What To Expect From The DNC
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Hello and welcome to the 530 Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druke and welcome to the Democratic National Convention. Today we're going to do a preview of the convention and for the rest of the week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, we'll have late night reaction podcasts. So get ready for a lot of late nights.

To kick things off, we're gonna talk about the goal of this convention. I mean, the party has already formally nominated Harris in a virtual roll call. So what is the party trying to accomplish over these four days? And based on the details that we have,

How are they going about it? We'll also take a look at the timeline. Harris's presumptive nomination came just 105 days before Election Day. In the modern primary era, only one nominee, Gerald Ford in 1976, secured the nomination with less time on the clock.

So how will the shortened timeline and the lack of a competitive primary in general shape this election? And then we'll take stock of what the Harris coalition looks like so far. One of our favorite math whizzes, Mary Radcliffe, combed through the crosstabs on all the polls that have been conducted since Harris took the helm to see what's happening under the hood and how her coalition compares to Biden's.

And speaking of Mary, she is here with us now. Welcome to the podcast. Good morning, Galen. Good morning. Also joining us is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Welcome, Jeffrey. Good morning, Galen.

So full transparency here, I am not actually in Chicago this week. Our colleague Nathaniel Rakich is. But I am coming to you instead from one of America's most competitive congressional districts. So we're going to do a little trivia to kick things off this morning. Can you tell me what district I am in? And here's the hint. I voted for... I'm the district. I voted for Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020...

Since 2016, on a congressional level, I've gone Republican, Democrat, Republican, Republican. And in 2021, I went without representation for a month because the race was so close and had to be recounted. What district am I? Where did we have a recount in 2021? It's Claudia Tenney's old district. And I don't remember which number that is.

Jeffrey gets it. The 22nd. It was the 22nd. Yeah, yeah. The number did change. You're right. It was the 22nd when that recount happened. You know, I can just feel the competition, the competitiveness when I'm out in public. It just feels live, like politics is happening. Debates on the streets. Debates on the, yeah, yeah, yeah. Median voters getting in arguments with other median voters on the sidewalk.

It's really something. Yeah, Mark Molinaro is the Republican representative there, and he's going to face another close election. Which is a good reminder, we have been focusing on the top of the ticket a lot this cycle for good reason. There's been some pretty crazy s***.

happening at the top of the ticket. We will eventually talk about Senate and House races, so buckle in, friends. But for now, let's talk about the Democratic National Convention, and we will be hearing from our friend and colleague Nathaniel Rakich from Chicago throughout the week. But these are the themes and keynote speakers for the week. So Monday's theme for the DNC is For the People, with President Biden, the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson speaking.

Tuesday is a bold vision for America's future with Barack and Michelle Obama speaking, as well as Doug Emhoff and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Wednesday is a fight for our freedoms with VP nominee Tim Walz as keynote and also Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Pete Buttigieg speaking. And then Thursday's theme is again, similarly to Tuesday for our future. And it features Harris's acceptance speech. And then there's a smattering of other speakers announced. But some of the info is still being closely held. So, Jeffrey, kick us off here.

Anything notable from these themes or speakers to discern so far before we've heard a single word from Democrats in Chicago? I think that they sort of the generic titles of these things match some of the language we've heard in Harris's ads or her campaign launch video. You know, they were talking about sort of the Harris campaign compared to where the Biden campaign was talking a lot about things that they that the Biden administration had done. The Harris campaign was

sort of shifted to a like freedom theme. And that includes kind of a host of issues, whether you're talking about abortion rights or freedom from gun violence or freedom from want, thinking about like the economy and how do you go about appealing there? It is interesting, like seeing how they frame all that will be interesting because we know that

Trump tends to pull better on questions like who would handle inflation better or the economy better. Although maybe the gap with Harris isn't as large as it was with Biden. Nonetheless, he does tend to pull better on that front. So I am interested to see how they use sort of these broad –

somewhat generalized statements and then actually talk about some of the different issues. Like, are they going to talk about Harris's new like housing proposal or the idea for a $6,000 tax credit for people who have newborns? You know, when talking about like

Yeah, to add some numbers to that, Jeffrey, ABC came out with a new slate of polling over the weekend that asked about all of these issues like immigration and the economy, for example. And it found that...

