some of these states, but through a combination of the national environment, candidate quality, and fundraising, they have managed to make really this vast tier of kind of second-tier races highly competitive. And that's what increases their odds of scoring a few upsets and making their potential majority even larger.
So which are some of those races? Which ones, for example, do inside elections have in their toss-up category? So our toss-up category is actually a really good illustration of this kind of boundary line between Senate races that are competitive because Trump is going to lose the state or could lose the state and Senate races that are competitive because of candidate quality.
So the first race we have in our toss-up category is Joni Ernst in Iowa. Now, Iowa was not initially thought to be necessarily highly competitive at the presidential or at the Senate level, certainly at the outset of this cycle. But over the last couple months, it's become very clear that Iowa is a presidential toss-up.
And that even though President Trump won it by nine points in 2016, he is at best tied and perhaps a point or two behind Joe Biden. And that has created a real opportunity for Theresa Greenfield, the Democratic nominee, to give Joni Ernst a real race there. Most people that I talk to on both parties think that
The outcome of that Senate race will probably mirror the outcome of the presidential. If Biden wins Iowa, Greenfield will win. And if Trump wins Iowa, Joni Ernst will win. The other race we have in toss-up, though, is Montana, which went for Donald Trump by 20 points in 2016. And no Democrat is seriously talking about Joe Biden carrying the state of Montana.
That said, the Democratic candidate in that race, Steve Bullock, is a very popular two-term governor who has a lot of goodwill and cross-party appeal among the people of Montana. And so even though this is a state Donald Trump is going to win, though not by nearly the kind of margin he did in 2016, Bullock has the kind of demonstrated crossover appeal that allows him to make that race highly competitive.
Now, there are some races where the polling is inconsistent in the sense that sometimes it'll show the Republican ahead and sometimes it'll show the Democrat ahead or it'll show the Republican ahead, but not at or...
close to, you know, like not at 49 or 50 percent. Those are races that you would have rated, I believe, as tilt Republican. And this is where Democratic eyes start to widen with greed and glee. If we can get these, what are some of those seats? And if this is a really bad night for Republicans, how do you look at these seats going?
So a lot of the states that populate are tilt and lean Republican categories, but the tilts especially are states where in a vacuum, candidate versus candidate in this national environment, it's very easy to understand why they are highly competitive. But when you factor in some of the structural aspects of the specific states that these races are taking place in, Republicans still retain a bit of a built-in advantage.
That's nowhere more obvious than in Georgia, where first term Senator David Perdue is in a surprisingly competitive race against John Ossoff, who some of you may remember as the guy who lost the highly publicized special election in 2017. That was the most expensive House race in American history at the time.
Now, the polling suggests that Perdue and Ossoff are pretty much knotted up in terms of voter support, and that mirrors at the top of the ticket Joe Biden and Donald Trump being all tied up in their race as well. However, Georgia has this specific rule that not many states have, that in order to win a Senate race outright, you have to win over 50% of the vote.
When there's more than two candidates on the ballot, and there's a Libertarian candidate on the ballot this time, it becomes difficult for either of these two candidates to achieve that 50% threshold, which means that more likely than not, they'll progress to a January runoff. Democrats historically have really done quite poorly in runoffs in Georgia. Even though Perdue versus Ossoff, for
For all intents and purposes, it's a toss-up between the two of them, which one will get more votes in November. Because it's likely to go to a January runoff, we give Purdue a slight edge here.
The other two races we have in our tilt Republican category are South Carolina and Kansas. And the reason why both of these races are competitive is because Democrats did a really great job with candidate recruitment. In South Carolina, they have Jamie Harrison, who is an associate chair of the DNC and a former state chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party. And he has...
turned out to be just this absolutely phenomenal fundraiser. He just posted the highest fundraising haul for any Senate race in history. He raised $57 million through the third quarter, really just an eye-opening sum by any metric.
