Why Biden Is Losing Support Among Voters Of Color 01:15:37

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Carlos, did I leave anything out? I think you got the long and short of it. I mean, this took place largely on Twitter, or the artist formerly known as Twitter. And it seemed like, in particular, this other podcast, this podcast on podcast crime, but this other podcast dragged out how much money Fabrizio was making off of Republicans to make this case in trying to debunk this poll. ♪

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk.

A couple weeks ago on this podcast, pollster David Beiler referred to the post-Labor Day part of the presidential primary cycle as, quote, silly season. And folks, that may have been prophetic. For those politically tuned in enough to notice, last week was full of the kind of hand-wringing and accusations of bias surrounding the polls that you'd usually expect from the final two months of a campaign, not the final year and two months of a campaign.

The focus was largely on general election polls, whether a Wall Street Journal poll showing Trump and Biden tied is to be trusted, what to make of a CNN poll showing Nikki Haley is the only Republican with a lead over Biden outside the margin of error, and how to understand data from The New York Times suggesting that Biden is losing notable support amongst voters of color.

There may be some interesting questions in all of that, and we're going to dig into them right here on this podcast. But if you spent the first week of September 2023 trying to use polls to determine or debate who would win in November 2024, I have a secret for you. Like what existed before the Big Bang or which one of Cher's farewell tours will actually be her last, it is unknowable, folks.

So now that I have gotten all of that out of the way, here's what's on tap for today. We are going to debate what of last week's polling is worth paying attention to. In particular, we're going to focus on the data suggesting Biden is losing support amongst voters of color. And we've also got a good or bad use of polling example that focused specifically on unlikely voters.

So here with me to discuss it all is a longtime friend of the podcast, Carlos Odio. He's the co-founder of Ekis Research, which focuses on polling and research of the Latino community. Welcome to the podcast, Carlos. Hello, hello. Good morning. Happy fall.

Happy fall. Another meteorological seasons person here on the podcast. Happy to hear. Did you say that knowing that you were joining a team? Okay. But I'm from Miami where there's no seasons. There's like hot and not hot. I appreciate that. So I guess it's fair to just follow the months in that case.

Yes, exactly. Precisely. Also here with us is Terrence Woodbury. He's the co-founder of Hit Strategies, which focuses on polling and research of voters of color and other democratically aligned groups. Welcome to the podcast, Terrence. Thanks for having me, Galen. And I will say happy football season, which is what determines seasons in my house. Okay. All right. Fair enough. We've heard that argument before from Chris and Soltis Anderson on this podcast, another pollster. So you're also joining a team of

on that one. So let's dive in. Like I said, of the polling that came out last week, the data that I found most notable or discussion worthy was Biden's decline amongst voters of color. And we are going to get into that. But first,

I want to ask both of you, as the heads of research organizations that focuses on polling, particularly amongst democratically aligned groups, what the first week of silly season was like for the two of you. So maybe, Carlos, kick us off. What was the most compelling data that came out last week in your eyes? That's a great question, because, you know, I'm in, this is the part of the season, and actually, I would say this extends for me fairly late, where I'm

I hate to admit it, because this is the profession which I am, I don't pay a lot of attention to the individual polls. I leave that to my father used to always call me and say like, Oh, yeah, did you see the poll today? And like invariably I hadn't, right. But for people like my dad, it was like therapy. I realized that's also the 538 model people who see it as therapy, but you know, like, use better health.

Like the reality is if you're actually trying to understand where things are at, I think what you get is a broader snapshot of things are close, as you might expect it. There hasn't been some tectonic shift in the electorate. So of the things I've seen recently, I'd say like the overall picture, I think, has been the most compelling. And we'll talk about what The New York Times did, which is highly relevant to the work Terrence and I do. I think that's the most compelling thing I saw last week, even with some caveats. All right, Terrence, how about you? Welcome to silly season. How was it for you?

You know, I kind of think of the Labor Day as, just to keep my football analogies going here, the end of preseason, the beginning of regular season, you know, everything that happened before Labor Day, it's all preseason. It doesn't put points on the board. It's not going to matter as much on election day. But now that we're in the regular season, a couple of things happened last week that are important to me. We started seeing paid media buys, $25 million investment from the Biden campaign towards voters of color. I think that's

a good regular season start, a good first play of the regular season. But also the Republican debates over the last few weeks, I think, gave me one very important data point, and that is no one put a dent in Donald Trump's armor.

And so I am the regular season just beginning to crystallize for me as a Biden Trump rematch. Okay, so maybe Terrence there with the argument that it's not necessarily silly season, there are some regular season components to what is going on. And you'll have the opportunity to make that case throughout this podcast. But for folks who aren't

familiar with what I was referring to in my intro. And for everyone's health, I hope it's very few of you. But did the two of you follow the drama surrounding the Wall Street Journal poll last week and Steve Kornacki's reference to it on air on MSNBC and the podcast Mueller she wrote responding to it? I did not, Gail, and you're going to have to catch me up a little bit here.

Okay, awesome. This is perfect for podcast purposes, because I'll be explaining it to you. And by proxy, the listeners will get familiarized. Carlos, are you familiar? Sadly, I am. Sadly, you are. Okay, so we can tell this story together. First of all, Steve Kornacki on air referenced the Wall Street Journal poll showing Biden and Trump tied at 46%.

Now, in response, viewers, and in particular the folks at Mueller She Wrote, a podcast, criticized Kornacki because the Wall Street Journal poll is conducted in part by Republican pollster Fabrizio Lee and Associates, which is the past and current pollster for Donald Trump.

Kornacki responded saying that, yes, in fact, they do use a Republican pollster and they also use a Democratic pollster, which is GBAO Strategies. And the two of those pollsters together combine their insights or sort of biases or whatever it may be to conduct the Wall Street Journal's polling. And essentially, Kornacki said,

Mueller she wrote was claiming that, you know, this use of the Wall Street Journal poll on air was misinformation and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that it can't be trusted. And then in fact, we shouldn't think of the general election this far away. I don't, what is it? 14 months away as being tied. Carlos, did I leave anything out? I think you've got the long and short of it. I mean, this took place on largely on Twitter or the artist formerly known as Twitter. And it seemed like in

In particular, this other podcast is like podcast on podcast crime. But this other podcast dragged out how much money Fabrizio was making off of Republicans sort of to make this case in trying to debunk this poll. OK, so, Terrence, at first blush.

Since you're uninitiated here, what do you make of this spat? All polling, especially all general election polling this early should be seen as directional and not predictive. No poll that we have seen to date is predictive of who's going to win this election. And frankly, no poll that has neither candidate above 50% is very predictive of who's going to win this election. This is the silly season part where these one or two point differences week after week are

are going to be headline news when frankly, they're still within the margin of error. There's still enough undecided voters to change the direction. And I just, I don't put a lot of credence in this, but it's a fun palace intrigue story to follow through podcasts on Podcast Crime. But maybe to be more frank here, like you're a partisan pollster. And basically Mueller, she wrote, was trying to discredit the Wall Street Journal's polling because a partisan pollster had been involved.