Harris is polling compared to Trump in a pretty similar space, slightly better, for example, on immigration. Trump had a 14 point advantage in ABC's last poll. In this poll, Trump has a 10 point advantage. Most of this stuff is within the margin of error. The things that have shifted a lot, unsurprisingly, is, for example, you know, is this candidate in good enough physical health to serve effectively as president? Trump had a 31 point advantage in July. Harris now has a 30 point advantage.

Advantage. There's a couple other, you know, places where there are some differences. But in general, the advantages that Trump had when Biden dropped out of the race stick for the most part. But Mary, what did you pick up on the themes and speakers?

Yeah, I mean, comparing this to the RNC, like what we saw from the themes of the RNC each day was, you know, make America strong again, wealthy again, whatever. That felt more cohesive, I think, than what we're seeing coming out of the DNC. It's sort of not clear to me what each day is supposed to represent. Maybe they're not.

That's not how they're doing this. It's not going to be really like each day representing a theme. But I thought that that approach from the RNC was pretty effective in highlighting the issues that were priorities for them. So it seems pretty vague. And I guess we'll have to see if they can make something concrete out of that vagueness. We're going to find out. I mean, one thing that I really noticed from this lineup as well is that we have a lot of

elder statesmen or elder stateswomen within the party. And that's in large part because the Democratic Party hasn't had something of a breakup with its past politicians.

Whereas at the Republican National Convention, you didn't have any of the Bushes speaking. You know, you didn't have you didn't have many of the people who had once, you know, held the levers of power in the party speaking. And so it will be interesting, you know, whether it's effective or not to hear from Hillary and Bill Clinton, for example, for what it's worth. I don't believe that those folks are going to be speaking in primetime.

prime time as the networks do it. So prime time, according to the networks, is really the 10 to 11 hour. Whereas if you're watching on streaming or whatever, you can see hours and hours and hours of speeches. But it's going to be folks like Barack and Michelle Obama, Tim Walz, Harris, who are really in that prime time slot. Okay, now let's ask the question, how does this all matter? Did it seem like the RNC had an effect on how voters perceived this race

and what kind of convention bounce should we expect?

from the DNC? I think that's pretty tricky in terms of disentangling what impact the RNC might have had on the polls from all the other events that happened basically at the same time, including Biden dropping out of the race, which is just what a few days after the RNC was concluded. Sure was. So in terms of the effect of how the RNC impacted voters, we will probably never know the answer to that. With respect to a convention bounce for Harris, I'm not sure

Because the race has changed so significantly in the last month, there's a question we've been hearing from people. Is Harris in her honeymoon phase, right? So is she already in the bounce that she would have gotten from the big publicity of the DNC, that she got it already from the big publicity of the handover? I don't know the answer to that yet. Yeah, I mean, I think Mary's exactly right here that I think Trump gained like a point,

from the start of the Republican convention, or I should say in his overall percentage support in our national polling average to the day that Biden dropped out. But again, that's like very hard to say exactly what was behind all that. And a point could just be margin of error movement. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we're talking, I mean, it's, it's very hard to say anything concrete about that.

And I agree that it is very possible that Harris has already had a seeming bounce because of the unusual, to say the least, nature of how she has become her party's replacement nominee, essentially.

And the amount of coverage that she got and sort of the energy that Democrats have had in the aftermath of that, if we've already sort of seen most of the movement that you would have any reason to expect is very possible. You know, maybe maybe she gets a tiny bit more, but I I would be skeptical. I mean, I think we should be skeptical of any really large convention bounces in this day and age anyway. But nonetheless, yeah.

I think given the circumstances surrounding how she got into this position, I'm maybe even more skeptical of a convention balance. But of course, we'll just have to see. Well, there's also an argument that Harris is less well-defined than...

than a different candidate might be at this stage in their presidential campaign. So there could be more potential movement. You know, I saw some polling that suggested somewhere in the range of three quarters of Americans have, you know, responded to the poll saying, I've made up my mind.

one way or another, about Donald Trump that absolutely nothing that happens can change my opinion, whereas only 50% of Americans felt that way about Harris. And so if people... Yes, there has been a lot of news, but it's also sort of...

for a regular news consumer. It's been generally positive, but somewhat detail-free. And so perhaps if people tune in this week and it is truly an advertisement for the Democratic Party, you know, this is not party business. The party business has already been done. The entirety of these four days is the Democratic Party...

putting what it believes is its best foot forward to try to win over, you know, to shore up the base and win over the median voter. And so maybe there are more persuadable people out there because people don't have such baked in views of Harris.

