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I'm Henry Olson, and welcome back to The Horse Race. It was quite something Tuesday night, and I'll update it all with election data guru Rui Teixeira of the Center for American Progress. The Grand Canyon State of Arizona is perhaps the top battleground state this year, being contested by both Trump and Biden and the site of a major Senate race. I'll go over what it looks like on the ground there with political science professor Samara Klar.

And finally, we launch a new feature this week, Polling Barometer, where each week we'll dissect what the polls tell us and what's driving any changes with the nation's leading poll watcher amid the American Enterprise Institute's Carlin Bowman. The horses are at the starting gate. Are you okay? He slimed me. Well, just like most of America, my guests and I were slimed last night at that thing that was supposed to be a debate.

But we've both taken a shower. We've got the green ooze off. And here to talk about the aftermath of that confrontation and everything else political is my friend Rui Teixeira, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Rui, welcome back to The Horse Race. Great to be here, Henry. Let's chat. Yeah, well, let's start with...

you know, I'm not going to say it was the thriller in Manila or whatever it was, but whatever we just witnessed, who won and who lost and why? Well, I think it's clear just in raw political terms, leaving aside the fate of the nation, this was not a great night for Trump. I mean, we know that he's solidly behind overall and in key states. And he really needed to kind of shift the political terrain. He needed to

you know, basically get a sort of gap closing move in the race. He needed to reset the terms to the extent that was possible for him at this point. And, you know, I think it's highly, we'll see what the polls have to say over time, but it seems highly unlikely he changed the general complexion and momentum of the race.

The post-debate polls that have been done, the so-called instant polls, generally say Trump did not do as well as Biden, some of them very strongly so. But I think the main thing is he didn't accomplish what he needed to accomplish, which was to try to change the complexion of the race. I think that was an abject failure on his part. So where do we go from here? The polls basically have Biden with a seven-point lead nationally. They have a lead in all of the

flipped blue states that Trump picked up, has some either narrow leads or tied margins in some of the red states, most crucially Arizona, where he's got more than a small lead. If you're a Democrat, should you be measuring the drapes? Is it over? I would not say we're in drape measuring territory. I

You know, not only should we be cautious because of what happened in 2016, we should be just cautious in general because polls are at best an imperfect indicator of what the public really thinks. Modeling at this point that, you know, sort of cranks out high probabilities of a Biden win or just that, they're probabilities, they're not certainties.

So at this point, I believe the 538 model gives Trump about a 22% chance of winning. And I think the economist model is more like 13% or 14%. Now, that's not good for Trump, but it ain't nothing. A one in five chance, a one in six chance happens all the time. So I would not measure the drapes. But on the other hand, what those models and the polling do tell us is that

by most metrics that we can plausibly look at to assess the state of the race, Trump is solidly in an underdog position, solidly behind, solidly behind where he needs to be ahead. The Democrats have many paths to putting 270 together. Trump has far fewer and they're far dicier. So I think the conventional wisdom on the race at this point is largely correct. Trump is

pretty far behind and he's unlikely to win. But, you know, at the risk of repeating myself, that doesn't mean he definitely will. He still could pull this out. So what do you think is more likely right now, a Trump victory or Biden landslide in the 10 point or greater popular vote margin? Oh, 10 points. That's high. I'd say, you know, I think at this point,

Maybe I wouldn't go double digit, but, you know, however we might define a landslide, let's say eight or nine points. Let's say, you know, even great, you know, an electoral college victory approaching what Obama got in 2008. I think that's more likely than a Trump win at this point. But if we're talking about an absolutely gobsmacking landslide of 10 plus percentage points in the popular vote and over 400 EVs,

I think a Trump pulling it out might be more probable than that, but we'll see. I mean, these are imperfect and speculative remarks at this point. You know, they try to more precisely assess that in the modeling sites like FiveThirtyEight and The Economist, and I'm not exactly sure how they suss that out. But I think the general view is that a very strong Biden victory

not just a narrow one, but a very strong one is significantly more likely at this point than Trump pulling out your classic popular vote loss, electoral vote victory kind of win, which is just a measure of the poor situation he's in. To sort of put some meat on the bones here that's away from just strict probabilities and overall top line polling leads, the thing I always like to point out to people is

my writings and you know a number of reports I've done papers you could actually look at the data from 2016 and you could look at the trend lines on key demographic groups both in terms of size and political preference and you could pretty plausibly project that Trump would have a very hard time getting reelected in 2020 if he didn't hold and you know actually probably increase

margin among white non-college voters, because that's what got him the election in 2016. The single thing he hasn't been able to do that's most important in this cycle is do that. He's consistently underperforming.

his margin among white non-college voters, particularly in those three key blue rust belt states, formerly blue rust belt states that he flipped in 2016. So you keep your eye on that ball and you just don't see it moving and you say, well, okay, that's really hard to see who pulls this out. He's not gonna get significantly more support from non-whites. He's losing ground among white college voters.

It's just, it's hard to see how this works for him. The math is not favorable, starting from that one sort of measuring device. So that's one reason why I think that unless the real, the tenor of the race really shifts quite dramatically in the next month, he's in more than a spot of trouble.

