How RFK Jr.'s Exit Changes The Race
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I believe my first concert was the Bare Naked Ladies in 1998. Nice. That's iconic. Were you also an Eve Six person? No. I feel like Bare Naked Ladies and Eve Six kind of went hand in hand. No, I think Eve Six was a little edgier. Yeah. Like Eve Six is like, "I would swallow my pride, I would choke on the rinds, I would like, you know, like..." "Find nothing but faith in nothing."

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. This election cycle always seems to have another twist coming. Shortly after the Democrats wrapped up their convention last week, independent presidential candidate RFK Jr. dropped out of the race and endorsed former President Trump.

That means that once again, there might be too many things happening at once to parse through what's happening in the data. But we'll give it a good old fashioned try. Did the DNC result in a convention bounce for Harris? And how will RFK Jr.'s exit affect support for the two major party candidates?

We also have a good or bad use of polling example for you today, but not the survey kind of poll, the actual poll where you go and vote. Washington state held its primary this month, and because of both the structure of the primary and the fact that it happens late in the cycle, it's been seen as something of a predictor of the outcome in the general election in November. So is that a good or bad use of polling, voter polling? And of course, what

did it show? Here with me to discuss is senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast, Mary. Hi, Galen. Also here with us is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeff. Hey, Galen.

All right, well, let's dive right into this. According to our polling averages, as of Monday morning, Harris leads Trump nationally by about three and a half points. She leads by between a point and a half and three and a half points in the northern battleground states. And then in the Sunbelt battleground states, Harris and Trump are roughly within a point of each other or less.

So, and I know that the answer is going to be it's complicated, but if we were trying to figure out if Harris had seen a convention bounce, is there any indication of one whatsoever? Well, it's pretty hard to say because I don't think we have any polls that were conducted entirely after the convention in any state at all right now. Come on, pollsters, let's get at it.

I mean, I know a couple of pollsters that are in the field right now, so we will have some data presumably by the end of the day today. They aren't the gold standard pollsters that I would like to see, but I assume that we will get some more of that data in the next week or so. It is the case, though, that we have polls that have come out sort of during the convention itself that included pollsters.

part of it. And, you know, as we discussed last week on our late night podcasts, there was quite a bit of, you know, messaging and sort of front loading of median voter politics in prime time. And so maybe it doesn't encapsulate Harris's speech specifically, but does it look like views of Democrats improved at all from that early incomplete data? It looks like if you look at the national polling average between Harris and Trump,

I don't necessarily think we're seeing a bounce. It looks like the trend we've been seeing for Harris since she became the top of the ticket nominee has just continued, right? So she's sort of been slowly gaining throughout this past month. Trump's basically been holding steady. We're not seeing any dramatic change to that. It may be completely unrelated to the convention. Just over time, as more people hear about Harris, hear from Harris, voters are moving into her camp.

I mean, Jeffrey, where do you come down on this? Do you think we should expect a convention bounce? I think if you see one, it's going to be small. And I think that's in part because Harris has been enjoying something of a convention bounce for weeks now with all the massive coverage of her taking Biden's place, all the attention paid to her and Tim Walz being her VP pick.

at the same time thanks for complicating things further rfk jr uh rfk jr has has uh suspended his campaign and so presumably some part of his of the people who were saying they were going to support him which was like roughly five percent in our national polls i suspect that if he was at five percent at this point that if he'd stayed in november he would receive less than five percent but that's uh just based on historical patterns of third party candidates but nonetheless some of those voters are going to go places you

Yes, and we are going to dive right into that in our next segment. But I want to continue talking about the convention for just a second. To add a couple data points here, Harris's favorability is now net negative 10%.

That has, as you suggested, Mary, sort of continued to rise. It looks like it might be flattening out a little bit now from the exponential rise in the early days of her taking the helm of the party. But that is an improvement from, you know, net negative 16 when this all began. And it compares to former President Trump at net negative 10%.

