More of the MelodramaEditors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

More of the Melodrama

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 1h

We’re back to another round of the Democratic woe-is-me, contending polls psychodrama. Jon Chait has a follow-on on yesterday’s NYT/Sienain which he sees those perilous numbers in key swing states as a sign that the Democratic presidential primaries have slipped into an echochamber in which no one realizes or cares that the leading candidates are pushing a policy platform that is simply not popular with most voters. As Chait puts it, Trump is “at the moment he is right on the cusp of victory.” Meanwhile, this morning, WaPo/ABC has a new poll out showing the Democrats holding thunderous margins against Donald Trump nationwide. Both of these soundings cannot be true at the same time.

Chait comes in for a lot of grief on Twitter and the online left generally. Sometimes with good reason. But broadly speaking I think he’s right here. The Democratic primary conversation has become significantly unmoored from how centerpiece policies play with the broader electorate. There really are some observers who think either that all left/Democratic policies really are very popular if only you explain them right or that your policies being popular doesn’t even matter.

My own take on this is that Medicare for All is the central issue. Specifically the abolition of private insurance is the central issue that could cut heavily against the Democrats in a general election. I’m actually with the Warren and Sanders crowd in thinking that most of their tax policies are either supported by the public or just not enough to move many votes toward Trump in such a polarized electorate. Insurance is unique because it cuts deeply into one’s own feelings of well-being, safety, security. Even if we’d all be better with a national single payer system, left Democrats greatly, willfully underestimate the degree to which people will resist losing the known they have even if they’re not totally happy with it. This is basica human nature and foolish to ignore or argue away.

With this said though the reality is that the NYT/Siena poll Chait goes to town on is just an outlier. ‘Outlier’ doesn’t mean wrong. But we shouldn’t make broad generalizations or decisions based on polls which are backed up by few if any other polls. I don’t like getting into the nitty gritty of crosstabs because that’s just an easy way to find your way to your own “unskewing” nonsense. It’s enough to say they’re just not in line with much of any other public polling. In this case, one poll can’t justify or confirm a storyline you’ve been pushing for years in the absence of polling data.

On the WaPo/ABC poll, I would say there’s basically no chance Joe Biden ends up winning the general election popular vote by 17 points. But there’s also no way the NYT/Siena numbers are right if his margin is even half that.

My takeaway from the WaPo/ABC number actually isn’t the margins, which seem too high compared to other recent numbers. It’s the relative margins of the strength of the Democrats.

Biden leads Trump by 17 points. But Warren lead him by 15 and Sanders does by 14. In other words, the difference in relative strength between the two leading candidates is becoming very thin. To me that is the number to watch. Electability is Biden’s calling card. People who say polls don’t tell us anything about electability are silly. If Warren keeps narrowing that margin that will and should change the equation.