So what do you do if you're Joe Biden? I mean, my impression over the last month is that he's been playing a prevent defense, calling lids on days, basically trying to run the clock down while he's got a lead. One, do you agree with that assessment? And two, is that the right thing for him to do if that's in fact what he's doing? And if it's not the right assessment, what is he doing and should he keep doing it?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say that he's been in running down the clock mode because, hey, you know, he has a head. Every day that goes by where Trump doesn't close that gap with him is another day that increases the probability he becomes the next president of the United States. So that makes sense. On the other hand, I think he could probably be a bit more aggressive in trying to put

some of his basic ideas out there in terms of how he's going to solve the COVID crisis, you know, the Park Avenue versus Scranton kind of thing, you know, and healthcare, healthcare, healthcare. So I think there's, you don't want to be completely substanceless about this. You don't want to be

Your profile for the rest of the campaign simply be, as Clinton did in 2016, I'm not Donald Trump. I'm better. So I think it's a delicate dance. He doesn't need to do that much along those lines. He can run out the clock. He has a significant...

a reasonable and solid majority of the public on his side at this point, who many, almost all of whom made up their minds. So he doesn't have to do a lot of persuasion, but I do think he wants to keep

the ideas and commitments that are clearly popular with the public and form a clear contrast with Trump, you know, at least somewhat front and center. I don't think he can just do the total prevent defense kind of thing where, you know, you sort of disappear for days on end and you just, well, you know, Trump just said this terrible thing. Isn't that terrible? And then disappear for a while again. I think you do want to

be clear that you're the alternative to the Trump madness. And it's not just your alternative in the sense you're not him, but you actually will govern the country better and do different things. So, you know, I think this is, I mean, this is a judgment call, how much of that you do and how much you just try to run out the clock. And it's even a judgment call whether

He doesn't have, you know, for all I know, he's got the perfect balance of those two things right now. But if I put a gun to my head, I'd say you might want to lean a little bit more toward being aggressive in some of his very simple, very clear policy differences with Trump. Now, you in the past have been somewhat critical of the more aggressive, progressive proposals and been consistently so.

Why do or have you been and give my listeners who don't read everything you write like I do some examples for them to chew on? And what would be the sort of differences with Trump that are also progressive and politically palatable that Biden could talk about in, say, the last three weeks of a campaign to build, if not a mandate, at least an understanding of where he would take the country?

Well, I think that starts with healthcare. One of the key differences between Biden and the strongest candidates he ran against in the primary was about the issue of healthcare where the standard left progressive line in the Democratic primaries is we need to move now, if not sooner, to Medicare for all, to a single-payer healthcare system. Biden

clearly and consistently distance himself from that and said, no, we need to build on Obamacare. We need to have a public option. We need to cover a lot more people. We need to give people the option of having a public plan if they want it. We need to bring more people into Medicare. But no, we do not want to replace private insurance at this time. That is not what I'm for. That is not what the American people want. And that in a nutshell,

And we know the public option is very popular. So what Trump, what Biden was trying to do, and I think doing effectively is saying, well, here is, there's a progressive impulse behind the idea we should change the American healthcare system, make it more accessible to more people, you know, sort of take the burden of healthcare costs off more people. That's a progressive idea that we can't just leave it to the market.

It's popular to do something about that. It's popular to offer people public option, but it's not popular to take away

the possibility of having private health insurance. It's just not. So what Biden consistently tried to do on that, on the Green New Deal, on a number of other things, on race, you know, issues of what do we do about police reform, is he tried to basically corner the popular part of that progressive impulse that could be sold to the American public, to the American voters, and dissociate himself with the more ostentatiously left versions of that

progressive issue that in fact are not popular. That would be very difficult to sell the American people.

So that's what he tried to do in the primary. And I think that's what he's trying to do today. And I think because these ideas are popular, reforming the police is popular, doing something about global warming and investing in green infrastructure is popular, even if like the massive Green New Deal isn't popular. Public option is popular. Building an Obamacare is popular. These things are all very relatively easy to sell to the American public.

What you don't want to do and what he's not going to do, because that's not what he's running on, is push some of these more ostentatiously left and less popular policy options in this part of the campaign. So I think the basic idea here is pretty simple. Run in what's popular. Don't want to run in what's unpopular. So let's imagine a world where Biden wins by nine points and has won.

somewhere between 53 and 55 seats in the Senate, an enhanced Democratic majority may be put in the House, maybe pushing to 240. Do the progressives then say, OK, this is what got us there. We will be happy if you act on that in the first hundred days. Or do the progressives then say, well, this is now the baseline and let's push for more.

Right. I think that's a very good question, and I addressed it somewhat in my Wall Street Journal Saturday essay I did a while ago on sort of what's the future of the Biden coalition. And I do think this is going to be a live issue. I think the self-identified left progressive forces in the party, the Sandersites, the people who love and revere AOC,

It's not that they're not OK with the Biden program as it's been put forward. It's not like they don't understand. I would think if you talk to them that the first thing you've got to do is solve the COVID crisis and get the economy back in its feet. They may acknowledge all that, but in the back of their minds, they may interpret a sweeping Democratic victory as a vindication of their basic values.

commitment to progressivism and pushing it as far as you can possibly push at any given time. They may not like the idea that the first and foremost task for Biden isn't going to be to move aggressively on a Green New Deal. It's going to be solving the COVID crisis and getting the economy back on its feet, whatever kind of spending and other policies that takes. And that's the most important thing, because if you don't deliver on that, it's going to be very difficult to deliver on other stuff. So there's going to be a real question of timing here.

for the progressive left wing of the Democratic Party, to what extent they're going to be willing to play ball and be supportive in these first 100 or 200 days as Biden takes office, if he does, in a very, very difficult situation where the public is clamoring for solutions in a very specific sense. Things are really messed up in this country, and they're going to be messed up the day Biden takes office. So he's got to solve the most obvious things first and then get to the other stuff.