I mean, I know what I make of that. I think it's bulls**t. But what do you make of that? Even as a partisan pollster, it is still in our best interest to have the most accurate polling released to the public. And so I don't suspect that Fabrizio, who I know well and have worked with, I don't suspect that he's putting a partisan lean on these numbers. I do think that it's

That is important in transparency. Those are the kinds of questions that our listeners here should be asking when they are consuming polling information, who conducted it, and the affiliations of those posters. But I don't think that's going to change the outcome of the poll. And I still have confidence in Fabrizio's ability to present nonpartisan data. I wouldn't call it bipartisan, but nonpartisan data. Look, debunking bad polls is really fun. Yeah.

Debunking polls because you don't like what they say is classic shoot the messenger stuff. It's not like this was a wild outlier. This was another poll in a line of polls that showed a close race. And by the way, of course it's close. That's what we should expect at this juncture when you have such a static, rather in some ways, highly polarized electorate. And as Terrence was saying, Tony Fabrizio,

as someone who mostly has worked on the Democratic side, Tony Fabrizio is one of the Republicans I, if not the Republican pollster, I fear the most because I feel like for many years running, he has seen things that the rest of us have not necessarily seen. And I think largely that's meant...

seeing the dark underbelly of the GOP. I mean, this is a guy who was responsible for the Willie Horton ad back in the day. And so he is a perceptive pollster, if not always a benevolent one. And he's matched up here with GBAO's pollster we've worked with for a very long time. These are professionals we're talking about being released under the Wall Street Journal banner.

And again, no outliers there. This is not Rasmussen. There's no reason to believe you had manufactured numbers. There was nothing leading or unfair about the poll in any way. And so, yeah, it's a bad use of polling. All right. So I think we can all agree here that this is a bad use of polling. I appreciate that podcast on podcast crime.

framing. We'll try to avoid it in the future, but we just could not pass this one by. And I will say credit to Steve Kornacki. We reached out to him to see if he would come on. He was like, I'm happy to come on, but I don't really want to engage further in this. I try not to argue with people on Twitter, so I don't want to elevate this beyond where it's already gotten. So I mean, we wish you were on, Steve, but also what a class act. So good use of polling by Steve Kornacki. Good use of

I guess, podcasting and Twitter as well. We have one more poll to get to before we dig into that New York Times data that I have been promoing throughout this entire podcast, which is the CNN poll. So basically it showed every Republican competitor

tied or within the margin of error of Biden in 2024 in general polling, except for Nikki Haley, who was leading Biden by six points, 49% to 43%. Now, I don't know. I mean, there's got a lot of play from the Haley camp and for folks on the Republican side that don't want to see Trump renominated. But did it teach us anything?

Anything maybe more broadly about the electorate and the coalitions that's worth focusing on for people beyond just maybe Nikki Haley boosters? You know, I this I actually do think is a bad use of polling. I think a head to head a head to head of Joe Biden versus anyone on that Republican stage not named Trump.

is a hypothetical that we can't read too much into. These candidates just haven't been very well defined to the American public. They definitely haven't been defined by Democrats in what we call contrasting, where we make sure Americans are very aware of the worst positions that they have.

People just don't know that about Nikki Haley. She hasn't been presented that way or contrasted that way. That said, you know, a head to head of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump is still interesting because there isn't a lot of new information that's going to be introduced about Donald Trump, especially not new negative information that American voters aren't aware of.

Biden, on the other hand, does have quite a bit of room to grow. One thing we're learning in a lot of the focus groups in polling that we're doing is that Americans...

especially the Biden base, are just unaware of the progress that he's been making. And so as we get into the paid media side here, I do think that there's still quite a bit of room for Biden to grow, but also quite a bit of room for Democrats to define the other candidates on that stage if one of them hypothetically makes it through this Republican primary.

Okay, normally I would stop you there and be like, is this the partisan speaking or is this the data person speaking? Which I guess I am stopping and saying that. But I will say that in the New York Times polling, there's also evidence to suggest that there's more room to grow for Biden than Trump.

But I'm specifically curious why you say it's based on education about Biden's achievements versus just really coming to the conclusion that it's a choice between Biden and Trump.

It seems like what's motivating Democratic voters a lot more than a love of Biden or anything that he's done is disliking Trump. And I think pretty sure that's borne out in the polling. Yeah, it depends on which voters, you know, and we'll get to some of this when we get into the erosion that we see amongst Black voters. But specifically Black men and younger Black voters, they aren't as mobilized by the threat of Republicans or the threat of Trump.

It is the progress that's been made and not the promise of what Democrats will do over the next four years.

but the progress of what they have done over the last four years that is the most mobilizing and that they are the least aware of. They just don't know about most of the progress that has happened, especially on the agenda items that are most important to them. And so there is room to grow there. Trump, on the other hand, look, he's leaning into his base. He knows that he's got to get that 47, 48 percent that he was able to win with in 2016. And I don't think he's trying to get much higher than that.

This isn't a Donald Trump campaign that's reaching to the middle and trying to persuade voters in the middle. It's red meat to the base. He's juicing the base trying to get to 47, 48. And he knows that that's enough for him to win again. That was enough for him to win in 2016. Carlos, I'm curious about your take on that CNN poll.

Yeah, I don't think it has any predictive power. But as a snapshot in time, as we're trying to understand the primary and where I think one of the debates, well, it is one of the debates that they are having on the Republican primary side is about electability. It is useful in some ways to see who's getting a pop and who is stacking up against Biden, even if though we understand that it's because Nikki Haley has the spotlight of the moment.

And that shifts very frequently. You can go back to the 2012 primary. You can go back to 2016 primary. They all get their turn in the spotlight. Starting in 2016, it was secondary to Trump, I should say. There's a Trump spotlight and everybody else who's going to be second place. And she has of the moment. You can see actually one of the more interesting things in the CNN poll is looking at the relative matchups that DeSantis, who was the previous guy in the spotlight, is the most polarizing of the figures there. There's the fewest undecideds.

Nikki Haley does a little bit better right now. She had a good, she got good headlines after the debate. And so in that way, I think it's useful in its moment. Again, not predictably, but to understand the current dynamics of the primary, which will shift week to week. Yeah, look, I would say the best use of that poll for Nikki Haley and for any other Republican candidate that is overperforming Donald Trump in a head-to-head is if they were

which I suspect is that many of them are running for vice president right now. And I think that's a very good poll for Nikki Haley if she was running for vice president. Okay, so my take was a little bit different, and I'm curious for your take on my take, which is that it tells us something about the coalitions, which the reason that Nikki Haley is getting to 49% in that poll is because she's winning the majority of college-educated white voters, whereas none of the other Republican candidates are.