Yeah, and I think actually that dynamic kind of puts her in a tricky position because she needs to have this convention be sort of both a like vibes and policy thing, right? She needs to do the introduction of herself, get people to know who she is. That's the vibes element. But also, we don't have policy details for a lot of the things she's been proposing.

You know, she gave an economic speech, but I don't know that we've seen like a detailed policy plan on those things, just like the top line headlines. Wait, you used the word need. Does she need to do that? I mean, I think so. I think it's important to sketch out at least the basics of what you want to do. I mean, if you're saying this is the for our future day and you're not going to say what that future is going to look like, I mean. Right. I guess I guess maybe from a good governance perspective, you would say you ought to

you know, sketch out what you actually want to do. But from waging electoral politics perspective, maybe you want Trump's 20 point bullet list that just says we are going to eliminate inflation. We are going to end illegal immigration and we are going to bring America together by dint of all of the success that we experience over the next four years. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And actually, now I'm going to contradict myself because we had polling out from YouGov today that asked about specific economic issues, which candidate voters thought would do better on. So the specific wording is as president, which candidate do you think would be more likely to lower housing costs, health care costs and food costs?

And Kamala Harris is leading on all three of those. For food costs, she's only leading by a point. So maybe that doesn't mean anything. But she's ahead of Donald Trump on all three of these like key expenses, like the inflation stuff. So maybe her bare bones economic sketch is enough. I don't know. And let me tell you something else that I found super interesting from this ABC News poll that came out over the weekend. They asked...

about Harris's influence on Biden's policies as vice president. So Harris's influence on his economic policies, immigration policies,

And what they found is that two thirds of Americans said that Harris had just some or very little influence on Biden's economic policies. And just a third said either a great deal or a good amount. And a majority, 57 percent, said Harris's influence was just some or very little on Biden's immigration policies. So interestingly enough, at the current moment, Republicans

Republicans have not effectively tied Harris to Biden's, well, whatever it may be, successes or failures, however you view them, obviously, from a Republican perspective, failures on the economy and immigration. So, yeah, interestingly amorphous perceptions of Harris at this point in time. Yeah, I think, you know, it's probably good news for Harris that

People don't automatically associate her with the Biden administration's policies. With a historically unpopular president? Yeah, you know, a guy with a 38% approval rating. It's probably good that there's some distance there. And that probably helps explain why Biden is speaking on the first night and sort of

They'll celebrate him some and then they'll he'll pass the torch to Harris in a way. And then they'll sort of shift in the sort of moving forward direction. So maybe they can kind of keep things more looking ahead and not so much at Biden. And I think just generally, though, you know, we talked a little bit about it, but I think it's worth delving into a little bit. The idea of like the kind of amorphous views of Harris. It is true that.

There definitely are people who like obviously knew of Harris, but I don't think it's a coincidence that her favorability rating has shot up from basically 37 percent when Biden dropped out to almost 45 percent as of today.

That's a big change for someone who on paper, at least, you know, people were aware of. Right. But that probably meant that their views of her were not necessarily that well entrenched. Maybe that does speak to the possibility of winning some more people over. And I'm sure that this

convention is going to just be a lot about introducing her to because the other thing is a lot of people probably don't even know that much about her. All right, well, we will end our speculation there because the Democratic National Convention is going to be upon us soon enough. Let's move on and talk about the shortened timeline of this general election. But first, a break.

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One of the things that's going to happen this week at the DNC is Vice President Harris will be ceremonially selected in a roll call on the convention floor. But of course, this is solely symbolic this year. Harris was nominated through a virtual roll call in early August.

So far, the process to select Harris has been an unparalleled departure from the modern norm, and it's meant that the contours of the general election are taking shape later than they often have. All right, Jeffrey, you have written about this. So 105 days until the general election, that's when things solidified for Harris. How does that compare in the broad scope of the modern primary system?

Right. So I co-wrote a piece with Caitlin Jewett. We looked at sort of when a person who has either become the nominee or has become the presumptive nominee, like when they've actually secured a majority support among delegates. So Harris did that essentially on July 23rd. So that's 105 days before the general election. The only person who sewed up a nomination closer to November than Harris in sort of modern times is Gerald Ford.

In 1976, who didn't secure the Republican nomination until the roll call vote at the convention in mid-August that year, 76 days before the election. That might seem like just sort of like interesting trivia, but I do think that there are important questions about that.