So I can see a conflict coming down in that sense. And I think it'll be very interesting to watch whether the last, so, you know, more or less left and more left center of the Democratic Party can agree on priorities at the beginning of a Biden administration and understand that if you want to

get what you want in the medium term, you've got to compromise and be reasonable in the short term. That Biden is going to be elected with a very, if he gets elected, and he gets elected in the way you described, with a very broad coalition. Doesn't just include young people. It doesn't just include non-whites. It just doesn't include, you know, college-educated white liberals in, you know, metropolitan areas on the coast. It includes a lot of other people. It includes a lot of seniors. It includes a lot of white non-college voters. It includes a lot of people from the heart of the country. It includes a lot of people from older generations. I mean,

They you know what what unites these people if we get the Biden victory we might is to get rid of Trump and get the country back in its damn feet, you know and make you get back to some semblance of normality and get people the economic house more in order and You know then try to solve some of these other problems people really do care about like health care So, you know, it's not going to be the People's Republic of America the day that Biden gets elected it's going to be

a change in administration that is charged with solving very deep problems that we currently face. And the first task of a new government is to solve those problems. So we shall see if the left, the self-identified left of the Democratic Party sort of can figure out how to play this game correctly.

And it's an open question, in my view. In 2009, we faced what was then the worst recession since the Great Depression. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, quoted in the New York Times as having told President Obama that he would go down in history as the man who averted a second Great Depression. And Obama supposedly responded, that's not enough.

And they then focused after the stimulus deal on Obamacare and tried to get through climate change policy. And the 2010 Republican wave was the result of that. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is in.

That is exponentially larger today and more powerful than it was in 2009. But yet what you're saying is that what they need to do is learn what went wrong in 2009 and do what Obama should have done, which is solve the recession first.

and then move on in year two, year three, or year four, whenever it was solved. I'll pressure you again on that. Given what we see about the progressive movement, do you think they can wait two years through an entire cycle for a $500 billion a year investment in the Green New Deal or pushing trans rights through the Department of Education or eliminating the filibuster or name whatever else is on the wish list that

circulates in Mother Jones and the Jacobin and all the other sites that the far left read? Well, I think they can, and here's why. I think one reason why things unfolded as they did in the early part of the Obama administration isn't just because the left...

was pressuring Obama, hey, let's do something about climate change, let's do something about healthcare. It's because Obama, if we can take him to represent the center of the Democratic Party at the time, and the economic advisors he had and the folks associated with him, actually didn't really understand

how deep the recession was, how critical it would be to solve it as fast as possible by any means necessary to make that priority number one. And it wasn't that hard for the left to talk them into sort of doing what they did because they talked themselves into doing it. They did not realize exactly, they did not understand the extent to which

It was going to be difficult to solve the recession and the extent to which if they did not and do it pretty expeditiously, the public would blame them.

The public would blame them for being too easy on the rich. The public would blame them for having other priorities other than improving the nature of the country and making them whole as fast as possible. It made it relatively easy for the Republicans in 2010 to run against the Obama administration, its perceived failure to do what seemed to be task number one in the minds of a lot of these voters.

And because they didn't, you know, that's the history. But it's not like people don't know that history now. It's not like Biden and his advisors do not know this history. There have been quoted all over the place as saying we understand what happened in 2009, 2010. We're not going to repeat that mistake. We need to, you know, err on the side of going big with solving these problems rather than small. And if we don't do that, everything else may be in danger. And it's not like

history automatically repeats itself. History is more likely to repeat itself when people don't remember the past. And I think in this case, they do. And they're, I think, determined that it not happened. Now, that doesn't mean they're going to succeed, but it does mean that they're not in the position where I think they'll talk themselves into thinking that somehow we can get away with not solving these massive problems in terms of the economy and COVID as fast as possible.

And, you know, we'll just like turn our attention very quickly to, I don't know, universal health care, Green New Deal or what have you. So that's that's my contention on that, that the left may be bigger now, but the center is in a different place. So last question. At what point, if Biden maintains his lead in the polls, will

Do we say it's really over? Do we really have to say this could change dramatically at any time until Election Day? Or if we're still looking at a seven-point lead and it's October 15th, do we basically then say, hey –

Trump has shot his best shot and this puppy is, you know, that his reelection is a dead parrot. It is gone to meet the choir invisible. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean, we always want to, we analysts, probabilistic thinking type of people always like to give ourselves a dodge, but yeah,

Yeah, the closer it gets to the election, you know, only a week or two out and Biden still got the seven or eight point lead and still the leads he has in these key Rust Belt states and very strong possibilities in a variety of other places. And for example, in the Sunbelt and even in the Rust Belt with Ohio and all that, you just have to say, you know, the window gets ever smaller. And, you know, we'll see that in the modeling that's done. I mean, the

by 48, estimates keep on creeping up. It's now at 78, as I said. Start getting into the mid-80s, the economist model will creep back into the 90s. You know,

You never want to say anything's 100% certain, but heck, if we get to that point and we see the polling data, as you alluded to, we see what the models are telling us. And importantly, we don't see any real signs of anything that could shake the tree. We don't see a sign so much change in momentum in the campaign. James Comey is retired. It's hard to see. It's just hard to see.