Which gets to your point, Terrence, about Trump not sort of reaching towards the middle, so to say. Like Biden, to the extent that he has made gains and was able to win in 2020 and sort of keep Democrats' losses to a minimum in 2022 is in part because of the support that Democrats have picked up amongst Republicans.

college-educated white voters who are high-propensity voters are, you know, centered around some key areas like the Atlanta suburbs or the Phoenix suburbs. I mean, it's probably less important today, but like maybe parts of Florida and also parts of Texas as well. And of course, those same trends you can also see around maybe Detroit or around Milwaukee or around Philadelphia, which are going to be just like very important states in 2024. And

And what it suggests to me is one, Democrats don't have a lock on these voters necessarily. Like if Republicans try to make a pitch to them, they can win them back.

And two, that maybe it's worthwhile because that's a perhaps easier way to win the election for Republicans than doubling down on the base. I take your critique of this that Haley hasn't been defined. And so without that definition, maybe she's free to rack up as many points as possible with this group. But what do you make of that take?

You know, I think it goes back to what I just said, that this is what is going to make Nikki Haley a very strong contender for vice president. Her ability to appeal to a demographic that Donald Trump cannot appeal to. You know, I do think that Joe Biden was able to put together a very different coalition than Hillary Clinton in 16 or Barack Obama in the two previous races. He did much better amongst Democrats.

white amongst seniors than most Democrats usually do. He did much better amongst around the suburbs. Those are areas where Biden has expressed strength, where some of the erosion that we'll talk about in his base have been less critical, mission critical to him because he's doing better with these groups that Democrats normally don't. I

I think that this is going to be the Achilles heel of the campaign. It is this dance between persuading the middle and mobilizing the base and the issues that might be in conflict of those two groups. Out of curiosity, we're going to get to this momentarily, but what do you see those issues as that divide those two groups?

You know, issues like student loan forgiveness, like immigration, things that have been quite urgent on the left, but have been quite...

but are sometimes more decisive along the middle. I really appreciate Terrence's frame about Nikki Haley running for vice president, because we're not really talking about a nominee. Right now, the electorate is sorted by Trump, right? The force of Trump has dispersed everyone into their corners. And that is what is defining the era, right? The Trump coalition. And

And so you think about Nikki Haley and, you know, maybe the Republicans thinking of her as the nominee and they're thinking, OK, you can take all of what Trump had and then add some suburban college educated white voters. When the reality is that Trump is Trump. Right. And so Trump brings all of these non-college white voters, brings them out of the woodwork in a way that none of these other Republicans do. And so the idea that Nikki Haley is going to be additive to that as a standalone nominee is.

I think that we have to question that, right? I think you're talking about Romney 2.0 in meaningful ways, if that's the way you want to think about it. No, I think that's a fair critique. And so then how would you think about this poll that like, maybe it's not necessarily reaching the low propensity, non-college educated white voters, and maybe even low propensity Latino voters who are only going to show up for Trump? Right. No voter at this stage is going to capture...

So the turnout dynamics, which are a really big question here, right, because we do have people in their corners. And so turnout is going to matter a great deal on the margins, as frankly, it always does. And so you can't predict that this far out. It is impossible to see whether the Trump coalition will return for Nikki Haley in a poll this far out. If anything, again, we are just monitoring the week to week.

If there's anything interesting from the CNN poll, frankly, it's another section in the poll that if you look at the right track, wrong direction, which they actually show the time series stretching back to something like the 90s.

You see early 2020, so post-COVID, you see this huge drop-off in the percent of Americans and voters saying that the country is on the right track. And it dropped down to, I think it was like 30s, down to 20s, and it has stayed there in a meaningful way. And that is a huge outlier in the course of this time series for the last two decades, three decades. And it's to say, we're in weird times right

This is unprecedented. So any kind of framework you want to apply on this moment based on past experience is going to be faulty because there are these, because something broke in the Trump era.

And you can't just piece it back together and predict. And there's a lot here that will remain volatile. Yeah. Perhaps like another data point to that is Biden having such a poor approval rating at the midterms, but Democrats not doing so poorly. Is that the kind of thing that you would suggest is a historical and more evidence that we're in weird times that make it difficult to use historical data to apply to our current time?

That is precisely right. That is precisely right. That the numbers we would have expected in the past to be meaningful no longer seem to hold the same weight. And with that, let's move on and talk about that Times data on voters of color.

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In an article last week, Nate Cohn of the New York Times aggregated the responses of voters of color in Times-Siena College polling over the past two years to conclude that Biden has seen a significant decline in support with that group. According to the article, quote, "...on average, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just 53% to 28% amongst registered non-white voters."

It characterizes this as part of a decade-long trend for the Democratic Party, saying that, quote, the results represent a marked deterioration in Biden's support compared with 2020 when he won more than 70 percent of non-white voters.

And it continues, quote, Mr. Biden's tepid support amongst these voters appears to be mostly responsible for the close race in early national surveys, which show Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump all but tied amongst registered voters, as we've discussed, even as Mr. Biden runs as well among white voters as he did four years ago.

There's a lot of data to dig into here. But first and foremost, is this trend in general in line with what you have seen in your own polling and research over the past couple of years? Terrence, let's start with you.

Absolutely. You know, we've been measuring this support, this this erosion of support amongst voters of color since Barack Obama exit the political stage. This is not unique to Joe Biden. This is not a a an individually Biden problem. It's a problem that Democrats have been facing up and down the ballot.

That Republicans have been making a play for for black votes, and it's been effective and the first time I knew that Galen the first time I was hip to the fact that black men in particular we're not just a marginal part of the of the Trump strategy but we're a cornerstone of it.

Holding on to my football references, it was it was during the 2020 Super Bowl when when a commercial ran with Alice Johnson coming on TV, a black woman saying that she had just been released from prison because her president, Donald J. Trump, furloughed her sentence.

It was a $3 million 30-second ad. It was the only ad Donald Trump ran during the 2020 Super Bowl. It wasn't about MAGA. It wasn't about building a wall. It was a Black woman talking about criminal justice reform during the Super Bowl, and I knew right there who she was talking to. She was targeting Black men.

And since then, we have seen considerable investments from Republicans, not just Donald Trump, but Republicans up and down the ballot making coordinated investments into targeting voters of color.

To the point that we have now seen, even in the 2022 cycle, that men of color in particular have become one of the swingiest voters and really do represent the one place where the Trump campaign is trying to reach across the aisle and attract new voters. And we are seeing from this poll and from a lot of the polling that his strategy has been doing that it's been quite effective.

I agree with Terrence. Terrence and I are often on panels together trying to alert people to these very dynamics, and it's been underway for a few years. So I'd say what Nate Cohn was reporting is consistent with what we have seen as well. What I'd say is

There was a shift, right? In 2020, Trump makes these gains among Latino voters. Coming into the midterms, there seems to be some gains for Republicans among Black and AAPI voters in certain places. And it's not exactly like things have settled down since 2020.

We're still very much in this uncertain post 2020 period. That said, it's not like the trend is linear. It's not like Republicans, like Latinos and other non-white voters are just in a linear way flocking toward Republicans. The GOP didn't capitalize on these dynamics in 2022 in the midterms outside of Florida, right? So the campaigns, candidates still really, really matter. The issue environment still matters. But what there still is, is volatility, right?

