Presenter: Kristen Soltis Anderson, Political Pollster; Founder, Echelon Insights
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00:00So my name is Kristen Soltis-Anderson. I am the founder of Echelon Insights. We're an opinion research firm that works for brands,
00:07advocacy groups, and
00:08occasionally we dabble in politics. And so every two to four years around
00:13pumpkin spice season, as a political pollster, I get asked one question over and over and over.
00:20And that question is, what will happen? What's going to happen in this election?
00:25Everybody wants to know. And part of that is just natural curiosity.
00:29It's kind of like how a kid on Christmas wants to know what's under the tree, and they might
00:34shake the box to see what's inside. Is it a toy or a lump of coal?
00:38Except in my world, the box is Pennsylvania. What's inside?
00:42Is it a lump of coal or a toy? Which candidate is the lump of coal may vary depending on your political persuasion.
00:49But nevertheless, what we're trying to figure out is
00:52what is it that voters are going to do when this election season
00:56wraps. And the reason why so many people care about this may be curiosity, it may be
01:01entertainment for some, but for the women in this room, the reason why you want to be able to
01:06see what is going on in the future is because you need to be able to prepare your companies.
01:11There are going to be policies that may be different, things that affect your bottom line, things that affect your employees,
01:17your ability to do business around the world, that matter whether one candidate or the other wins the election.
01:24So I get asked that question a lot because people are rightfully very anxious and know that there are huge amounts of things at stake.
01:32But this is not a very easy election to predict. There's a piece written by a variety of folks at Politico.
01:39They pulled together about a dozen different academics,
01:43pundits, advocates, to all come together and try to figure out what is the black swan event that could affect this election.
01:50This was a piece from January, and it has stuck with me ever since because of the dozen or so things that they talk about,
01:58not just one, but many of them have already occurred.
02:02The article included a number of people who said, I predict that it would be unpredictable,
02:06but possible for a climate change-fueled natural disaster to affect our battleground states in the weeks leading up to election day.
02:13One person wrote that they believed the debate over abortion was only going to get more intense, and this article came out
02:20just weeks before the Alabama Supreme Court's ruling on IVF.
02:24We had some who predicted that there could be a death at a Trump rally, or a
02:28violent attempt on a candidate's life, both of which sadly came true at that rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
02:34In fact, in that article,
02:36most of the things did wind up coming to pass in one way or another, except for one. If you have the
02:41aliens making contact on your bingo card, we still have a few weeks.
02:46They still have time, but I just put this up here to underscore how unbelievably
02:51unpredictable this election has been, to say nothing of the fact that the two candidates on the ballot at the top of the ticket
02:58are not the two candidates we thought we would have back in January at the start of the year.
03:03So knowing all of this, I want to then give some context for how
03:07stable this election has been in the face of chaos. So back in
03:122008, you had an election where you had John McCain, Barack Obama.
03:16They were in a race of their lifetimes, and in that race,
03:20the polls were all over the place. When we took a look at how far the margins were apart on these polls,
03:26we found that John McCain, at one point in the last two months before Election Day,
03:33John McCain at one point was up by three, and then Barack Obama was up by seven, a ten-point swing.
03:39We then also had Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in their election. The swing there was about
03:45five points. It went from a Romney minus one to an Obama plus four. We had Trump versus Clinton.
03:52That was an election where the polls in the closing weeks
03:55had about a six-point worth of swing, and the last election as well only about four points.
03:59But still, in those closing weeks, we expect the polls to move a lot.
04:03And so then I looked. Since Labor Day, how much has this race moved?
04:08It has not moved at all.
04:10I had to go to decimal points in order to show any sort of difference between where this race stood.
04:16So that's just to give you some context for how unbelievably stable it is, and it is the same way in the battleground states.
04:22We see Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan are all races
04:28that are not just within the margin of error.
04:31They are essentially within a point. Our friends at AARP put out a poll today of voters in Michigan.
04:36It had Harris 46, Trump 46.
04:40So as somebody who works in the statistical profession,
04:43it would be irresponsible of me to tell you that I knew how this election was going to go.
04:48So instead what I'll tell you is why is this race so close, and why isn't it moving at all?
04:54So we'll start with why it's so close.
04:56Part of why this race is so close is that the candidates at the top of the ticket are now very evenly matched on
05:02two criteria that voters say is incredibly important.