10. So where we were looking at two unpopular candidates where Biden was even less popular, but both unpopular in the realm of double digits. We're now looking at a race between a candidate who has roughly even views in terms of favorability with an unpopular candidate. Big question about whether or not that will stick. Obviously, Republicans are setting out to define Harris negatively, and maybe some of that will have an impact. But

But we can also look at data about how Americans feel by looking at the generic ballot polling. We've been tracking it continuously. But we do see a rise for Democrats basically around the time that Harris also starts rising in the polls from something that was close to even between a preference between Democrats and Republicans for the House. And now a situation where Democrats are leading by about 2%.

two percentage points. Maybe we're talking about a trajectory that had already began, but based on what you saw at the convention, do you think that this trend is likely to continue or abate?

I think that's pretty hard to say. I mean, I think one of the things you might be seeing in the generic ballot pulling particularly is a shift in the likely voter universe. If you've got Democrats that when Biden was the nominee said they were not going to vote and now they're thinking, ah, maybe I will, or Democratic-leaning voters in that camp, that may explain some of the shift in the generic ballot. And I think that is the goal of the convention in some ways, or the goal of the campaign, is to turn these I might vote voters into I will vote voters.

That is the work of the next few months for both the Trump and the Harris campaigns. Yeah, on a similar theme, we talked to you at the beginning of the week last week before the convention actually happened. And I got to talk plenty to Nathaniel, who was there on the ground in Chicago, as well as other folks. What was your impression of what we saw over those four nights, given what you all know about the preferences of Americans based on the large volume of polls that you look at?

I think what you saw a lot at the DNC in particular was attack toward the center. We talk about median voter politics and you see that tack toward the center on a lot of issues. You see it on immigration,

You see it on certain economic issues. So really going back to this sort of median voter strategy, I think that's a smart play. And I think it works particularly well for a candidate like Harris, who is not defined really in voters' minds. So she can sort of reset the way the party is thinking about certain issues without having to deal with a whole bunch of baggage from previous campaigning. Yeah, I mean, to put it one way...

Kamala was a cop. That's to borrow one of the criticisms she got from some progressives back in the 2020 presidential cycle for her background as having been a prosecuting attorney. But here we were at the 2024 Democratic National Convention and the portrayal of her background in law enforcement and her legal work, both like in terms of helping people who had been abused or by the system or going after big banks for money.

various things, but also immigration and being tough on crime. And so I don't think it's a coincidence that you saw that given what we know from polling about what a lot of Americans' concerns are. One of the other things I was observing during the convention, and my kids actually noticed this too because they're teenagers, so this is the first time they've really seen this. They were camped for the RNC. There weren't a lot of policy specifics.

One of my kids said to me, oh, this is just like a big hype party. And I was like, yes, it is a big hype party. That is what we're doing. That's exactly what it is. Precisely. Precisely. And my other kid was complaining that the whole thing felt like pathos and not logos. What?

What kind of young teen slash tweens are you raising there that are talking about the DNC in terms of lack of policy details and pathos? They studied the pathos and logo stuff in class, like current events type stuff. And they talked about like how news is presented. And so now my son frames everything like that. Wow. All right. Wow. Shout out to your kid's school. Something that I noticed is

Of course, Republicans have made something of a deal of the switcheroo that happened. You know, they just replaced Biden and threw out the 14 million votes that he got in the primary and stuck in Harris. And that is a switcheroo, of course. But in some ways, the bigger switcheroo is the party going from...

an ascendant left over the past eight years or so, and also a seeming willingness to take unpopular positions almost so long as they contradicted Trump.

Trump would be a hawk on immigration and even speak derogatorily and things like that. The conversation is somewhat toxic, but then the response was we're going to abolish ICE. We're going to decriminalize crossing the border, things that were actually never popular even at the time. And what you've seen is a jettisoning of some of those unpopular policies and.