He has been able to make a really solidly Republican state highly competitive and really put the fear of God into Senator Lindsey Graham, who is facing a competitive race for the first time in 18 years. But again, South Carolina is a very Republican state. It's very racially polarized with white voters voting for Trump.
Republicans and black voters voting for Democrats. And there are more white voters than there are black voters. And so it becomes very difficult structurally for a Democrat to win, hence Tilt Republican.
It's a similar picture. It's an open seat, which makes it more competitive to begin with. The Republican candidate, Roger Marshall, is generally viewed as not necessarily subpar, but he was not Republicans' first choice in the matter. They really wanted Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, to run here, obviously.
But he didn't, and so they ended up with Congressman Marshall. The Democratic candidate, Barbara Beaulieu, is viewed as a rock star within the party. They think that she's just the best thing since sliced bread. She's a great fundraiser. She's got bipartisan appeal. And she is –
close, if not tied in some of these polls that we're seeing coming out of the state. Again, Kansas is very Republican structurally. It's difficult for Democrats. No Democrat has won a Kansas Senate race since FDR era. And so that's why this race also lands in a category like tilt Republican.
Now, you have not mentioned the special election in Georgia that both Georgia Senate seats are up. Where does Inside Elections have that and what? So we currently rate the special election in Georgia as lean Republican. This is a tricky one to parcel out because we know that it is going to this January 5, 2021 runoff. And
in runoff elections because they're off cycle, they generally garner less attention, there's less turnout, and it's much more difficult to kind of predict what the electorate that shows up at the polls will look like. That said, we have a pretty good idea of at least who one of the candidates is going to be. So the way this election works is all candidates from all parties appear on the same ballot in November, and voters can pick one
If no candidate gets over 50% and with five candidates, five major candidates on the ballot, no candidate will get over 50%, then the top two vote getters will progress to the runoff. So the Democratic front runner is a guy named Raphael Warnock. He is a reverend who preaches from the same pulpit that MLK Jr. preached from in Atlanta, Georgia. And he's really locked up support of
most of the Democratic Party. The real fight here in November is between the incumbent, Senator Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to this seat, and an insurgent challenger to her right, Congressman Doug Collins, who you may remember from the
the House Judiciary hearings on the impeachment issue last year, and they are competing to be the Republican candidate in the runoff. And it is very unclear which of them is going to end up there. And it's kind of unclear which one would be the strong candidate for the Republicans, because they both have pretty serious baggage that goes along with their candidacies.
So the reason why we keep it at special, the special at Lean Republican for the moment is just because we know this race is going to go to a January runoff and we will have plenty of time in between November and then to kind of hunker down and see how things have changed and how things will play out in this fairly unique situation.
So if you're one of my listeners and you're following the presidential race, but you really don't want to go all geek on us and start following all the Senate races, is there a cusp point that
the president can lose the popular vote by, but it is still at least a 50% chance that the Republicans control the Senate. At what point does Trump's margin become so large that it's not realistic to think that the Republicans can control the Senate? So,
The reason why we tend to think that the Democrats are more likely to take control of the chamber is because the minimum threshold that they need involves those states that Donald Trump is just – he's likely to lose, mainly Colorado, Maine, Arizona and North Carolina.
When thinking about what does Trump need to do to help put the Senate back in Republican hands,
The simplest answer is he needs to be in a position to win Arizona and win North Carolina and win them by enough that he can drag these two pretty unpopular incumbents, Martha McSally and Tom Tillis, over the finish line. Right now, the president is down about 10 points in the polls, but he's only down about three to four points in Arizona and North Carolina. So perhaps if he managed to...