There's still a lot of volatility. And the key voters here are those who are less likely to vote. So it is low propensity voters,

who largely are responsible for this gains that Trump made among Latino voters in 2020. And they are the wild cards now. When we talk about swing voters, you tend to think of somebody who's, I don't know, the old fashioned idea of like someone who's reading the newspaper every day and like considering all the information, deciding who they're going to vote. It tends to actually be people who aren't very plugged into politics, aren't paying a lot of attention. And in addition to deciding who to vote for, they're deciding whether to vote at all.

And it is among those kinds of voters that you're seeing the most movement. I think the big question is, so why is this so over-indexed among non-white voters that you see this kind of movement, if really the dynamic is that it's more peripheral voters? Right. I mean, I think there's a couple takes here. Like Terrence painted a picture where Republicans have made very specific appeals on issues that maybe are more applicable to the black community, like criminal justice, and

And that's sort of what's winning folks over. And I don't know what exactly you could say would be the case amongst Latino voters, but maybe it's socialism or whatever it may be. I mean, the other way of looking at this is a more macro way, which is this is just following a trend we've already seen amongst the broader electorate of non-college educated voters.

white voters really flocking towards the Republican Party or, you know, voters without a four-year college degree, and that it's maybe taken a little longer because the relationship between the Democratic Party and voters of color is just stronger, but that this is now sort of repeating itself with voters of color as well, and that it may be the same exact things that attracted white voters without a four-year degree to

to Trump as it is now. And like, there's a lot of debate there because you'd say, okay, well, immigration or maybe sort of some racial animus, would you really apply that to voters of color or whatever? And maybe the answer is no. But I'm curious between the micro, you know, those specific appeals and the macro, just broader demographic trends taking time to work themselves out through the electorate, which do you think is more of a, which do you think is a better explanation?

Okay, I have to hit because you get one of my pet peeves. One of my pet peeves is making this all about non-college when it comes to Latinos or other non-white voters. So it is true that the diploma divide is a very effective cleavage to use when studying white voters.

I find that among Latino voters, it obscures more than it clarifies. Something like 85% of Latino voters are non-college, right? It is not as helpful a divide as people think it is because it's useful in other parts of the electorate. People have tried to shoehorn it on the Latino side. And it's actually not, cannot be consistently applied.

It tends to be more about engagement. When I hear people say non-college Latinos, what they really just mean is swing Latinos. They're saying that the swingiest part of Latino voters are the most likely to swing. That's what I'm hearing. It's redundant. That said, of course, there is something there. There are class and culture divides that are embedded in this. But what I think, why I think you are seeing this, where I think the macro and the micro meet, is the way the Democratic coalition is built,

Democrats have not won a majority of white voters for a very, very long time. They win by trying to stop bleeding among certain white voters and then winning an astronomical, unsustainably high level of support among especially black voters, but then also Latino, AAPI, and other voters. It is incredibly high. Among every racial and ethnic group in this country, there's going to be, because we're all normal human beings, a big set of people who are conflicted, who have mixed views of both parties.

It happens because of the ways the parties have evolved, because of issues, because of identity lens that Black Latino voters who are conflicted, who have mixed views, break overwhelmingly for Democrats, overwhelmingly. But the conflict doesn't go away altogether. And so when a party decides that they see an opening, when Republicans see there is this opening, it's because here you have, again, an unsustainably high level of support. It's where there is the more room for growth. And so when they actually try to compete for those votes,

instead of as many times they did in the past saying like, those aren't our voters, we're not going to get them. When they actually try to get those votes, there are votes there for them to get. I think the way I think about Latinos these days is conflicted Latinos are

break all things being equal for Democrats, but are open to supporting Republicans on a case-by-case basis. And that's what we see in a moment with someone like Trump. And I'll say thank you, Carlos, for catching me on the education thing. So education was a cleavage in this New York Times-Siena College polling, for sure. But actually, the biggest cleavage was income. So lower-income voters of color

were the biggest source of decline in support for Biden. So maybe there's still some class issue at play here, but the education is less of a useful measure in this case. But Terrence, I'm curious for your thoughts on all of this.

Yeah, you know, we are observing the same thing amongst black voters, that college education is not the direct correlation between Republican or Democratic support as it is amongst white voters, when in fact the biggest determinant variables are gender and age.

We talk a lot about the gender gap between Black men and Black women. Black men supported, 17% of Black men supported Republicans in 2022. But we don't talk enough about the generation gap, that 17% of Black voters under the age of 50 also supported Republicans in 2022. I always say Black seniors are my favorite voters in the electorate because we know they're going to vote and we know who they're going to vote for every time.

That's just not true of this of this younger of the younger counterparts. And so I do think that that that there is some cleaving happening here. But when we begin to segment the black electorate beyond just demographics, you know, we do some some clustering and segmenting.

And there are these two groups in the middle of this cluster, this about 50 percent of black voters are millennial and Gen Z. You know, this is the potential for Democrats is in this younger electorate, this under 50 electorate. But that's also where the most frustration is. And Republicans are leaning into that. And I say that this is not just a Biden problem because it's not just Trump that's making these investments. We see Democrats.

Republicans like Ron DeSantis and Tom Tillis also doubling their support amongst Black men and amongst younger Black voters. And that is where I'm most focused heading into 2024 and where I think that they have the most potential to continue eroding that Black base. Okay, so to answer the question here, you don't think this is just an extension of macro trends that we have seen starting

Or that it's like maybe a bit of both? I guess, how would you characterize when you have to sort of break it down between the trends in class that we've seen over the past decade plus between the two parties versus specific appeals that Republicans are making to pick up that Black support or the Latino support?

I think it is overwhelmingly the specific appeals that Republicans are making. I keep saying that the biggest difference here, as we see Republicans like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Tom Tillis doubling their support amongst Black men and younger Black voters, the biggest difference is not in their policies, it's not in their message. The biggest difference is that they're trying to.

that they're spending money talking to them, in many cases for the first time. And to Carlos's point, there are receptive voices, receptive ears there that they just hadn't been talking to before. I think, again, the macroscopic enables, facilitates the microscopic. There are

larger trends at play and then they're there to be taken advantage of or not taken advantage of, right? To be capitalized or not to be capitalized. I think though, again, a lot of what we're talking about is post-Obama era.

That is, what is our reference point? When we think about what Black support, quote unquote, should be, what Latino support, quote unquote, should be, what are we comparing to, right? And in some ways, we're comparing to eras where it was incredibly high. For in the Latino case, you know, you had these immigration debates in 2006, 2007, that kind of defined a snapshot of the GOP among Latinos. I'm not welcomed over there. That rhetoric held for about 10 years, right? But that was, in some ways, kind of artificially high.

So, again, I don't think there's a linear trend going on here. I think there are macroscopic conditions. I think in the case of 2020, what we saw is because of the way COVID played out, the economy, the COVID era economy sort of supplanting other concerns.

Where 2016 was much more of an identity question, in 2020 you had the economy going forward. If it was going to be a referendum on the economy, Trump was going to do better among Latino voters. And to that point, there's another issue that I think has this type of coalescing effect, could have this type of coalescing effect amongst this multiracial coalition that Republicans are attempting to splinter, and that is racism. I mean...