How quick does it matter? Actually, how much does this matter? Does it affect how able you are to quickly turn around and run a general election campaign? If you're still sort of battling with your party, does it affect sort of the timeline of, you know, in a traditional primary campaign, how much attack you've received, basically, how many negatives are out there about you. And so for Harris, you know, she doesn't really have that because she didn't go through that, even though her timeline is more like that of someone who,

got nominated after a really long primary battle. Interesting. Right. So usually if you get nominated late, it means that you've had to sort of slug it out in the trenches for something like a year before you actually win the nomination. And then your job is to unite the party first and foremost. Whereas in this case, the party united extremely quickly around Harris without any kind of competitive primary process. Right.

But in terms of getting ready for the general election and talking to, you know, the median voter instead of, you know, your primary voter or whatnot, in recent years, folks like, you know, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Obama, et cetera, Carter Dukakis, they all secured the nomination with about, you know, 150 days left on the clock. So this is going to be two thirds the length of the general election that we are used to.

And you said you tried to figure out, does it matter? Is there a benefit to that? Is there a disadvantage to that? What does it all mean? So I think it's tough to say that there's a meaningful relationship between how late you clinch a nomination and winning. If you sort of look at all the cases where someone wrapped up the nomination in, say, early June or later, if you look at those eight cases...

In three of those cases, the candidate won, and in five, they lost. And so I think it's kind of tough to say. So it's seven Democrats plus Ford. It's kind of tough, I think, to say conclusively in any way how much it matters. And I do think Harris's case is very distinct from the others in the sense that the party quickly rallied to her. She was already the sitting vice president, which helped on that front.

And she already had a lot of the campaign structure and campaign fundraising set up because she was already on the ticket or the prospective ticket with Biden. So that makes her a little bit different and maybe makes actually in a weird way her nomination a bit more like a short nomination struggle because of that. So while she's had sort of this –

shifting to the general election mode here at the last minute, a lot of the other ways that the party came around her, that she's fundraising and things coalesced quickly and there's energy behind her. Some of that might speak more to like a shorter nomination process than it does a long one. Yeah. And to that point, you know, we were just talking about policy during that year plus that encompasses the invisible primary where, you know, prospective candidates are doing interviews and writing books and trying to, you know,

sure, donor support and whatnot. And then the actual, all of the debates that happen, a lot of that happens over policy because in an intra-party debate, that's where you're going to go. You're going to go more towards what direction should this party go in? And while Harris did engage in that in 2019 in ways that

she seemingly regrets now because she has pivoted on basically everything she said back then at the very least for her, those debates have not happened within this calendar year in any kind of high pitched way. So I think to what we were saying earlier, most people don't have a clear sense of what her policy positions are. And, you know, in a diverse, pluralistic, complicated country, um,

Sometimes being policy free is an advantage. Yeah, I mean, I think there's some truth to that, in part because she hasn't taken a bunch of hits in her primary. Now, now there is a there is a counter argument to this, which is like a long primary battle between.

can sometimes be good for party, can animate the party base, can energize it. I mean, the 2008 Democratic presidential race is sort of the classic example of that with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton going all the way to early June and the feeling that a lot of people were motivated to volunteer, to contribute to like and get you had like record turnout for a presidential primary in terms of participation.

But at the same time, I think if you're Harris coming in late and it may not be a coincidence that Donald Trump has essentially complained about this. Right. He's he spent all this time attacking Biden, but now he's got to spend all this time attacking Harris, who is not as well defined as Biden. And people don't have firm opinions on and he's upset about that. And I can see why he would be, given that the Democratic Party sort of.

adjusted for the reality that they weren't feeling terribly confident about Biden's chances. All right. Well, speaking about Trump's frustration, it may have something to do with the polls. So let's move on and talk about those. But first, a break.

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As of right now, here's where the polling averages stand. Harris leads Trump nationally by about three percentage points. In the northern battleground states, her lead ranges from one to three percentage points. In the southern battleground states, Harris and Trump are separated by about a point in all four Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia.

By comparison, when Biden dropped out, he was down three percentage points nationally, so the inverse, and down in every battleground state by at least three points. And in the southern battleground states, he was trailing by more like six percentage points in each. Obviously, things have shifted. And so, Mary, you took on the task of looking under the hood of all of these polls and seeing what has changed.