really to the point of just wanting to contradict Trump, Harris did the opposite. Like with the tax on tips thing, she said, Trump said that? Okay, I'm going to do that too. And that's so different from the posture of the Democratic Party since Trump entered the scene, which is if Trump

says it, that must mean that it's wrong. Some of the things have gone under the radar, like tariffs. Obviously, Democrats were very critical of Trump's tariffs when he first enacted them. But then once they had the power to undo them, actually didn't. And so there was maybe a beginning of an acceptance of some of Trump's

policies that turned out to be popular. But the DNC put it in high relief, sort of getting beyond some of these more dour and scoldy vibes, some of these more contradict just wanting to contradict Trump vibes and really leaning into what is popular. Yeah. And I

I think they are doing that. They're leaning into what is popular, you know, and they're doing it in such a way, you know, we think about this pathos and logos situation. They're doing it in such a way that people can sort of sketch in the details of the policy to be the thing they want it to be right there because they haven't put out detailed policy statements on some of these things. They're kicking around new ideas, seeing how they land given the short time frame that might actually be a successful strategy.

In 2020, while you did see in the primary on the Democratic side progressive positions taken by candidates like Harris trying to win over voters in sort of on the left, thinking about sort of the direction of politics within the party as a whole.

In the end, the Democrats did pick Joe Biden, who was seen as maybe the most, you know, the electability candidate, as we discussed ad nauseum in 2020. And so in some ways, in terms of how the party is reacting broadly, like the Democratic Party and its voters are reacting to the broader like general election context. I actually don't know if it's that different. But given that Harris was somebody who in

2020 or 2019 in the lead up to the 2020 primary took a lot of positions that she's now essentially stepping away from is notable and I think is, you know, could leave her open to an attack, obviously, by Republicans. They're playing clips of her, you know, things that she said on 2019 debate stages. But will it actually stick because people don't have that

firm of a view of her. And there's been so much positive coverage, maybe that that could make it difficult. It's, you know, unclear. Yeah, Jeff, I hear what you're saying. But I would actually argue that Biden did not necessarily campaign or even govern from the

the center. I think he ran probably the most left-wing campaign and administration campaign since we've seen since McGovern and administration since I don't know when, you know, the, the positions that he took on sort of immigration or race or things like that were quite left-wing and to the left of where Harris is positioning herself today. And then once he got into office, he,

I don't think that you would say this was a middle-of-the-road Clintonian administration. It really embraced the economic left in particular and couldn't pass the more social left policies that it wanted to simply because of the filibuster. And so I think Harris is actually...

a true tack to the center compared to Biden, even if he was the most sort of centrist or moderate candidate of the crew in 2020. That just said very little because of how far left the party had gone and also the fact that part of his appeal was just name recognition.

Yeah, you're seeing this sort of across like politics right now, too. I mean, 2020 with the George Floyd related protests, we really saw left ascendant. But this year, even if you look at primary results, you're seeing less success by progressive candidates all over the country.

And to my point about the switcheroo thing, what I wanted to say was, I think that if Harris had picked up where she left off in 2019, we would not be seeing this same response. It's not just the fact that the candidate has changed. It's also the fact that the approach has changed pretty significantly and that she's like ill-defined enough that she could take advantage of the malleability of perceptions and recast herself. Yeah.

Yeah, and voters tend not to punish politicians too much for changing their mind on stuff. It's not... I mean, I know that the GOP wants to hit Kamala Harris with this attack, but in general, it's not one that lands. And Trump has been relatively effective at changing his policy positions when they don't work for him as well. If your argument is that in a democracy, it matters what people think, if what you're pursuing is contrary to what the public wants, and we can see that in survey data, then...

why not go to where your voters are? I mean, the way that public opinion works broadly is that sometimes you need to follow the voters and sometimes you can lead the voters. There are some issues on which it doesn't matter how you try to pitch an idea. Voters are not going to pick it up and you got to kind of go to where they are. There are other issues where voters perceptions and preferences are not well defined. And if you believe strongly in something, you can lead them in the direction that you would like to go.

Thinking about differences in campaigning and like how Harris is campaigning, I think another thing that's worth noting is not just thinking about this in the context of 2020, but to think about it in the context of 2016 and sort of what you heard at the Democratic National Convention regarding her potential place in history. Right. Could be the first woman elected president of the United States.

And I think just about the only person who really spent a lot of time on that subject was Hillary Clinton in her speech. Otherwise, it was referenced, but it was not like a focal point.