I'm not ready to bury the parrot until, you know, the last vote is counted. But I think people can be forgiven for being significantly more confident if this goes on for a couple more weeks. Always interesting to hear your perspective. Thank you for rejoining me on the horse race. It was fun, Henry.

Well, now, as the campaign is winding down into the home stretch, we've brought back our regular feature, State of Play. Each week, we'll be taking a look at a different key battleground state. This week, it's Arizona. And it's my pleasure and honor to be joined by Samara Klar, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona and an expert on political matters, national and state. Samara, welcome to The Horse Race.

Thank you so much for having me. It really is my pleasure. Well, Arizona has a reputation of being a rock-ribbed Republican state. It has only gone Democratic, I believe, once in the last 60 or so years, even sticking with home state nominee Barry Goldwater in the otherwise Democratic year of 1964. But a lot of people have it tipped as perhaps one of the key states to flip from red to blue. Is that right? And if so, why?

That's correct. It's anyone's guess right now as to where Arizona is going to go in November. You know, one thing I'd say about Arizona is that although you are very correct that the state consistently supports Republican nominees for president, with the exception, of course, of Bill Clinton, who was supported by Arizona,

Republicans never have a huge advantage in Arizona. So I wouldn't say we are a deep red state like you might find in the southeast. Generally, the state shows about 55 percent or so supporting a Republican candidate. So, you know, certainly a solid majority. But there's been that potential for several years now that Arizona could move toward the left. And that is what we are seeing here in 2020. So tell me who is moving that.

This is a state that voted for John McCain by nine points, Mitt Romney by 10 points, voted for Trump by, I believe, three and a half points, and then elected a Democrat and a lot of Democrats, actually, to statewide office in 2018. What's produced that sudden shift?

Sure. So I think there's two things going on. The first, and I think this is probably what people are hearing most frequently, is that there are big demographic shifts going on in Arizona. We have a growing proportion of our electorate who are Latino. And we know that although Latinos are not a monolithic voting bloc, they do tend to support Democratic candidates. We have a lot of urbanization going on in Arizona, people leaving rural areas and moving to the cities.

We have domestic migration that tends to favor the Democratic Party. By that, I mean we have a lot of retirees, baby boomers, other people moving from expensive blue states, places like California, New York, Maine, Michigan. So all of that, all of those shifts do lean Democrat.

Now, what I find curious is that the registration numbers here in Arizona are actually not changing as much as you'd think. So this year, we have a plurality of registered Republicans, just like we always do. So while the voting behavior of our state is moving leftward, the registration numbers aren't moving quite as dramatically. So I think what we're seeing here is first demographic shifts, as I outlined, but also a Republican

electorate here in Arizona that has stayed pretty moderate over time, while the national Republican candidates are, like the Democrats, becoming a little more extreme. So, you know, I think this is a combination of both demographic shifts, but also a Republican base here in Arizona that doesn't necessarily connect with the national party this year.

Certainly, we saw some of that in 2018, especially in high income educated suburbs of Phoenix and Tucson that flipped at the state legislative level and tended to back Democrats both in the U.S. Senate and in many of the state races, but went and voted Republican for Governor Doug Ducey.

Are we seeing that sort of focus of people who may be that moderate Republican who registered as a Republican would like still to be a reasonable Republican who just can't stomach the Trump presidency? Are we seeing some of that as well as behind the potential flip of from red to blue?

Yeah, I think that's a really astute observation. And recently I did some surveying here and in Arizona with the Arizona Policy Lab. So we do a lot of polling of Arizona residents here in the state. And we are finding something that I think really echoes exactly what you're saying. Both Republicans and Democrats here in Arizona view the state parties as much more moderate than the national parties. So we have about a third of Republicans telling us that Democrats in Arizona are much more conservative than national Democrats.

And equally, about a third of Democrats tell us that Republicans here are much more moderate than the national Republicans. Now, it's pretty normal in national level data for all partisans to view themselves as more moderate. But what's unusual in Arizona is that both parties actually view each other as more moderate, too. So I think there's a lot of, you know, a lot more potential for bipartisanship here in Arizona than we see nationally. Well,

Certainly, that's something that Senator Sinema is trying to foster, is that she has been a sponsor, a co-sponsor on a number of high profile bills with Democrats, with Republicans. And I believe she's also said that she does not want to repeal the filibuster, which is something that is a cause celeb among many on her left.

Will this trend move from the presidential race to the U.S. Senate race, where the husband of the not martyred, but woman who was

rising star in the Democratic Party before she was shot in the head by a crazed person about nine years ago, Gabrielle Giffords. Her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, is the Democrat nominee and running against appointed incumbent Martha McSally, who lost as an appointed incumbent or lost two years ago. Where does that Senate race rise right now? And are there any different trends that you're seeing in that than you are seeing in the presidential race?