And we've talked about this a little bit on the podcast already in last Thursday's podcast about Latino voters. We've talked about young voters. But some of these changes are not so intuitive. And I want to start, Mary, with actually the gender gap. So what did you find in terms of the difference between...

the gender gap with Biden on the ticket versus Harris? Yeah. So the gender gap for folks that aren't familiar with the term looks at the difference between vote share for Democrats among men and among women. So the largest gender gap in history was the 2016 election between Clinton and Trump, where the gender gap in the two-party vote share was about 14 points.

We've had a gap between men and women for every election in the last 20 years, and it's usually somewhere around eight points. That's basically what it looked like for Biden's polls. So Biden, we looked at all the polls between the debate and the day he actually did drop out. And he was looking at a gender gap pretty similar to what we've seen in the past, about six points.

If you look at polls of Harris now, so since Biden dropped out until Sunday yesterday, that gender gap is up to 11 points. So that's encroaching on that historic 2016 territory. Well, and that can happen for two reasons. It can happen because you are, you know, as the Democrat in the situation, because we're looking specifically at their vote share, are improving with women or you are worsening with men.

which one's happening or both happening? No. So Harris in two party vote sharing polls is almost exactly the same as Biden's 2020 performance with women. Like it's a difference of 0.2 percentage points, which is not a difference in polls of men, though. She's underperforming where Biden was by about four points. That's where Biden was in 2020 with his winning coalition in 2020.

So not where he was in the days before he dropped out. No, no. So we're looking at, you know, Biden had a winning coalition in 2020. Harris needs to build a winning coalition in 2024. But the ways in which those two candidates are going to do those things might look different. That's the data we're really trying to dig into here. OK, so right now, underperforming amongst men, but doing about the same amongst women. Yep. What did you find in terms of...

And oftentimes we talk about race and education at the same time, particularly when it comes to white voters. Yeah.

So if you look at race, she's improved over where Biden was before he dropped out among all racial categories. But she is nowhere near the winning Biden coalition in 2024, particularly among nonwhite voters, which is a dynamic we've been seeing in this election, even when Biden was the nominee. So she's about par with white voters to where Biden was in 2020. The difference is less than 0.3, so not a difference.

With Hispanic voters, she's lagging Biden's 2020 performance by four points on average. And with Black voters, she's lagging by 12 points on average.

Now, she has made some gains with Black voters since her campaign launched. So we looked at this week by week. She started off around 78% with those voters, and she peaked in the third week at 84%. So she's making some improvements, but she's still not anywhere close to the winning Biden coalition among non-white voters. What is interesting when you think about race and education is that

She's performing better than Biden did in 2020 in polls with.

rural voters and white non-college educated voters. I think there's a significant overlap between those two things. So you can maybe read that as a related group. But she's she's polling four points better than Biden's performance among white non-college educated voters. Those two groups, white non-college educated and rural, are the only demographic groups we looked at where she seems to be improving on where Biden was in 2020.

And again, to repeat, not where Biden was in July of 2024, but where Biden was on Election Day in 2020, according to the actual result. OK, so this is a little surprising. All right.

Also, it raises maybe a little surprising if you subscribe to the idea that people vote based on identity, which honestly, looking at all of the social science research, it's mixed. There are certainly cases where people vote based on identity. You can do experiments where you see on the ballot if somebody's name is Latino or Hispanic identifying, you will see increased support amongst Latino and Hispanic voters for that

candidate. In other cases, it does not look like, for example, Harris's becoming Biden's running mate changed much at all for women voters or Black voters during that race, for example. You know, we could talk about this for a whole other hour. But it's

That's interesting. It also raises a red flag because white non-college educated voters have been some of the toughest voters to poll in the Trump era. And as a result, we have seen polls like Biden leading by more than six points in Wisconsin in the final days of the 2020 election, when in fact,

It was an extremely close race that was separated by 20,000 votes. Once again, we're actually seeing some of Harris's best battleground polling in Wisconsin. Yeah. And so what should we make of that? That both this is a little counterintuitive if you subscribe to identity determines vote to some degree. And also-

Yeah, I think that's a really important flag. You know, if you if you look at the APOR report, the American Association of Public Opinion Research, after the 2020 election, they found that the whiter and more rural a state was, the more likely it was to overstate support for Democrats. So it's a really important methodological flag.

