Election 2024: Can Kennedy Really Appeal to Enough Swing, Independent, and Moderate Voters to Swing the Election?

By now my highly engaged political readers have read reporting on the latest Quinnipiac poll on Election 2024, and we’ve seen the topline results of the poll: Biden is beating Trump by six whole points! The election is obviously over, so we can all go back to doom scrolling and binge watching, right?

Well, not quite. We need to take a deeper dive into the evidence that we have to start to figure out how the issues, the narratives, and the sentiment of the electorate will affect the outcome of the election. As someone somewhere on the liberal media scene said, no election with Trump in it is business as usual. We’ve got to treat everything as breaking all the rules that we know… well, except the predictive behavioral economic rules, right?

Distinguishing the Swing and Moderate Voters

Several prominent public policy and political science scholars have been looking at elections and election data for a long time and have some observations that if we add them to the cross tabs of the Quinnipiac poll and behavioral economics findings, we might could just have us some insight into how the vast quivering squishy quavering jello-mold of the middle-of-the-road voters are going to affect our election.

The Truly and Weirdly Moderate Voters Will Determine the Election

• THE TRUE & “WEIRD” MODERATE voters swing elections according to University of Chicago public policy professor Anthony Fowler. We’ll get to what is meant by both true and “weird” moderate voters in a minute.
• MODERATE VOTERS have the least support for democracy and the most support for authoritarian strong-person rule according to Rachel Kleinfeld reporting in a recent Carnegie Endowment for International Peace article on  political polarization and violence based in part on a 2018 Democracy Fund survey on political views of Americans.

The Types of Moderate, Swing, and Independent Voters

We’re now left buggering the question, what is a moderate voter? We throw around a lot of terms: swing voter, independent voter, moderate voter, occasional voter, and undecided voter. They are all animals of different stripes and can affect our elections in different ways. We’ve bitched about the disaffected, disinterested, and disinclined independent, occasional, and undecided voter A LOT at Ye Olde Blogge, but rarely have we defined our terms very well. That trend ends today because we read an article on Vox and an article on FiveThirtyEight!

• INDEPENDENT VOTERS tend to have a partisan lean but not necessarily a strong party affiliation or identity even though they tend to vote for one party over the other… usually… sometimes…maybe always, except for that one time. They are the flexitarian that subsists on heavy meat diets except on their dating app profiles. Knowhatimean? Whatever they are, they are not centrist voters. They vote for one party too consistently.
• TRUE MODERATE VOTERS tend to value policies that end up in the middle of political spectrum. However, there is another way of defining moderates.
• THE MEH VOTERS are the ones without a real guiding ideology. They tend to pick and choose political and policy issues from across the spectrum and for a variety of reasons, which can average out to being in the middle. Think fiscally conservative, socially liberal Manchenima and the resulting mess that comes sliding out of that combination. One important thing to note here: they don’t usually vote. A lack of ideology generally means a lack of political motivation.
• THE WEIRD VOTERS are ones who don’t really fit any ideological profile. However, they tend to be engaged politically and will vote at least occasionally. They are the true wildcard of the elections.

Analyzing the Results of the Quinnipiac Poll

Great. What do we make of this mess, amirite? That’s where the Quinnipiac poll comes in… and a little bit of behavioral economics. Most polls have Trump beating of Biden and have for some time, so why should we care what one outlier of a poll says? Two reasons: (1) It is a recent poll. And (2) it comes after the Republican Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary and the Democratic New Hampshire primary. We can corroborate the polls with findings in how folks voted. Hunh? Hunh? Pretty smart, right?

Polling Analysis Caveats for the Ages

Here’s some smart brevity regarding caveats on this poll:

• NINE MONTHS. It’s still nine months BEFORE the election and the primaries have just started. Still a bit early to say anything other than if the election were held today, but that isn’t very good click bait, is it? Better to pretend that it is IMPOTENT, right?
• ONE POLL. It is always better to look at polling averages than single polls because regression to the mean.
• REGISTERED VOTERS. Quinnipiac chose to poll registered voters over likely voters, which is always worse because, uh, voting, you know?
• NATIONAL POLLS. As we learned in 2016, presidential elections are won at the state level. The national vote totals don’t mean diddly.

The Unsurprising Top Line Poll Results

Even with all of this noise and chafe recommending against paying attention to this poll, it has some interesting findings.

• 50% – 44%. For one of the first times in a year, Biden leads Trump in a high quality national poll from a high quality polling organization. That in and of itself is heartening to all of us who think our democracy is being maintained one election at a time.
• 47% – 46%. The Quinnipiac poll from December had Biden ahead by a meaningless percentage point, so if the trend holds up, it could be significant.
• GAPING GENDER HOLE. Unsurprisingly, women hate I2I4 and are moving towards Biden as the election creeps closer. Biden’s lead has widened to 22% accounting for his overall lead.
• UNDERWATER. For issues like the economy, foreign policy, Israel-Hamas, the border, Biden is fairly far underwater. People, for whatever reason, ain’t happy with what’s going on in those areas.

The Surprising Cross Tab Results and Biden’s Weaknesses

There are some surprising changes when other candidates are polled, though, like Kennedy and Hailey. We shouldn’t get too bogged down in the exact numbers, but here’s what I found:

Kennedy’s support comes mostly from Biden among all demographics putting the election to within a couple of points. A viable Kennedy candidacy could really throw the election. That’s why conservative billionaires are funding his run.

Hailey actually barely beats Biden 47 to 45% leads him across all demographics. While she can’t win the primary, it helps spell out Biden’s weaknesses going into the general campaign.

Appealing to the Various Types of Moderate Voters

Looking at the swing voters that will sway an election, we get some ideas for how to appeal to them.

The True Moderate Voter

The true moderate voter can’t be scared into voting by emphasizing Trump’s threat to democracy. They just don’t care about politics and democracy. Fowler’s research suggests that they do not have much ideological interest and will vote for the “interesting” or more likable candidate.

Unfortunately, both Kennedy and Hailey may qualify for this group as an interesting or novel candidate like Trump and the other third party candidates did in 2016. Biden should not take Kennedy’s lack of viability as a given. He should come out early and emphasize just how normal and safe he is as a candidate and president and how unhinged and dangerous Kennedy is.

The Meh Moderate Voter

The meh voter is disengaged and indifferent to politics, but that doesn’t mean they don’t care. They are more than likely to be risk averse, meaning they are afraid to change things unless a sure loss is staring them in the face. They will come out to vote to save democracy. They will come out to vote if they feel threatened enough by I2I4.

The crazier Trump, Kennedy, and Hailey act, the more likely it’ll catch their attention, and the more likely they will be to vote against them.

The Weird Moderate Voter

The weird voter is politically engaged; they just aren’t ideological. These are the people who want to feel special and do their own research, which means they’re vulnerable to mis and disinformation campaigns. They are not risk averse, so appealing to them by hyping the threat to democracy is not likely to work. Worse, these are the folks that will decide the election because, they are the most likely to vote.

Appealing to them has to be based on messaging. Not a threat to democracy, but Democrats get things done, make life better, maintain the status quo (status quo bias), and Republicans obstruct and play politics. That is a message that will work with these folks.

Image Attribution

This image was generated using Poe’s StableDiffusionXL bot using the prompt, Robert Kennedy Jr shaking hands with Donald Trump