Sure. So what we're seeing is, well, first of all, I should say that Arizona has not had two Democratic representatives in Senate since the 1950s. So this is going to be real big. If Mark Kelly wins in 2020, this will be a really big shift for Arizona. We're going to have two Democratic senators, which is really,

really out of the ordinary in our state. Now, you know, what I think has happened over time is it's not necessarily that our electorate has shifted, but it's rather the parties have sort of switched roles in terms of who is better able to appeal to the moderate sensibility of our state. Now, as you know, the late John McCain really, um,

conveyed this moderate, almost sort of post-partisan, non-partisan message. He tended to cross the aisle sometimes much to the Republicans' dismay, but that really connected with voters here in Arizona. As you just indicated, Kyrsten Sinema really pulled that off in her campaign. She has consistently tried to portray herself and vote like a moderate. She does not always toe the party line. This year, what we're seeing in the Senate race

Mark Kelly is really better able to give off this independent, moderate message that Arizonans love so much. Martha McSally, by aligning herself so much with Trump, has really moved away from the middle. And I think that is why we are seeing Kelly with a sizable advantage here in Arizona. So what are you seeing on the ground? Are both parties confident?

Again, it's hard to say there is a ground in a world with a pandemic. But Arizona, after being hit in the summertime, has pushed its caseload back down and has reopened back up. Its unemployment rate is near close to 5 percent as of August. And that presumably improve more in the results that are going to be coming out soon.

What sort of campaign activity and organizing are you seeing both parties or both parties' candidates engaging in? Well, here in Tucson, this is sort of a pretty deep blue city. So we are seeing the Kelly campaign in full force trying to get all the voters out as possible, sending personalized postcards. Anything the campaigns can do to get personal is what they're trying to do, because what political scientists show is that these personal communications are really the best way to

to try to get people on your side. And as you've mentioned, with coronavirus, no one really wants strangers knocking on their doors. So we're seeing lots of text messaging, lots of postcards, lots of phone calls. Arizona is getting a lot more attention than usual. But, you know, Trump is really trying to fight for Arizona. And it is within reach. You

in favor of either party, and it switches back and forth, it seems, every poll that comes out. So both campaigns are fighting really hard in Arizona. This is going to be a really important state for the Electoral College. Now, Arizona is a state that is not an all-male ballot state like California or that Nevada has moved to this year, but it is a state that has had a very large proportion of male in ballots before this year.

Do you and do the people who run elections, the secretary of state and the county boards, expect to see an even higher proportion of mail-in ballots this year? And how, if at all, do you think that will translate into either a partisan advantage or a question as to whether we will know the result from Arizona close to Election Day?

Yeah, well, it's honestly, it's hard to get higher than we've been in the past. Arizona is really proud of our mail-in ballot history. In 2016, 78% of Arizonans voted by mail. There was no public health crisis then. It's just what people wanted to do. So I would anticipate those numbers are going to go up because there's been so much attention paid to mail-in ballots, campaigns, making calls, making sure that everybody has their ballot coming in the mail. So I would expect absolutely an excess of 80% of voters this year should be voting by mail.

Now, political scientists generally have not found that mail-in ballots provide an advantage to either party. You know, people are searching to try to figure out who get the edge. And it doesn't appear that this is a partisan issue. It doesn't really look like either party is going to have an advantage from mail-in ballots. So I don't anticipate that that to be a partisan issue.

But I do agree that this could be a protracted ballot count. It could be several weeks, potentially, before we know the exact numbers, especially since polling is just so tight. I remember in 2018, the only race that I had to really retract, I did have to retract two calls. I do election night Twitter where I'm online predicting races for 10 straight hours. And

I didn't believe this guy with the account from Sesame Street is his logo, who called himself a Z data guru. He said there are a quarter million ballots out. Oh, right. That would mean that there's as many votes in a presidential race. So I called it for McSally because she was ahead on election night and turned out that Mr. Count counted right. And there were a quarter million ballots out and they tilted so heavily to cinema that she won.

So I have that as a long, self-deprecating intro to do people think that there will be as many late ballots this time? Or do people think or have they hypothesized whether the pandemic is going to push people to report earlier so that maybe there won't be a week to 10 days for us to count the late arriving ballots?

Well, they'll count them in the week to 10 days, but maybe it won't matter. Right. Well, I think both parties are really pushing their voters to get their ballots out as soon as possible to try to avoid this kind of situation. And because, you know, as you've mentioned, there's just been so much attention paid to this issue of mail-in voting, people may be more likely to take care of it earlier.

You know, this is an election where passions are running very high on both sides. So I think people are eager to vote. They're eager to get their ballots out there. Having said that, you know, listen, we're humans. We're procrastinators. I'm not the only one. And I don't think we can guarantee that this is going to be an election night result. I think, as you've said, it's going to take several days at least before we know the specific numbers, especially in these states like Arizona, where it's just anyone's call right now as to who's going to win.

Well, let's shift focus very quickly and very briefly to the U.S. House that Dave Schweikert, who represents that high income area of Phoenix, has been rumored to be in trouble because of some various personal and professional scandals. Democrats are certainly making a push there. And there's a recent poll that came out that basically showed it to be a toss up race. Are you following this race? And if so, how do you see it develop?

You know, I've been following it a little bit. It's one, it's another example of where we are seeing some shifts where we haven't seen them before. And just as in the state of Arizona, I think there's two levels here. One is the demographic shifts of the voters themselves. Phoenix is moving increasingly left. You know, Maricopa County itself is

It is much more Democratic than people realize. And the city of Phoenix has an advantage for the Democratic Party. Now, we're talking about a wealthier suburb of the Phoenix region that has generally supported the Republican candidates. But we are seeing shifts there in their preferences. And then, of course, it doesn't help the Republican Party that their candidate, Dave Schweikert, does have some...

allegations of ethics violations. So this is a really tempting seat for the Democrats to pick up, and it's one that's getting a lot of well-deserved attention. Well, last question for you then, Samara. What are you looking at as the clock turns into October? Besides the polls, what should you be looking at, or what are you looking at, and what should people who want to follow Arizona closely be looking at to kind of read the tea leaves on whether...