And so if you're thinking about has the Harris campaign sort of learned from the Clinton experience by avoiding slogans like I'm with her, which may not have been great. I mean, look how much the slogan matters. You know, who knows? But I mean, Harris hasn't even necessarily made public statements or notable public comments about Trump's comments regarding like her race, you know, and it feels like in 2016, Clinton might have engaged criticized Trump openly. Yeah, yeah.

All right. Well, it sounds like we don't know whether or not there is a convention bound. We'll continue tracking the data as it comes in. But let's move on to the other confounding factor, which is RFK Jr. after this break.

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As I mentioned at the top, RFK Jr. dropped out of the presidential race, or at least suspended his campaign on Friday and endorsed former President Trump. Now, to give a little bit of the lay of the polling land, before Biden dropped out of the race, RFK Jr. was getting somewhere in the range of 8% support nationally. And that's not a lot.

After Biden dropped out, that declined close to half. Maybe he was getting about four and a half percentage points the day that he dropped out of the campaign. And it seems likely that a lot of that support may have gone to Harris. It could have been part of the reason that she's improved. People who were inclined to vote for a Democrat who now had an actual Democrat that they liked. What happens to the remainder of the RFK Jr. support, Mary?

Well, it actually doesn't make a...

Huge difference. So Elliot Morris and I looked at this on Friday when when RFK dropped out. And we actually have some pretty good data as far as the national top line, because we use it to calculate our national top line. So some polls ask questions that include RFK Jr. and some ask head to head. When we want to average those together, we have to have a sense for how they differ from each other so that we can bring them in line.

So we already are calculating on a rolling basis the difference in support for the top two candidates when RFK is and is not included. And the difference in the margin is 0.2 percentage points. For reference, that's about on average how much the margin on our polling average changes every day.

So, what you're saying is, with that 4.5% support that he has nationally, when it breaks down into, you can now vote for Trump, you can vote for Harris, you can vote for another third-party candidate like Green Party Libertarian, or you cannot vote.

the degree to which it advantages or disadvantages one of the two major party candidates is 0.2 percentage points. Correct. And to be specific, it's 0.2 percentage points advantage to Trump. But the thing is, you know, his 5% is not all going to Trump. Even in his own polling, he said 57% of his voters were inclined to support Trump over Harris.

That's just barely more than half, right? So it's just a tiny advantage to Trump. I don't suspect that his endorsement of Trump is going to make any significant difference, in part because I suspect that most RFK voters are not like actually big RFK fans. They're voting for RFK for a reason that is not, I like RFK's policy. It's, I don't like Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. I don't want to vote for the Democrats or the Republicans. But I don't like Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

but not any particular loyalty to RFK as a person. So I don't think that him saying support Trump is going to move more of that 57% of his voters toward Trump.

Yeah, an important factor here, right, is you have to put yourself in the shoes of a third party voter. They have known Trump and his political preferences for about a decade. They've known the Democratic Party. They knew Biden for much longer than that. They they know what they have with Harris. And it seems like some of them did go to Harris once that became an option.

The option on the Republican side has not changed, right? So if they already were supporting RFK Jr. and not supporting Trump with the knowledge that RFK Jr. would not become president...

They might be the kind of person who just really doesn't want to support either of the two major party candidates. Yeah, maybe we see a big spike for Cornel West. I don't know. Or Jill Stein. Or honestly, this says something about this campaign because if it was 2016, I would know the name of the libertarian. Chase Oliver. Chase Oliver. So, yeah. And also, of course, the option to not vote at all. Yeah.

Yeah, which is, I think, why you see such a small difference in the margin when we consider polls that do and do not include RFK. I don't think this is going to have a big top line impact. You know, I looked at this spoiler effect very early on in this cycle.

And it was like, would RFK Jr. notably impact the race? And it seemed at that time that it actually would hurt Biden more having RFK in there. But as time moved on and RFK Jr.'s support sort of stabilized at around 9, 10 percent in the national polls.