You have, as Republicans continue to embrace not only racist, but racism, they are effectively making racism a partisan issue.

And what is, what's, what's the big opportunity there is that combating racism has been a number one issue for Black and AAPI voters since 2020 and a top three issue for Latino voters. And that if Democrats really invested here and made racism a top, combating racism and

and uniting the country, restoring the soul of America. That if Democrats really did that, then they have an opportunity to attract that multiracial coalition that we really saw emerging after the summer of 2020, the summer of unrest, when we saw those protests, the complexion of the protests changing, and the generational shift in those protests, that it was young people

versus racism, you know, and that I think is the opportunity that Democrats have. And again, they're saying a lot of the right things and doing a lot of the right things on issues of race and justice. But unfortunately, a lot of the voters that they have to mobilize here just are not hearing it.

What I'm curious about here is, right, I think what I get a lot, I'm sure you get this question a lot too, right, which is how is it that the Republicans can make any gains at all when you have sort of the most racist president of modern times in office? How does, I don't know, Ron DeSantis in Florida make gains among Hispanic voters in spite of the fact that he's, you know, busing migrants to other states, right? How does all of this, how is it they are overcoming it? And there's this weird phenomenon that you're encountering is,

there was an SNL skit about this actually after Trump was elected. I think it was Chappelle hosting. And it's like Chappelle watching as kind of an audience of mostly white people react to the Trump era and are like shocked that all of these things are possible. But that among black Latino voters, there's less surprise at what is possible in this country, right? There's less shock at the worst case scenarios. And so what we've started to see in focus groups and we're trying to chase down is kind of a rejection of the hyperbole

It is a much more pragmatic view of things of saying, listen, we know the bad things that certain politicians are capable of. Right now, I'm just trying to think what's going to make it more likely for me to be able to afford next week's grocery bill.

and really bringing it down to that level. That is what we have seen. The idea of Republicans being a threat to free and fair elections among the swingiest Latino voters, it just doesn't resonate at all. These ideas, much more high-minded threats

don't seem to land. Dobbs did land because it felt like a very imminent, urgent threat. But right now, talking about a national abortion ban, I don't see it resonating with Latinos the way maybe you would expect it to based on how Latinos reacted to Dobbs, for example. Wait, it actually sounds like you're saying two different things here, which is one, Terrence is saying racism is...

a priority for voters of color and that Democrats, if they want to reverse their losses, would do well to make it a priority in how they talk in politics, etc. But you're saying that it is the economy and pocketbook issues are attracting voters to Republicans.

despite it all. And so they say like, okay, we know that there's racism in America, or there may be these biases, or we might not like the way that Republicans talk about certain things. But that's not my priority right now. I'm hearing two different things.

Right. I'm questioning Terrence's position and saying I'm not sure. I think there's actually some uncertainty in this regard where I think that we can we can Democrats and lob attacks about racism to Republicans all day long. But the people are wanting to know, is this credible? Right. Is there like an imminent threat? And how do you tie that imminent threat to what me and my family are going through right now? Yeah. You know, look, I and maybe I should reposition this. It's less about.

The position here is less about racism and more about unity, right? Because the imminent threat that I hear in focus groups, the first question we ask in every focus group, Galen, is what keeps you up at night? What's the greatest threat facing the country? What are you scared of for your children's future? I mean, they are blatantly saying civil war, blatantly. And I have to clarify, when you say civil war, do you mean debate? Are these like

Are these reliable Democratic voters or are these marginal voters? Because that sounds like something I would hear from a very reliable Democratic voter, not somebody who's like, if you're worried about civil war, you're probably not like being like, oh, I'm probably not going to vote in this election. You know, it's just not worth my time.

No, this is along the margins. Americans are afraid after seeing an insurrection of people climbing the walls of the Capitol, even before that, Americans are afraid that the rhetoric has become so incendiary and so charged that there will be political violence.

And that is and we're hearing that more and more. And that is where I think, look, I'm not saying that Democrats just have to be anti-racist. I'm saying that the last time Democrats did well with a coalition that attracted a lot of suburban that attracted the young and diverse coalition, a lot of suburban moderate voters. It was a message of unity of yes, we can.

A message of us overcoming our biggest differences, a message of us not just being a collection of red states and blue states and purple states, but the United States, that there's a message there that is aspirational, that America wants to believe. And look, I am convinced, and I think polling plays this out, that Americans really don't like racism, not just politically.

Americans of color. Americans generally don't like racism. And when confronted with the choice between racism and unity, I believe that we have an overwhelmingly majority opinion here. We just have to lean into that and make that the choice. And I would also argue that Dobbs resonated so much, not just because of the threat. Dobbs resonated because we spent hundreds of millions of dollars making sure it resonated.

And that is what I would recommend here is that if we can make the choice of this election about a future where our diversity is our strength and our differences are what is going to make us competitive in the world versus the vision that I think Republicans are putting forward, then that is a majority coalition opinion. Hillary Clinton tried that in 2016, and I don't know that it worked.

Hillary Clinton was a uniquely divisive figure, though. And this is the difference that like when Joe Biden talks about restoring the soul of America, America believed him. You know, Hillary Clinton, they just didn't like her. And that's not Joe Biden's problem. Even amongst his base, the base that's splintering, they don't not like him. They're just frustrated. And I think that this is a part of how you bring a part of how you bring them back.

Carlos is lost in pensive thought. I'm riddling it out because look, to some extent, and by the way, obviously my object of study is Latino voters. And we think a lot about threat and how voters perceive threat. And I will say, for example, right now, what is an incredibly salient issue, incredibly salient in a way that continues to surprise us in every single poll is gun violence. Especially post-Uvalde, it went up and stayed up. And that is a, when we talk about threat,

That's like a real sense of threat, like a threat to my imminent safety of my children. And I think for Latino voters right now, when we think about things that can be thought of as a group, because as we said many times, Latino voters are not extraterrestrials. They exist in the same community as everybody else, have the same concerns as everybody else. But when we think about where the group comes into play, it is where the sense of, well, I am going to be worse off in some way because I'm Latino.

And I think gun violence is one way where there is a sense of, well, who's being targeted in the Walmart shooting in El Paso? Who is being targeted in some of these other shootings as well? Who's kind of more at risk in these situations? I think that might be one way in which group comes in. You know, there hasn't been a fight on immigration in a bit. There's been a fight about the border. The border is different. I want to be very clear. Border is about public safety, law and order, what have you. There hasn't been a fight about who gets to belong in this country.

There's a fight about Dream Act. If anything, Vivek is now picking this by saying that we should be deporting U.S. born children of undocumented immigrants. Right. I don't that is taking Republicans into a different terrain that would bring them back to the kinds of divisions we saw among Latino voters in the during the Obama era. Right. In the absence of, though, any real debate on immigration or progress on it.

Again, something like the economy rises to the top. So I don't see, this is why I'm riddling this out because I don't see racism per se and calling it out being a thing among Latinos unless you can connect it to another issue that feels highly salient right now. And for example, immigration is not salient. Yeah, I mean, look, I would argue that I think you're right, Carlos, that gun violence is one of those opportunity issues.

