What Opinion and Behavioral Data Are Telling Us
The contours of the post-Biden election are starting to take shape
It’s tempting to look at opinion polls and draw conclusions about what’s going to happen in November. But we’re not going to do that today. It’s still too soon. We’ll get there, but let’s give it until a week or so after Labor Day, when people who haven’t tuned into the election traditionally start paying attention.
By then public opinion should settle down after the repeated shocks of the past two months.
Just think about everything we’ve been through this summer.
On June 27, Joe Biden debated Donald Trump. On July 20—less than six weeks ago—he was still a candidate for president. In the interim, Trump survived an assassination attempt, was nominated at the Republican convention, and made the brilliant selection of J.D. Vance to be his running mate (and by brilliant, I mean disastrous).
Then Biden dropped out, and events started to move at a dizzying pace. In the past few weeks, we saw Kamala Harris step in as nominee-apparent, rapidly unite her party, take control of the Biden campaign and redirect it to reflect her style and message, pull off a rousing nominating convention, and make the brilliant selection of Tim Walz as her running mate (and by brilliant, I mean brilliant).
That’s a lot to process. Two months ago, the prevailing election narrative was how an old incumbent was struggling to keep pace with an aggressive and ascendant opponent. Today, the prevailing election narrative is how a youthful, energetic candidate has introduced joy to our politics, invigorated two generations of voters, and put her once-confident opponent on the defensive.
The change in narrative is a soft indicator of how the election is trending. There are clues in hard data as well. Even though we aren’t quite ready to draw conclusions from measures of how people say they intend to vote, there are other ways to examine opinion data—as well as behavioral data that’s available for analysis—to get a sense of where the election stands and where it may be going.
And that data is giving us a consistent and clear message:
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