And when we had more state polling, as things had advanced, it looked increasingly like it was going to really vary from state to state how much Biden would maybe benefit from RFK dropping out and how much Trump would benefit. And then, of course, the race got entirely scrambled by Harris replacing Biden. The fact that Kennedy dropped to just below 5 percent in our national polling average with Biden gone is

Kind of suggested to me that he wasn't going to make a huge difference in the race because I suspect, again, as I said earlier, his support would probably continue to decline if the past is at all useful in understanding how third party support often moves. Together, those factors, even before we, Mary and Elliot did that specific analysis, I was suspicious it wasn't going to matter very much.

I will say the spoiler effect that you mentioned, the chances of that have decreased significantly. So before RFK dropped out, we had about a 40 percent chance of a spoiler. And now it's it's less than one percent. So so that's to say that Chase Oliver, Jill Stein, Cornel West would be a spoiler. Yes. Right. That some third party candidate would get more votes than the margin in a key state.

It does sound, though, like RFK Jr. is trying to come up with some sort of scheme where he could still have an impact on the election through balloting in that he said he was going to stay on the ballot and encouraged, you know, people in blue states to support him while trying to get Trump elected.

elsewhere i gotta say i was on air when that speech was rolling and so i listened to a good portion of it and it was delusional i mean there's no other way to describe it it was delusional he said that you know had the parties been fair to him he would have won the election um he compared himself to ross perot who in the spring of 1992 was leading clinton and bush uh

In the general election polling, you know, the best RFK Jr. was ever doing was about 10%, and he was on the decline. And frankly, according to the favorability polling that we have, the more Americans learned about him, the less they actually liked him. But that aside...

Does his scheme in terms of balloting seem to, Jeffrey, like make sense in terms of what we know about how people vote or even how state balloting rules work? Well, it sounded like he said something along the lines of, I'm going to take my name where I can off the ballot in battleground states. So I'm not a spoiler, but I'm going to remain on the ballot elsewhere. And, you know, different states have different rules about withdrawing from the ballot or

or whether you stay on the ballot and it empowers different people. It's either the candidates applying to be withdrawn or the secretary of state may have the power to take someone off the ballot who has clearly withdrawn from the campaign. But I think the kind of the weirdest part of it from just this perspective of like winning for RFK Jr. And the fact that he said in his speech, he was like, if enough of you vote for me,

and neither of the major party candidates win 270 electoral votes which i think is likely which he said i think is likely i could still conceivably still end up in the white house in a contingent election a contingent election is where no one has a majority electoral college and the u.s house of representatives picks the winner based on one vote per state not one vote per member one vote per state uh and you have to win a majority of the states and you get elected president

But in order to be considered in a contingent election in the House, so if we're even going to like accept the premise here that that sure, RFK Jr. could maybe win a contingent election, which, of course, is basically impossible to imagine.

He has to win at least one electoral vote to be considered by the House in a contingent election. And he's removing himself from state ballots. He's, or at least in some states. And if he's dropping out of the race for the most part, even if he stays on the ballot in some places, his chances of winning an electoral vote went from zero to zero. But like, is it like an even bolder zero? I don't know. Things we all have in common with RFK Jr. We're not going to be president.

All right, let's leave things there and move on to our good or bad use of polling for today. But first, a break. Today's podcast is brought to you by Shopify. Ready to make the smartest choice for your business? Say hello to Shopify, the global commerce platform that makes selling a breeze.

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Washington state's primaries are often seen as a bellwether for the general election, and that's because it has a top two primary system, meaning that Republicans and Democrats and anyone else for that matter all compete and vote in the same primary. And whichever two candidates get the most votes face off in the general election, even if it's two Republicans or two Democrats.

The primary also comes relatively late in the year, closer to the November election. This year, the primary took place on August 6th. And so it's a little bit closer to Election Day. And we also now have results. So before I ask whether or not using this as a bellwether is a good or bad use of polling, let's get to those results. Jeff, how did the primary shake out?