I hate to call gun violence an opportunity, but it is an issue where if Democrats can frame the election around a choice on gun policy, we win that debate. We have an overwhelmingly majority position there. But I do think that the imminent threat that you talk about is one that has always been uniquely felt by Black voters.

And one that, you know, even what we just saw in Jacksonville, in the Jacksonville shooting, in the Topps Buffalo shooting, in the Tree of Life shooting. And then we also see post-2020 that AAPI voters, post-COVID, AAPI voters expressing even higher urgency around issues of racial violence.

And I think that this administration has a hell of a record prosecuting the murders of all of the shootings that I just listed with federal hate crimes prosecution. But that's just not a story that they're willing to make this election about. Yeah. I mean, so I should say here, because we haven't mentioned it, that the New York Times didn't have enough data to come to conclusions about specifically Asian American voters. Just because the sample wasn't large enough, the margins of error would be too big. But of course, we have seen...

When looking at some of the data that gives us the best hint about trends like overwhelmingly Asian neighborhoods in New York and other cities that have large Asian communities, that's actually where we've seen some of the largest shifts towards Trump.

Well, in 2020 in particular, we actually talked about this during a live show on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, which was the neighborhood in New York City in Manhattan that shifted the most in 2020 was Two Bridges Chinatown area in New York City. So I'll say that as well in terms of whether there is a post-COVID change or not. It seems like the post-COVID change, at least amongst the Asian community that we have seen in big cities, is towards Republicans.

Now, we've gotten into the why. I mean, you've sort of given some advice on, you know, if you're a Democrat and you want to stop this, what would you do? I want to make sure we nail down on the why here. It sounds like Carlos-

You're suggesting that a lot of it is economic. And I want to quote the Times article here and just see if you all agree. It says, Issues like abortion and threats to democracy may also do less to guard against additional losses among Black and Hispanic voters who tend to be more conservative than white Biden voters. They may also do less to satisfy voters living paycheck to paycheck.

Mr. Biden is underperforming most among non-white voters, making less than $100,000 per year, at least temporarily erasing the century-old tendency for Democrats to fare better among lower-income than higher-income non-white voters.

So it sounds like they're calling out pocketbook issues. Do you have any critiques of that? I mean, they bring up abortion in that as well, threats to democracy, which we have discussed. Is there anything you'd like to add or subtract from the sort of conclusions that they made about the why? In an otherwise great article, the abortion line was one of those that bugged me just because it's not what we've seen. We did put out our postmortem after the 22 midterms.

We pointed out that, in fact, there is this difference among the Latinos who voted in the midterms versus those who didn't. And it's among the non-voters, which is by the way like seven in 10 Latinos, among whom there is the most opportunity for Republicans and Trump in the presidential race.

But those non-voters are not ideologically consistent in the ways that I think an article like this portrays. You get a picture of like a very conservative group of people. In reality, what we found is the non-voters were more opposing of Dobbs than the regular voters. Among the non-voters, you had, again, more rejection toward these abortion bans than you did among the voters. At the same time that when you ask, who do you trust more on inflation and rising costs?

The non-voters trusted Republicans more than the voters did. So again, these voters on the periphery, voters who are not super plugged into politics, do trust Republicans more on inflation. However, when you ask about their concerns about Republicans, the top concern is that Republicans prioritize the rich over working people. And so there is a little bit of a tug of war. It doesn't feel consistent because it's not. You're talking about voters who aren't following the day in and day out. They are getting a basic snapshot. They are saying, I know that I am going through a tough time.

It is the economy, but it is the cultural side of the economy. It's like, who understands where me and my family are coming from and feeling like politicians don't?

and thus feeling like the politicians in charge don't. But when it comes time to make a choice, I think it will be, as we saw in the midterms, a little bit different, where it's like, well, do I think that the Republicans are going to be looking out for me more in this moment in the way that I, especially this particular candidate, when you talk about Senate races, so on and so forth. But it is to say, I think the overall diagnosis is right, but

We should not assume that non-voters in some ways are more conservative than the others. It is just that they are concerned. They're worried about security in multiple ways. And they just want to know who's going to look out for me and my family and who's looking at things in the way that I look at them. Yeah, you know, Carlos, I'm seeing the same thing. And I often wonder when I hear this analysis that Black voters are more conservative than

I just wonder what issues they're talking about, because when we look at issues like climate change, abortion, gun control, Black voters are to the left of Democrats on many of these issues. They want to go further on gun control on many of these issues. Now, that said, there are some progressive issues like gay marriage, like a lot of LGBTQ issues, family values issues, where...

It's not that Black voters are simply more conservative, but that we are framing many of these issues, many progressive issues, and not framing them through Black values. For example, we've done message testing that shows that when you frame abortion as God granted all of us freedom of choice, and why should government grant women any less than that?

Well, that's a very religious value on a very progressive issue. And I think that there's an opportunity for Democrats to do a lot more of that, to bring voters of color along on some of these progressive issues that they may not naturally be aligned with. On the side of the economy, though, I do think that this is another place where we have a messaging problem, that the Democratic messaging on the economy, which is often focused on poverty reduction as opposed to wealth creation,

is where they're missing a lot of men of color who just, even when they are low income, do not consider themselves poor and do not think that those policies are for them. Interesting. So we've gotten to the point where a lot of these debates oftentimes end up amongst partisans, which is, is this just a messaging issue or is the party...

wrong or doesn't have some of the wrong policies or whatnot if it's trying to win over certain people.

And obviously, people who are committed to one party or the other are always going to say it's a messaging issue. We have all the right issues. We have all the right positions. Like, why would we change anything that we're doing in the party? I mean, is that is do you really think that like, do you really think that what plagues the Democratic Party is all just messaging? No, there are some positions that are that are less popular with the broad coalition. But overwhelmingly on these hot button issues.

guns, immigration, even economy, where Democrats are getting their asses kicked on which party you trust the most. Our Democratic policies are extremely popular. It is the way that we are delivering and messaging them. So I do think that this is a messaging problem. I'm not going to say the Democrats are on the right side of every issue.

especially with voters of color where they are often, where they're sometimes to the left of voters of color that they haven't brought along this journey. But messaging will go a long way to solve most of the erosion that we've seen. I will say, when you hear these critiques of Democrats and the ways in which Democrats need to resonate more with normies and where that might fit on the issue landscape, a lot of what ends up getting described seems to define Joe Biden almost perfectly.

So there's a little bit of a disconnect, right? In the sense that Joe Biden is at the kind of center or moderate position, especially in how he talks a lot about these things. It's just that people live in their bubbles and they're not seeing things the way Biden talks about them. They're seeing them as filtered through whatever media bubble they exist in. I think a lot of it right now is not about the instrumental piece. It is not about actually tracking people.

metrics, because by those measures, the economy is doing incredibly well. It's more symbolic at this point. A lot of the fights that are being had are more symbolic. It's a lot about feeling who is fighting for me, who is delivering for me in this moment.

