Hey Stephen, wanted to flag something. I read this quickly and I'm in the middle of getting a big report out myself but it looks like this is looking at survey data and the two-way, not the file, yes? What some initial back of the napkin analysis found seems to indicate there was a LOT of Biden '20 dropoff and churn that you won't see in net turnout + survey data alone. Mike Podhorzer gets into it in some detail here but the evidence so far seems to suggest we can't definitively say she didn't lose to the couch. At the very least it seems like it was a significant part of it -
Steve, excellent analysis. Still, for the life of me, I cannot grasp how new voters would prefer Trump over Harris. Were the new voter demographics more favorable to Trump? Were there character attributes that new voters preferred? Were there issues that appealed to the new voters?
I'm tootling my own horn here but my client Way to Win is in the middle of a big, thorough study of why 2020 Biden voters skipped '24. So not quite this cohort of new voters, they'd be interesting to look at too, but I'd wager a lot of the patterns are pretty similar. We put out a couple of podcasts (it's called "Charting the Way Forward") with sound from them, inc. this one w/ Dan Pfeiffer -
Hey Stephen, wanted to flag something. I read this quickly and I'm in the middle of getting a big report out myself but it looks like this is looking at survey data and the two-way, not the file, yes? What some initial back of the napkin analysis found seems to indicate there was a LOT of Biden '20 dropoff and churn that you won't see in net turnout + survey data alone. Mike Podhorzer gets into it in some detail here but the evidence so far seems to suggest we can't definitively say she didn't lose to the couch. At the very least it seems like it was a significant part of it -
https://www.weekendreading.net/p/how-trump-won
Steve, excellent analysis. Still, for the life of me, I cannot grasp how new voters would prefer Trump over Harris. Were the new voter demographics more favorable to Trump? Were there character attributes that new voters preferred? Were there issues that appealed to the new voters?
I'm tootling my own horn here but my client Way to Win is in the middle of a big, thorough study of why 2020 Biden voters skipped '24. So not quite this cohort of new voters, they'd be interesting to look at too, but I'd wager a lot of the patterns are pretty similar. We put out a couple of podcasts (it's called "Charting the Way Forward") with sound from them, inc. this one w/ Dan Pfeiffer -
https://youtu.be/eBUBGeZ-Ax4?si=AJJyaXPXGzGairLA
And this is a little from their post election survey -
https://chartingthewayforward.substack.com/p/americansand-the-missing-biden-voterswant
Bottom line was, a whole lot of voters just wanted change, and they did not get a clear signal about that particularly at all from her campaign.
I’m not saying that’s wrong, but not all change is good change.