Presumably pollsters have taken steps to mitigate those issues since 2020, but we won't know for sure if that is true until after the 2024 election. The other way to look at this is to think about what Obama's coalition looked like in 2012, because the way that Harris is polling, what we see in the polling among rural voters and white non-college voters is actually pretty close to Obama's 2012 winning coalition.

So there's sort of two possibilities here. Well, there's probably a lot more than two possibilities here. But the polling could be off in the same ways that it was in 2020, which would be problematic for a whole host of reasons. Or we're seeing some reversion to the pre-Trump era with certain demographics. And again, that's not something we'll know for a while now. My suspicion is it's probably polling error. Yeah.

That's my guess. Mary, I wasn't going to say it. I was going to let you say it. That's my suspicion, too. Yeah, but I can't know that definitively. So does that mean that folks should be skeptical of all of the sort of upper Midwestern battleground polling that they're seeing right now? I mean, the upper Midwestern battleground polling, while Harris is leading, she's not leading by a lot. This is a margin of error race. You should always be skeptical.

There you go. From Mary's lips to God's ears. Unless, I mean, look, if it becomes not a margin of error race, we will come back on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast and tell you all about it. Yeah, I think the important thing to remember with any crosstab stuff is you do have to be careful with crosstab diving. And I love doing it. But it's only really good to do when you have a large sample of polls that seem to have

actually have the group consistently in terms of how they're splitting out their data. And so it's really easy to go poll by poll and find things that kind of don't make sense based on what we know about politics. So that's an important caveat, I think, with any crosstab discussion. So I would tend to say that

I think there's reason to think that Harris might have a slight edge in some of those states, in part because Biden was pulling better there than in the other states. So if you're thinking about where she had the least amount of ground to sort of make up, it was those places, right? So if she's consolidated Democratic support, to some extent, it would make sense that it's showing up there particularly.

But at the same time, we have plenty of reason historically to be a little uncertain in the Trump era about those sorts of numbers. Of course, at the same time, it's also possible that in places like Georgia and Arizona, maybe Harris is actually being underestimated because of what we know about the electorates in those states, which are far more diverse. There's uncertainty. And to Mary's point, this race is like 50-50. And every time I see like a quote in an article recently about like Republicans being mad about

Trump not staying on message or like Trump is screwing up his reset. And I'm like, have you guys been around for the last like decade? This is like how it is. Yeah. Oh, it's how it's consistently been. There's nothing new here. And you know what? Trump could still very much win. Yeah, I totally agree with your point, by the way, about crosstab diving, which is why we are averaging a full month's worth of polls here, because, you know, it's

if you look at just one poll or just a small number of polls, there's so much variability. And even with a full month's worth of polls, I mean, crosstabs can be really noisy. But we wanted to make sure we were trying to get a robust set of data. So hopefully some noise cancellation. Yeah. But what is interesting, Mary, about what you found is I talked to Carlos Odio last week about his oversample of Latino voters for ECE's research. And while he found that Harris made up

something like 15 percentage points amongst Latino voters in battleground states over where Biden was before he dropped out, she was still lagging his performance in 2020 by about four percentage points, which is exactly the margin that you found in all of your aggregated crosstab diving. So... Oh, that's reassuring. We like it. We like it when...

data from different sources agrees with each other. And with that, we're going to wrap up. But Mary, because you are the true math nerd that we know and love, you wanted to make one methodological point before we wrap. And so I'm going to let you do it. The floor is yours. I wanted to say something about like how we are looking at this data, because one of the challenges trying to compare polling to actual election performance is that in polling, you can say you're undecided, whereas at the ballot box, you're

That's usually not one of the options on the ballot unless you live in Nevada. So what we did here is we looked at the share of the two party vote. So among folks that say they're going to vote for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, what percent of those people said they're going to vote for Kamala Harris? Effectively, we are erasing all the undecideds from the data so that we can compare it directly to election results.

That makes it easier to compare, but there is some information loss there. So if those undecided voters are significantly more Democratic or Republican leaning, that might make all of this look very different in a month or so when those people get off the fence and decide who they're going to vote for. Yeah. So another important reason to keep listening to the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast so you can find out what happens next. With that, thank you, Mary and Jeffrey. Thanks, Galen. Thank you, Galen.

And just a reminder that we are going to have late night podcasts on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week, which means that you can listen to them Wednesday morning, Thursday morning, Friday morning. So stick around. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chartavian. 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 review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.

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