Yeah, so in the so basically what I did was I looked at the the aggregate House vote for Democrats and Republicans and throughout the small, very small number of minor party votes and added them up across the state of Washington. And so Democrats won 58 percent of the two party vote in the top two primary in Washington. And that's slightly up from 55 percent in 2022.

That increase could signal something nationally. We can talk about that. But Washington is a blue state in a relatively progressive part of the country. So, okay, 58... Democrats get 58% support. I mean, how do we...

reestablish a baseline for what that would actually say about the national environment, because it's a blue state anyway. Right. So it's not so much about looking at Washington's vote as exactly like the same as what's going to happen nationally. It's more looking at the direction of the shift in Washington's vote. So, for instance, in 2022, Democrats won 55 percent of the two party vote and then they won 49 percent.

of the National House popular vote. In 2020, though, two years earlier, Democrats won a bit more, 57% in the primary, and then they won about 52% in the National House vote. So it's sort of, the magnitude could vary, but I think the thing here is that sort of every two years, directionally, Washington's vote

has more or less always aligned with the direction the country has moved nationally. It's not like a perfect correlation or anything. I think it was like 0.7 from 1992 to 2022. One being a perfect correlation. Yeah. One being like perfect correlation, zero being like there's absolutely no relationship between the data. Okay.

Okay, so it sounds like you're telling me that Democrats are going to win the House this fall. To sort of frame this a little bit differently, is this a good or bad use of polling? I mean, this is just one of several bellwethers that elections analysts try to use to get a sense of the direction of the country. We also look at special elections. We can also look at individual parts of the country, like bellwether districts, whatnot.

How strong is this as an indicator and what should we actually apply it to? Like, oh, this is just the House. This is maybe also the presidency. I mean, I think it's broadly applicable in the sense that and I think it is a good use of a data point.

as long as you don't say like it is like the end all be all because of course it's not. And the magnitude of a shift could vary. But I think what it would point to is that if past results are any indication, this result could signal the Democrats will gain relative to where they were in 2022, which would put them in range of winning a majority of the House vote, which might in turn produce a majority in the House of Representatives. That's not a guarantee, of course, because we don't elect Democrats

proportionally based on the national party vote, right? It's not like you get 51% of the vote, you get 51% of seats. That's not how it works. We elect everybody at the individual district level, and outside of Maine and Alaska, it's just whoever has the most votes wins. Those states use ranked choice voting, which changes the calculus a little bit, but

How that like votes to seats relationship works out in each election varies to some extent. So, you know, Democrats winning a majority of the House vote narrowly this November would would not necessarily signal that they'll win an absolute majority in seats. Also, because the House map as a whole, if you look at each individual district and their presidential vote in 2020.

The map's a little right-leaning relative to the country as a whole. The median district, which is Virginia's second congressional district, went for Trump by about two points in 2020, while Biden was winning the national popular vote by about four and a half. So that's another reason why this is no guarantee of a Democratic majority. But I think there's a fair amount of evidence here that it could signal the Democrats will gain ground. But will it be enough to get a majority? That's tougher to say.

And doesn't say anything at all about the presidency? Yeah, I think it does because the House vote now is highly correlated with the presidential vote. That was not always true. You had for a long time Democrats winning majorities in the in the U.S. House, even while, say, Richard Nixon was winning like a landslide in the 1972 presidential election, for instance, or even 1984 when Reagan won huge Democrats kept their majority in the House.

But basically, if you go back to 2000, so sort of the start of the red state, blue state era, the correlation is like point eight, nine, nearly point nine. So I was talking about point seven earlier. So this is getting closer to one between the National House popular vote and the presidential popular vote. So that is to say, like.

I think Biden won a little over 52 percent in 2020 and House Democrats won just under 52 percent. So like very similar amounts here. And that's, I think, to be expected. Not a lot of people are splitting their tickets anymore. So I think that speaks to kind of the polarized partisan era that we live in. All right. Well, with that, Jeffrey, we have established that your use of polling is, in fact, a good use of polling. And always with our work, caveats accompany it.

I think we're going to leave things there for today. Thank you so much for joining me, Mary and Jeffrey. Thank you, Galen. Thanks for having us, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any 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'll see you soon.