05:05Who will make the country safe, and who will make the economy better?
05:09Back when Joe Biden was at the top of the tickets, my polls showed Donald Trump with a
05:14fairly sizable lead on a variety of these metrics.
05:17But since Democrats made the change and Kamala Harris became the Democrats nominee,
05:21we now can see that you have keeping our country safe and making our economy work better as even, and
05:27the important metric of being competent and effective has now swung decisively in the Democrats favor.
05:34But why then do we still have such a close race if those numbers had moved so much?
05:38The reality is that we're incredibly polarized, and I want to double-click for a second on what our polarization means.
05:44Some people think our polarization means that half of America believes one thing and half of America believes the other.
05:50At my firm, we've done lots of experiments where we ask people what they think about their different political and partisan views,
05:56and we find that the vast majority of Americans take a little from column A and a little from column B.
06:01They are not entirely Republican or entirely Democratic in their worldview.
06:05The reason why we are so polarized is because voters look at the other side,
06:11and they think these are people that want to harm me, and they have the power to do so.
06:16Republicans and Democrats increasingly view their side as losing, and when you feel less powerful,
06:22you are more willing to excuse bad behavior of the others in the foxhole with you.
06:26You're more willing to do or accept whatever it will take for your side to win, and that's where we find ourselves today.
06:33And so that's why this race is so evenly divided, because people across this country
06:40really feel set in their tribe and are concerned about what happens if the other side takes power.
06:46But then why does the race not move?
06:48Well, there are so few people who really don't know how they feel about all of this that that's why this isn't moving very much.
06:55So back in May, I wrote a piece about Donald Trump and why his brand image has remained so stable.
07:01And part of it is because he has been a factor in American life for decades.
07:06My entire time on this planet, Donald Trump has been a celebrity of some kind.
07:11And so it's important to keep that in mind.
07:13When we look at those other races where the polls swung one way or another,
07:17it was because voters were still getting to know the candidates at the top of the ticket.
07:21In this race, we have one anchoring force, Donald Trump, who people know how they feel about him, love him or hate him.
07:29And so his views have been locked in place pretty strongly, even as Kamala Harris has consolidated the views of Democrats,
07:36has gotten more people within her own party to say that they think that she is a strong candidate and she can do well.
07:42But if her brand image is moving and Trump's isn't, then why isn't she decisively winning?
07:47It's because there is a small but very significant portion of voters who do not like Donald Trump,
07:54but nevertheless say they intend to vote for him.
07:57I call these voters the begrudging Trump voters.
08:00Again, it's about seven percent of them.
08:02And they say, I don't not like him, but it doesn't matter.
08:05I had a focus group where I talked to one voter.
08:07She was a moderate former Republican voter in Pennsylvania, but she still said she planned to vote for Donald Trump anyways.
08:15And I asked her why.
08:16And she said, if I go to the doctor and I need heart surgery, I don't care if I don't like the heart surgeon.
08:22I just want him to do a good job.
08:24And in her view, she thought that Donald Trump would do a good job on the issues that mattered to her.
08:29There are a lot of voters going to the polls this year who do not like the candidates that they have on offer,
08:36but are nevertheless of the mind that this is an election with enormously high stakes and they're going to participate.
08:42So I'll leave you then with one voter who really doesn't like the options available to her either,
08:46but has nevertheless decided to vote for Kamala Harris.
08:49I don't know if this will resonate with any of you in this room,
08:51but this was from a focus group I did for The New York Times back just a few weeks ago.
08:55This respondent, her name is Kay.
08:57She's 61.
08:58She was a Biden voter in 2020.
08:59And she said, I voted for Biden because I thought he was a little bit more than the lesser of two evils.
09:05Harris, I just don't know enough about her.
09:07But I don't think Trump can string five words together to make a sentence.
09:10He's a global embarrassment.
09:12Everybody says if I don't vote, it's a vote for Trump.
09:14So I guess I have to vote.
09:16I'm not going to love it.
09:17I'm not going to enjoy it.
09:18I'm not going to have fun.
09:20There might be wine afterwards.
09:22I wish I could tell you the answer to what will happen in this election, but statistically, I can't.
09:27The polls are simply too close.
09:29All I can do is tell you to be prepared for anything.