And that's where, again, a lot of it I think is perception more so than it is any particular realities. And so there are things to be done. I think there clearly are more, there is more for the Democrats to do. I don't think Democrats are meeting these voters at where they're at either kind of physically, like literally, like going to geographies that tend to be neglected.

Or in some ways, virtually in the online spaces they're occupying, in the ways in which they talk about these issues. I think there is a disconnect in that way. But I think it ends up being more symbolic, perceptive than it is instrumental at this juncture. So here we may be talking about the sort of the vibes. Yeah.

vibes based elections decisions that can't be easily described by policy positions. And to that point, you know, what you're saying about Biden, maybe part of that is that maybe Biden does a lot less to define the Democratic Party than Trump does to define the Republican Party. Right. Like when you think about the Democratic Party, do you just think about Joe Biden or do you also think about maybe some of the like less popular? I mean, I don't know. Not that Trump is popular, but like

If your argument is that Biden's positioning sort of on the left-right spectrum or whatever would be popular amongst voters, then maybe his challenge is to make himself more visible. And maybe that's difficult given his age and other things as well. Or maybe, yeah, maybe you're seeing Democrats not as Joe Biden, but as like your crazy liberal high school classmate that you see on Facebook all the time. You know, I think what people consider an avatar for the Democratic Party-

Well, what people consider an avatar for the Democratic Party has in some ways shifted. But you went to the taboo place. So I feel like we should ride that out. Oh, yeah. Ooh, yeah. Let's do it. Let's dive in. So we haven't talked about age. I don't feel like it's a taboo. I'm happy to talk about age. I think that age is maybe less important than perceived capacity. So, like, obviously, when you compare...

Joe Biden to Bernie Sanders, for example, they're basically the same age, but Bernie Sanders seems a lot more energetic and out there and obviously attracted a lot of young voters when he was running as a quite old person. So I think what people are actually responding to is the way that they see Joe Biden speak and

and his appearances when he does appear, when he reads off of note cards, when he reads speeches, like all of that stuff. It's like undeniable. I know that like during 2020, they made a lot of how he did have a stutter earlier on in life. But like, if you just compare any of his speeches to speeches that he gave as vice president, it's just obvious that there's a big difference in like the way that he's performing. And I say performing as in like rewiring

rhetoric is performance. I have known nothing about what his internal health situation is like at all beyond what the doctors say. So going just off of performance, and politics is a lot about performance, I think that's what people are reacting to, not specifically a number, which is why when people are just like, well, Trump is old too, it might not actually do the same. It might not answer the question for people. I think it's more a question of vitality. And

Why I wanted to take care of it here, by the way, was because, you know, I think we have to talk about it because it is the simplest explanation for what some of what we are seeing. Right. First of all, Republicans have made it central. Republicans allude to it all the time. It does come out in focus groups when you talk about what the basic snapshot people have of politicians that they really can't find other issues with Biden. They just find this. Right. So this is this is what what Republicans have zeroed in on. It is the focus of jokes. If you look at like the SNL skit level impression, right.

It's what people focus on much in the way they did, by the way, with Reagan toward the end of Reagan. Right. That was like the caricature of Reagan. But, you know, if we look at this objectively, Biden has been incredibly productive. Right. When you look at his jobs reports, they have been historic, right?

And so this is the one thing, right? This is the one thing that helps kind of explain why approvals are a little bit lower is because people aren't seeing the vitality. They're not seeing the presence, even though they are seeing the exact results that they're telling us that they want to see. And so I think the question is, is he productive in spite of his age or is he productive because of his age?

And I think this is the argument that you're starting to hear Biden himself make, which is that this is about the experience and perspective that he brings. Right. And I think we have to give the Biden team credit, which is we can all critique them and we all have.

at different points in time, going back to the primary, Democratic primary, going back to the 2020 general, going to the midterms, going to several legislative fights, where we've always underestimated them and thought that they were out of touch. But in reality, they seem to be more in touch with where the electorate was or where Congress was. And I've been able to get a lot of things done. And so I think this is

Who's we here? I think it's worth them leaning into it. We is the, what do you call it? Like the Ponderati, right? Like it's those of us who observe elections, talk about elections, come on these podcasts and talk about elections. When you talk, the commentariat, right? When we talk about the election, like he has been underestimated throughout, right? I think Twitter has always underestimated Joe Biden, right? And I think to Biden's credit and his team's credit, they have been able to kind of tune out

that kind of discussion. And I think some part of it is related to experience and perspective. And I think that has to do with being around a lot longer. And I think that's what we'll see them leaning into a lot more. Okay. So that's the message, the message part of the age thing. Where I'm coming back to this is like, I think that we can't ignore it as the simplest explanation. We are here torturing ourselves over millions of reasons that approval ratings might not track

with the realities of the presidency. And I think this is the most obvious one. And so for Democrats, it probably behooves Democrats to actually, as Biden has started to do, to lean into it and to address it directly because people are going to have to do it at their kitchen tables.

But why would age influence the opinions of voters of color more than white voters? Because as the article started, as I read at the top, that while he has he hasn't seen a decline in support amongst white voters and actually in some polls suggesting that he's seen an increase in support amongst white voters while he's seen this notable decline amongst voters of color. We're talking about younger voters who who tend to be lower propensity. And that is over over indexes on non-white voters. That's right. That's right.

And look, I would agree that the vitality and the capacity of Joe Biden is much more important than his age. In transparency, I'm also doing Barbara Lee's race in California, who's 77 years old.

I mean, we introduce her in focus group after focus group after focus group. It doesn't even come up. We have to probe age. This in a race where the age of the incumbent is the reason that this election is happening, you know? And so I do think that it's far beyond just the number. And this is where I think a couple, I think Democrats are going to have to do a couple of things. One, lean into it, lean into his age, lean into what he's been able to accomplish, you

But also they're going to do some repositioning the hero here that Joe Biden won't be the only hero of this story. And when, in fact, as opposed to Joe Biden has gotten X, you know, this laundry list of things done. This is, again, where we adopt from his story.

From Barack Obama, what we were able to get done because of your votes, we were able to pass child tax credits and climate change reform and insert, insert, insert. But that's going to have to be a broader message carried beyond just Joe Biden and about what the coalition is able to do to continue the progress that we've already started. All right.

We are running out of time, but I want to make sure that we get to this one final poll because it is so relevant to everything that we've been talking about here.

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USA Today and Suffolk University conducted a poll specifically of unlikely voters. This includes registered voters who say they are unlikely to vote in 2024, as well as people who are eligible to vote but not registered. For some context on who that includes, here's a quote from USA Today. In 2020, two-thirds of eligible voters cast ballots. The

the highest turnout since 1900. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 40 million didn't vote, including almost 13 million who were registered and then another 26 million who weren't registered. Here's what the poll showed. Quote, registered voters who say they aren't likely to go to the polls back Trump over Biden by nearly 20 percentage points, 32% to 13%, with 27% supporting a third party or other candidate.