Well, first of all, we have a few really big ballot measures coming up in November. Here in Arizona, recreational marijuana is on the ballot, and we have a measure to increase taxes by three percentage points on families making more than $500,000 in order to increase funding for public schools.

And both of these are really high profile ballot measures in the state. So here in Arizona, people are talking about these ballot measures a lot more than what we're seeing nationally. And both of those ballot measures are showing polls that favor passing the measure. So sort of on the liberal side.

So all of these little local elections are suggesting good news for Biden. But, you know, as I've said, it's so unusual for Democrats to win here in Arizona that I wouldn't bet on anything right now. Well, Samara, thank you for coming on the horse race. And I'll have you back towards the end of October to sum up things for my listeners. I would love that. Thanks for having me, Henry. It's been a delight.

Well, this week we're having a new segment that will continue all the way through the election here on The Horse Race, Polling Barometer. We'll be joined each week by national polling expert, Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute, where she is a senior fellow, to talk about what's going on in the polls, what they say, what's going on with any changes, and what you at home should be looking for.

Karlyn, welcome back to The Horse Race. I'm delighted to be back with you. Well, let's start with the overview. Not everyone reads, not everyone refreshes real clear politics polling or 538 polling averages three times an hour like I do. Where does the presidential race stand right now and how has it changed, if at all, over the last two weeks?

Presidential race puts Biden in the lead. It's a comfortable lead. I think at this point it's around six, seven points. I like unlike you do not look at the real clear 538 averages. I'm not even sure I look at them every day because this race has been so stable for so long.

that I haven't seen much change. Now, clearly there's some changes going on in the state polls, which we need to pay more attention to at this point in the campaign. But at the national level, the polls have been remarkably consistent for a long time. If you look, for example, at let's say the last 400 national polls conducted since July 1st,

But Trump has been at 45 percent against Biden only about 20 times. And that's another way to look at the race, suggesting that he he has to be doing a lot better than he's doing. Of course, we know that the president did something that hadn't been done since 1876, and that's win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by more than one percent.

What does the president have to do to win the Electoral College, i.e. how big of a gap between the popular vote and the national vote and the Electoral College vote can he sustain and still have a fighting shot to win the Electoral College?

Well, I think he needs to be at least 46, 47 percent in the national polls. Biden is hovering around 50 in some of these polls overall. At the state polling level, I like to see a lead for one candidate or the other at three percentage points or more. And that's a bit of a comfort level about how that state might go forward.

in the final analysis. And so the polls are very close in many states, but Biden also has a lead in a lot of states, particularly the industrial Midwestern states that were so competitive before. And he also has a lead in virtually every Arizona poll, and certainly the polling averages has him ahead as Arizona. Why do you think that's the case? And can we believe polls in Arizona that has not gone for Democrats since the Clinton years?

I think the state is changing demographically. And as my colleague Mike Barone pointed out when we were last together, particularly for white women in the suburbs, they just seem much less Republican in this particular contest than they have in the past. Whether or not that's temporary, whether or not this is just a Trump phenomenon remains to be seen. But the state is changing demographically. And you're absolutely correct that Biden has been ahead in about 17 of the last 20 of those polls.

So the Republican listener is going to be hanging on and saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the polls were wrong in 2016. Why should we believe them this time? Were the polls wrong in 2016? The national polls called the race on the nose. They were very accurate.

We had real problems with the state polls in many, many areas across the country. And there are many reasons for that. And of course, the aggregators who told us that Hillary Clinton had an X percent chance of winning, they also had a very bad night on Election Day.

But state pollsters have tried to correct some of the problems that they had on election night. I think there were quite a few, some that were beyond their control. Polling takes place pretty close to the final election day. But we know that in a couple of key states, such as Wisconsin, 13 percent of voters made up their minds in the last few days, and they voted by Trump by

for Trump by 30 percentage points. Most times these kinds of voters split evenly and we didn't see that in 2016. So they needed to correct clearly for that.

And I think they've been, that's something that they can't, excuse me, that's something they really can't correct for. There are other things that they can correct for. For example, they had some problems with weighting in many states, particularly again in the industrial Midwest. They had too many college graduates in their sample. The way the pollsters make up a sample overall is to look at data from the census that tells us roughly how many people in

Wisconsin have a college education and how many have less than a high school education? It gives us all the basic demographics. And the pollsters usually...

weight their polls to that data overall. But if you looked at some of the final polls from Wisconsin, and here, Courtney Kennedy, who's one of the best methodologists in the country at Pew, says she has noticed polls this year that have not corrected for the underweighting of people with less than a college education. That could be serious, and that could throw the polls off. There's also the phenomenon of what we call the shy Trump voters, something I think we saw for the first time in the Bradley

race in California many years ago with people just not being willing to say that they're going to vote for Donald Trump. There doesn't appear to be as much evidence of that in this election year. If you look at a massive study Morning Consult did that came out about two weeks ago, they argued that there just wasn't much difference between the way people

answered questions on the telephone and the way people answered questions when they were participating in anonymous online surveys overall. They said there were some differences by income, but they didn't feel they were statistically significant. In other words, higher income people being more likely to say that they were going to vote against Trump.

