"If the election were held today, she'd win"

What a top GOP consultant is seeing in their internal polling

Sep 28, 2024

Welcome to the weekend edition of The Experiment, your official hopepunk newsletter. If you’d like to support my work, become a paid subscriber or check out the options below. But even if you don’t, this bugga free. Thanks for reading!

Have I ever told you about my friend… Well, I can’t tell you his name, now can I? My friend consults for some of the top campaigns and causes in the Republican Party, but trust me, you’d like him. He prioritizes seeing things clearly and winning above party loyalty and polishing his reputation. He won’t go on cable TV and toe the line. What he will do is tell you the truth in private so you can go out and win a race, a quality that makes him in high demand.

We became friends when I was still in politics because despite our partisan difference we shared an excitement of finding the true thing in a room full of ideology and personal agendas. Like many in the political profession, he’s profane and drinks enthusiastically, and while I barely trust him around my wife, I trust him to tell me the truth, and he trusts me not to burn him. So as I found myself increasingly drunk on anecdotal polling that confirmed my bias that Kamala Harris could be headed to a comfortable win, I needed my Republican friend (who had access to the best internal polling numbers) to tell me what their campaigns are talking about in private.

He was exhausted when we managed to connect, through that’s to be expected this late in election season. He was up until 3am the night before. “I require less sleep than most people,” he said, but with less than two months till Election Day, everybody he knows is pulling long hours, too. “It’s that time of year.”

I asked him what he’s seeing in his polling, and at first it sounded much like what Republicans were saying in public. “There was a sugar high for Kamala when Biden withdrew, and she ran a very well-done positive ad campaign, pure positive, very loud, and they had a good convention, but it’s come back to where we expected,” he said. “I don’t think it’s any shock that the president race is gonna be close.”

But then he did the thing I admire him for, which is trust me with the truth:

“If the election were held today, I think Kamala would win,” he said, estimating that she had solidified the formerly dependable Great Lake states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. “I don’t know that Trump can win any of those as of today.” He said the numbers looked better for Trump in the South and Southwest.

“If the election were held today, I think Kamala would win.”

Then things got dicier.

In the Senate, “a flip is assured,” he said. West Virginia is gone, of course, but it’s more than that. “I don’t see how [Montana Democratic Sen. Jon] Tester pulls it out. I think that’s gone,” he said with none of the boosterish salesmanship we hear on cable TV. He sounded like a doctor reading off a chart. “Same with Ohio. The only question is do the Republicans take the senate by one or five.”

When Democrats moved money this week into senate races in Florida and in Texas, where Democrats are trailing narrowly in public polling, some saw this as expanding the map, i.e., doubling down on a good bet to maximize increasing odds. But given what my friend told me, it could be that Democratic donors were covering their bets on incumbents in Montana and Ohio in tight or losing re-election races by playing in long-shot races that could keep a majority. In other words, Democrats funding senate races against GOP incumbents in Florida and Texas might have been a tactical maneuver out of a bad spot rather than an act of growing confidence. We’ll know soon enough.

And then there’s the adult day-care facility known as the United States House of Representatives.

“The House is a full-fledged toss up.”

“The House is an absolute f**king coin flip,” said my friend who said the result could easily be a slim Democratic majority or a 13-seat gain for the GOP. “It’s the hardest to predict. The House is a full-fledged toss up. I’m not a betting man, but if I were I’d stay away from that one.”

The trick that Republican candidates have to pull off is running ahead of Donald Trump by 3-5 points, “and in most cases that’s occurring.” In fact, Harris is running behind where Joe Biden was in 2020. “I feel good about that. We are consistently running ahead of Trump, which we need to be doing.”

The key constituency in his view—the Soccer Moms of 2024, in other words—aren’t childless cat ladies but Republican-leading independent men who voted for Joe Biden last time may vote Harris this time. These are guys who call themselves Republicans, or at least did before Jan. 6, but who can’t quite call themselves Democrats yet.

This explains why Harris’ campaign is up with an ad featuring a white, Republican couple, one of whom saying, “I’ve never voted for a Democrat, but the choice is simple—I’m voting for Kamala Harris.” There’s also an admittedly cringey ad out from White Dudes for Harris that says, “This isn’t about picking teams. It’s about who’s got a plan that’s going to make life better for me and my family.”

This also explains the Lincoln Project’s Sam Elliott-narrated pitch aimed right at fence-sitting dudes. “What the hell are you waiting for?” asks Elliot. “Because if it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that,” before concluding, “It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman.”

My friend pegs the undecided vote at around 10% for the presidential race and twice that for down-ballot races, that is, congress, state legislature, school board, that sort of thing. And undecided voters are disproportionately what he called “double negatives, basically people who have a negative opinion of Trump and a negative opinion of Harris.”

Right now, my friend is advising his clients to focus on border security and the economy. “We don’t have a good response, and won’t, on women’s rights and abortion,” he said. “We don’t have a message for it, and frankly we won’t.” He takes some comfort in the fact that voters are placing less of a priority on abortion rights than they did in 2022, so when it comes up, “We just have to hope to change the subject.”

I brought up turnout and how in 2020 Democrats, scared of the pandemic, organized virtually, and Republicans, scared of science, knocked doors, resulting in what is broadly assumed was a 5% GOP advantage in GOTV, or getting out the vote. Now we’re seeing the opposite as the RNC has outsourced organizing and Democrats, flush with cash, are knocking more doors than the Mormons. Word is trickling out of the swing states that Republican doors aren’t getting knocked on. No lit is getting dropped. Would Democrats get the same 5% advantage?

“In a presidential year, surprises are minimal. You get what you get.”

My friend thought little of my theory. “In a presidential year, people vote. In an off-year, turnout operations are important,” he said. And when it comes to Republicans, “Our people just f**king come. In a presidential year, surprises are minimal. You get what you get.”

I let him go about his day and didn’t press the point because I trusted that he was telling me the truth as he saw it, though it felt like he was trying to convince me. He was arguing for what, in his view, was an unassailable fact: His voters were going to come out because they always come out. It was proof by assertion, and I’ve done it a hundred times when trying to construct an optimistic rationale for something that evidence didn’t support. He wasn’t lying to me, is what I’m saying, but what he was saying might not be incredibly accurate.

Because the truth is that Democratic enthusiasm to vote has never been higher in a general presidential election. The last time it was this high was in the 2008 Obama-Clinton primary. Almost eight in 10 Democrats are excited about voting in the general election.

And the Republicans? Well, it’s not like they’re pouting. Most—69%—say they are “more enthusiastic than usual” to vote in the presidential election, and when you combine all Americans voter enthusiasm is higher than it’s ever been since Gallup measured voting enthusiasm 24 years ago. And my friend is right; the Republican numbers are right about where they were in 2004 (W won), 2012 (Romney lost), and 2020 (Trump lost).

With Republican voter enthusiasm a constant, what seems to determine who wins is Democratic enthusiasm to vote, which right now is up at 78%, and according to Gallup, “The party with the higher net-enthusiasm score at the end of a presidential campaign usually sees their candidate win.”

I went looking for my friend to talk me out of optimism and ended up finding a flaw in the reasoning for cynicism. Enthusiastic voters can be enthusiastic volunteers who can cajole reluctant voters to vote for Democrats just to get rid of Trump once and for all. It took a tectonic shift for Democrats to dial into this race, and with voters already casting their ballots in some states, it’s hard to imagine something that big happening again to suppress sky-high Democratic enthusiasm.

Earlier this month I saw evidence of a possible, late-breaking Democratic wave forming. I’m sticking with that for now.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.