climb himself to a four-point deficit as opposed to a 10-point deficit and kind of bump his margin in Arizona and North Carolina up by six points so that he's not just winning but giving McSally and Tillis some breathing room, then they might have a chance at keeping the chamber. But the reality is that's hard to do, right, to –
gain six points in a matter of a week and a half or try and gain a little bit of it through the election and a little bit through polling error is a really steep task. And that's why the chances of the Republican Senate
remaining in Republican hands have really diminished over the last couple months. I think the more important kind of fulcrum point is in relation to this second tier of races, you know, places like Kansas and South Carolina and Georgia and Texas and Alaska, where the president is really struggling to reach his margins in 2016, but he's still winning them. And
If he goes down further in the national polls, right now he's at a 10-point deficit. If by election day the president is losing by 12, 13, 14 points to Joe Biden, there is a whole swath of Republican territory in the Senate that suddenly becomes very, very vulnerable. So the way we see things right now, what we say is the most likely outcome is
is a Democratic gain of between four to six seats. But there is a possibility that Democrats could gain up to 11 seats if the president's struggles continue to a greater degree. Well, it's a shame I didn't interview you next week because that could have been my Halloween trick, scary Halloween prognostication for Republicans. But
But thank you for preparing the listeners for the good, the bad and the ugly of election night in the Senate. And thank you, Jacob, for joining me on the horse race. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thank you.
This week, we only have one ad of the week, and that ad of the week is a doozy. We've previously looked at entries in the special election for Georgia's Senate seat, particular Kelly Loeffler's use of an actor playing Attila the Hun to argue that she's more conservative than, guess who, Attila the Hun. Well, this week, her Republican challenger,
Representative Doug Collins hit back, and he hit back hard. Let's listen. I'm Doug Collins, and I approve this message. Communist China's Mao Zedong, history's most brutal mass murderer. Yet Kelly Loeffler lied about hanging a $60,000 portrait of Mao in her buckhead estate.
Her love of their money explains the Chinese flag Loeffler hung on her New York Stock Exchange and Loeffler's refusal to cut ties with China-controlled companies that make her millions. Because Kelly Loeffler is a fake conservative who looks out
Well, it's been a long time since people have argued that a Republican is too close to a communist regime. But that's where Doug Collins is going. And he does it for a number of reasons. First, polling has shown that Republicans are particularly angry at China.
for their role in the spread of the coronavirus, both in the United States and across the world. As we've seen before on Ad of the Week, many Republicans, particularly when taking aim at Democratic challengers or when touting themselves, try to say that they are tough or their Democratic opponents are weak on China.
Here, though, Collins does a number of things at the same time. What you can't see is the picture that they're talking about. This is allegedly a picture that Andy Warhol, the famous counterculture New York artist of the 1960s, painted of Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong. And it allegedly was at one time hung in the foyer at
Kelly Loeffler's home in Buckhead. Now, Buckhead is an elite suburb of Atlanta. So not only is he taking aim at
her ties or alleged ties to China and its communist regime, but throughout with New York Chalk Exchange, taking their money, looking out for herself, Buckhead Estate. He's playing a class card against her. It's not just that she's allegedly too close to China. She's too well-to-do to care about people like us.
And Collins, when he says at the beginning, I'm Doug Collins and I approve this ad, what you can't see is the picture. The picture is of him in military uniform talking to another person in military uniform because apparently he was a chaplain in the United States military. So there he's subtly striking a patriotic theme. I'm the real American in this race. And Kelly Loeffler, well, she's just looking out for herself because she's a greed head from Buckhead.
Now, who knows whether this is going to play? These ads can often be interesting to watch, but not move voters. But the polling clearly showed that this would be the sort of thing that would play with Republican voters. And polls show that Collins and Loeffler are locked in a neck to neck battle to see who's going to come out on top in the November election and have the right to face Democratic Reverend Raphael Warnock in the fall.
Collins is being outgunned on the airways because of Loeffler's massive fortune. But if an ad can break through and reestablish his credibility, this is the sort of ad that can do it. And that's why it's this week's ad of the week. That's it for this week. Next week, join me for a final look at this year's amazing and tumultuous election season. I'm Henry Olson, and I'll see you in the winner's circle.