So we'll have to wait to see how that works out. But there were serious methodological problems in 2016, and we'll have to see whether they're corrected. I confess, I look at all the polls at about this time in the race. I don't look at them at a lot at earlier points in the race carefully. But I think now is the time when we're beginning to

really focus on these polls. And one of the things you'll notice in the polls at this point is that most of the pollsters change their sample from registered voters to likely voters. They have to be sure who's really going to turn out to vote because we have, all of us, give the civically correct response and tell the pollsters, of course, we're going to turn out to vote, but we know that isn't the case. And so tighter and tighter screens are

from national adults to registered voters to likely voters, and then even a few fancier categories than that, are very important as you get closer to a campaign. And as you may have noticed in some of the new polls with the likely voter screen, the race seems a little tighter in many places than it does in those that are still using the registered voter screen, which is a much broader sample, some of whom are clearly probably not going to vote.

Well, that's one thing that the Trump campaign can take some solace from. And that makes sense in the sense that if people give socially correct answers, you know, they say they are registered to vote when they not or they say they're voting when they're not. We know that there are more people.

Democrats or people who lean Democrats in lower propensity voting groups or people who aren't even citizens who are still called randomly because the pollsters don't know when they do a random digit dial call whether or not the person is or is not a citizen. And so a likely voter screen starts to weed some of those people out. And that would naturally move the electorate slightly more Republicans.

But there's no way that that's going to correct for a seven point deficit, is there?

Absolutely not, no. What's interesting about those likely voter screens is pollsters use very many different kinds of approaches in devising their likely voter screens. Some of the pollsters ask a whole series of questions like, do you know where your polling place is? Of course, a lot of people in this election will have already voted and voted by mail. So they'll ask a lot of very, very specific questions to find out whether someone's really going to turn out to vote. But some pollsters use a patriotism scale. Some pollsters I've heard

use a religiosity scale. The more religious you are, the more likely you are to turn out to vote. At least that's been true in the past. And that's, it's very interesting to see how pollsters try to put together that likely voter sample. But a seven point lead, you're absolutely correct, is a very comfortable lead at this point if it holds up. Now,

We've used a fair amount of jargon in this conversation already. For the less technical listener, let's go through what do you mean by screens and what do you mean by weighting?

Screens are the extra questions that pollsters ask to try to find out whether, in fact, you are registered to vote, you are likely to vote on Election Day. And those screens use more and more questions as you get closer to Election Day to really determine who's going to turn out to vote. So, for example, some polls of national adults may simply ask,

do you intend to vote for Biden or Trump? And they're looking at national adults. Well, we know an awful lot of Americans don't vote in every election. And so they then would follow up with questions. And we've certainly seen that for most of this year. Well, are you registered to vote? And the kinds of screens that they might use as you get closer to

Election day, for example, ask whether or not you know where your polling place is. Have you voted before? Those kinds of questions. Pollsters are also able in many cases now to use actual list of registered voters. So already they have a better idea of people who turned out to vote in the past. And so then they use a screen with those voters and you could purchase registered voter files that the pollsters use.

And then with respect to weighting, and this ties into another term that we've used in other conversations, but not today, and that's response rates. You know, it used to be that everyone would pick up their phone. As everyone who has a phone now knows, that doesn't happen anymore. Tell us about how we've moved from a pure random sample to a sample that is actually constructed to resemble randomness through the weighting process because of the low response rate phenomena.

The response rate phenomenon is very serious, and sometimes I wonder whether this business really has a future. Again, according to Pew, and has a very sophisticated methodological section on its website, if your listeners are interested in reading more about this, even the best design polls like Pew and Gallup have response rates that are about 6% now. And that's down from somewhere in the 30 percentage range a couple of decades ago. And

And so that's really serious. Can we really create a sample that looks like America if you have only a 6% response rate? The pollsters feel pretty confident they can do that. We've moved from telephone polls. Telephone polls were used for the first time in the 1972 campaign to polls that include mostly cell phones, some landlines.

And many pollsters have moved to online polling, which seems to be easier for people. But still, polling is more expensive when you have to reach cell phones because they're not directories of cell phones that are available for the pollsters to call. So the response rate question is massive.

really important. And the waiting question then goes back to what the sample of actual people who are going to turn out on election day really looks like. And of course, we have a huge amount of historical information on that point. From the exit pollsters, we know what percentage of those who turned out to vote were men,

women, black, white, Hispanic, underage, 18 to 24, 18 to 29, and so on and so forth. And so that's one of the many things that goes into the mix in terms of finding a sample for the voters you want to survey overall. And if you have too few of one group, let's say you have 46% women, you would wait, you would assume that those people who didn't answer you

at least in terms of the percentage of women in the population, would break or split on various issues the same way that those people who did answer you. So you weight your data up.

Or you weight your data down depending on what you're learning and what you're comparing to what the census tells us about the size of these various populations in the country. And that, of course, creates the possibility of where a shy Trump factor is, which is that if there's a if there are people who don't answer any polls, whether it's online or phone polls,

then the data that will be used to weight up or down will be disproportionately less Trump. So even the morning consults, very interesting approach, can't completely rule out the possibility of a shy Trump effect because it assumes that Trump supporters are just as likely to respond to

And that their difference or the example of their shyness will only be revealed by a degree of anonymity in their response. Yeah, I agree that there are other factors that could account for a shy Trump vote. So the pollsters did not rule it out in their postmortem. Again, Courtney Kennedy at Pew headed a team.

that looked after the 2016 election and everything that could have gone wrong. And she had a section on shy Trump voters. And she said, I think in conclusion, this large committee that did the postmortem said that, you know, they couldn't rule it out, but they didn't think there was a lot of evidence for it. But you're pointing to something that could yield a lot of shy Trump voters. Let's discuss the last methodological issue that might bedevil pollsters this year. And that's

the expected massive upsurge of either early in-person or especially male voting.