Citizens who are eligible to vote but haven't registered also favor Trump by a close to two to one margin. So 28% to 15% and a similar percentage also support another candidate. I thought this was a really unique use of polling. I'm just curious for you guys, was it a good or bad use? Like polling people who basically say they're not going to vote or aren't even registered to vote may be an interesting approach if what you're trying to get at is who might win an election. But did you think this was a good or bad use of polling?

I personally think this is a good use of polling. You know, whoever the next president is going to be, they're the president of all Americans and not just voting Americans. And so I think it's important that we register and measure those opinions. Although we all know how hard and expensive it is to poll non-voters, unregistered or inactive voters. They're just harder to get on the phone, harder to keep on the phone, harder to complete. But it's a worthy investment. Look, the irony in this to me is,

Despite the GOP, with the GOP, specifically Trump, appearing to do much better with non-registered or inactive voters, that would seem to imply that they wanted to expand the electorate, allowing as many people to vote as possible if they have this strength amongst non-voters, when in fact their policies seem to be doing the exact opposite. Right.

And same with Democrats, that this would imply that while Democrats, many of the candidates and organizations that I work with, the Democratic organizations I work with, are laser focused on structural barriers like

like ID requirements or early voting access or polling places, that with this article, with this poll shows that it's in fact the attitudinal barriers, that they don't believe voting matters, that they don't think it changes things, that they don't trust the candidates, that those are the things that Democrats need to be more laser focused on beyond just the structural barriers that are not actually preventing folks that are not voting, who are just making a choice to not vote. - I would repeat, I love this poll.

And to echo what Terrence said, it's hard to pull. It's hard to pull non-voters. It's hard to get enough completes. It's hard to get the weights right, like what benchmarks are you using? And yet, like, it's so important to do because in a electorate that is otherwise can feel very static.

where people seem to have chosen their corners. This is where the unpredictability most comes in, is in who is going to end up voting and where they are going to vote. In this glut of polling, of all this election polling that just shows the same race over and over again, it's a close race, a few points here, a few points there, I think it's really valuable to glance to another part of the electorate. I think especially because there's this old idea about turnout that you were alluding to, Terrence, which is that if you get higher turnout, it automatically benefits Democrats.

I think this shows that's not necessarily true. It's not necessarily true. It is still true that an electorate that is less white benefits Democrats more or hurts Republicans more because even though non-voting or less likely voting Latinos support Democrats by a smaller margin, they still support them by a higher margin than their white peers.

And so still getting any kind of Latino black voter whose low propensity to vote is still net gain for Democrats overall. But it is to say there is still a lot of for both parties, a lot of persuasion to be done among those who are traditionally considered just a mobilization universe. And I'll say lastly, it's the stakes are really high for pollsters in properly calibrating kind of likely voter screens as we get closer to the election.

And so stuff like this is pretty valuable as well. I think we have to think long and hard about who we think is going to show up. And I think a lot of the error we saw in some of the last presidentials was introduced by these likely voter screens and people cutting the boundaries

erroneously or in the wrong places. Yeah, I'll say, in fact, that Nate Cohn's write-up in The Times that we just spent a bunch of time talking about at the end says, we may not end up seeing these margins on election day, but they may, in some ways, influence the election because of who ends up turning out. And to that point, there are two more data points that I want to bring up from this article. So

USA Today and Suffolk also conducted this poll of unlikely voters back in 2012 and found, similar to what you were saying, that they supported Obama over Romney 48% to 18%. So the case that high turnout elections were better for Democrats was certainly the case. Like it had been the case for quite some time under perhaps different coalitions. And again, this polling can be tricky, so I'm not exactly sure if we should sort of

imagine that these margins are exactly so, but still that's a very big difference. And the other way that this relates to what we were talking about, they say unlikely voters, quote, are disproportionately people of color. While exit polls of voters found that whites comprised 67% of the electorate in 2020, they were only 51% of the non-voters in this survey. So this kind of gets at maybe exactly what we were talking about. These lower propensity voters of color may be the likeliest folks to support

Republicans. Still not a majority of them, though, right? Just better margins. Yes. We're still not talking about majority. We're talking about Republicans shaving off some margins among these groups. Yeah. You know, it reminds me of a quote I heard in a focus group in Florida at the end of the 2022 cycle from a young Black man in Dade County who said that his hood didn't get any better under Obama. It didn't get any worse under Trump. So what do any of these presidents have to do with me?

That's the cynicism of the voter, the frustration of the respondents in this poll that have made a choice to withdraw from the electorate. Not they forgot to vote, not they didn't know there was an election. They have made a choice to withdraw. And that's a lot of the quotes that you hear in this election. The reason I think that Trump is appealing to these voters, and it's similar to why Obama appealed to these voters, is because a message of how the system is broken appeals to people that are closest to the pain.

And that's, that's Trump's message that the system is broken, drain the swamp. The problem is, is, is politics and politicians. And that was very similar to the Obama message. Something is broken in Washington and we have to go there and fix it and unite it. They were, they, their fixes were very different, but they were both, uh, they both anchored their message in, um,

in the problem with the system. I think that is a challenge that Democrats have in this cycle, where defending democracy is one of the leading messages of the cycle. And that's tough. It's tough to mobilize voters on defending democracy, especially the respondents in this poll, when they've had mixed results from democracy, when it hasn't really worked for them that well.

Well, in fact, perhaps the irony for Republicans here is that, to read another quote, Donald Trump's argument that the 2020 election was rigged has reinforced the views of Americans who are already disenchanted about politics. One factor in their inclination not to cast a vote next year, that is a vote they would probably cast for him. So,

unlikely voters are more likely to agree with Donald Trump about the 2020 election being rigged. They are also more likely to support him. Isn't it ironic, don't you think? It's been said that you don't talk about election fraud a lot as you get close to elections because in some ways it's demobilizing. If you tell people, I think your vote's not going to count, they're less likely to go through the effort of voting. So here you've had Trump for the last

Three years? Actually, if you think about like five years, just talking about election fraud, election fraud. I mean, you've been talking about election fraud since before the 2016 election, for sure. That's right. That's right. Rigged elections, rigged elections, rigged elections. And so it's somewhat ironic, right, that at the end of the day, it is his voters who are the ones who are most hearing that and who might be taking home the message, well, maybe this isn't worth turning out for.

All right. Any final thoughts? This has been a really good conversation. I've learned plenty and I've really enjoyed hearing your insights. Thank you. Always glad to be back, Galen. Especially good to be on with Terrence. And I just say, again, don't use polling as therapy. It's bound to disappoint you.

It's not a crystal ball, right? But it is the research, if done well, like this USA Today poll, I think is a way to get a check in on people who live outside of your own bubble. But I would urge people sort of look at the polling more broadly, pay less attention to national, pay more attention to states, pay more attention to subgroups. It is among Latino, Black, AAPI voters where you have the most dynamism. And so it is, I don't think it's a coincidence that's what we're talking about here today.

All right. Well, we'll definitely have to get both of you back on together at a future point in time. I've really appreciated this again. So thank you. My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow and Cameron Chortavian are in the control room. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.