2024’s ‘double doubters’ and third-party spoilers
Our old friend DOUG SOSNIK, whose deep dive political memos have achieved a cult following among Washington insiders for many years, has a new look today at the 2024 presidential election that we are happy to share first with Playbook readers.
Sosnik makes an astute point about handicapping next year’s race: Several of the traditional indicators — including presidential job approval, national polls and right track/wrong track numbers — no longer have the predictive power that they once did.
In 2016, he writes, “national polls demonstrated their limitations when they predicted HILLARY CLINTON would win the presidential election due to her strong lead in the popular vote,” Sosnik notes,” while last year’s midterms, where Democrats held off a GOP wave, “showed the shortcomings of relying on proxies for voter sentiment like the mood of the country and the President’s job approval” — both of which were dismal.
So as much as possible, he argues, we need to focus on data from the eight key swing states in 2024: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Sosnik points out that one common feature of these states is that their populations skew in the middle — “neither extremely high nor extremely low”— on educational attainment, perhaps the most important demographic characteristic when it comes to predicting partisan affiliation.
The full .pdf memo is here.