Do pollsters have a good methodology to be able to actually address people who have or expect to mail votes? And that's particularly a case, I think, with the exit poll as opposed to pre-election polling. How are the exit polls in particular going to deal with this phenomena where maybe across the country we'll pass the 50 or maybe even 60 percent mark as people who didn't vote on Election Day?

What we're seeing is that many of the polls are already asking people whether or not you've already voted. They're factoring that into their overall results. They're thinking about what that shows in terms of the level of voting that we'll have on November 3rd. What the exit pollsters do, they know states that have high, low levels of mail-in, MAIL, in voting.

And they consistently, they're polling those states before the election. They're polling the country before the election. They're polling all those states. We have five states where you vote entirely by mail. And so they're always polling those states before election day to factor in what they're learning from those states. And this year from many others, where you will have a large number of mail-in or absentee or early ballots,

they're factoring those numbers into the overall sample. So that's something I think that they've been conscious of for a very long time. And they also have a sense of whether or not early absentee votes tend to tilt one way or another in various states based on past experience. But if there is a record turnout, as people like Michael McDonald and others are expecting, that could throw off some of those calculations. So you can bet that many pollsters...

need to know what's going to happen on election day are really trying to factor in with a whole series of questions about whether you've already voted, how did you cast your ballot, did you go to the polling place, did you mail it in, etc., etc. So they're going to be asking a lot of questions to try to understand the pandemic phenomenon. Well, Carla, last question here.

How historically do polls at this point, which is roughly five, five and six weeks out from the election, how do they compare to the final result? Is it pretty much baked in or can a significant change occur?

Well, there can always be a change. The closer you get to election day, the more accurate the polls have been historically. They're not very accurate in February, March or April, but really starting after Labor Day, we begin to pay very close attention to them. And where we are at this point of the campaign is the time when you really start paying very close attention because absent a major change,

An October surprise, I guess we're familiar with hearing. Another debate that perhaps changes the race in some significant way. So we haven't seen that this morning yet. But things can happen and you don't want to rule them out. But they are...

The closer you get to Election Day, the more accurate they are. Well, sounds like it was a great time for us to start this weekly feature. And I'm looking forward to talking with you next week on the next edition of Poll Barometer. As am I. Thank you, Henry.

This week's ad of the week takes us to Peach State of Georgia, where appointed Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler is running in a special election against a number of Democrats and Republican challenger Doug Collins, a congressman from the conservative rural northwestern part of the state.

Loeffler is a multimillionaire, married to a multimillionaire, and she's been spending freely from her own pocket in order to establish her name and her political identity before the state's millions of voters. Her most recent ad is perhaps one of the more unusual ads of this political season. Let's listen. Did you know Kelly Loeffler was ranked the most conservative senator in America? Kelly Loeffler.

Yep, she's more conservative than Attila the Hun. Fight China. Got it. Attack big government. Yeah. Eliminate the liberal scribes. More conservative than Attila the Hun. Uh-oh.

Kelly Loeffler, 100% Trump voting record. I'm Kelly Loeffler. I approve this message. Well, you've probably said it yourself sometimes. X is more conservative than Attila the Hun. Well, the Loeffler campaign went there and boy, did they go there in spades. It's a humorous ad and humor often cuts through the ice because it's not something you usually see done effectively in political ads. It

It's also one with unusual visuals because the grunting voice that you hear is somebody who is dressed up like Attila the Hun. Yes, they've made the production values to make it look like they are in a fifth century barbarian's huts with people who look like Attila the Hun and who look like that poor liberal scribe who ends up

his own prospective demise at the grunting request of his despotic leader. What is behind this ad? Well, first of all, you have to understand the political

political challenge she faces. The political challenge is that in the special election that she's running in, she has to finish first or second in order to come in and face a runoff. The Democrats have coalesced around African-American minister Raphael Warnock, and he now leads pretty substantially in all of the polls. But unless he gets 50 percent, which is looking very unlikely, the

The second place finisher will go on to the runoff. And that means the real contest for her right now isn't against the Democrat. It's against Doug Collins. And that means that what she needs to do is establish herself as a real conservative. That's what this means.

commercial tries to do. It not only does it by saying that she is more conservative or the most conservative candidate, it does it by striking some of the themes that most conservatives care about, such as attacking the liberal media, such as being tough on China, such as eliminating or reducing big government. The themes and the words reinforce each other. And then at the end, there's a

sitting next to President Trump on what looks to be a private jet, presumably her own. But that's let's pass over that for a moment. The point is that from start to finish with visuals and issues and the use of humor, this ad effectively establishes Kelly Loeffler as the most conservative senator since Attila the Hun. And for that, it's this week's ad of the week.

That's it for this week's Horse Race. We'll return next week with another all-star lineup to look at the final month of this fascinating election season. I'm Henry Olson, and I'll see you in the winner's circle.