But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for...
Stray thoughts on politics, via Billy Joel lyrics. You're welcome?
This week brought an exciting bit of news for the Piano Man Hive: Billy Joel is going to release his first new song in nearly two decades, and his first full-on pop single since River of Dreams dropped in 1993 when I was in *mumble mumbleth* grade. The final track on that album, “Famous Last Words”, seemed a pretty conclusive note on which to go out (“these are the last words I have to say, that’s why it took so long to write”), and Joel has spent the intervening thirty-some odd years touring, performing at Madison Square Garden, putting out some classical music and so on.
His new song is, aptly, going to be titled “Turn The Lights Back On”. This news has had me listening to Billy Joel on Spotify quite a bit in the last day or so while I’ve been traveling to New York for CNN 2024 primary election coverage.
With Tuesday’s dual Trump-Biden victory in New Hampshire, we are now effectively entering the general election phase of this campaign. No, I am still not making any predictions about who will win in November. However, I have decided to organize my thoughts about what indicators and metrics I am watching now that we are pivoting to the general.
And I have chosen to organize these thoughts via Billy Joel lyrics. You’re welcome?
In no particular order, here’s what I am tracking most closely the rest of the year:
“You may be right, I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for”: who will voters trust most to bring about stability and order? I took a little grief from some of you for having the audacity to say in the pages of The New York Times that, yes, I know you may think Donald Trump is a wrecking ball or that chaos follows him, but for an awful lot of voters in 2024, they are looking for stability and order…and they are starting to think Donald Trump is better than Joe Biden to provide it. Well, I decided to ask American voters point blank: do you think that if Joe Biden is re-elected in 2024 that things in the United States will be more stable, less stable, or about the same? What of Trump? Well, only 27% of Americans think Biden will usher in more stability, while 49% say things would be less stable. For Trump? He runs about even, 45% more stable, 43% less stable. Yes, there are different ways you can interpret the question; someone might prefer Joe Biden very much but worry that his re-election will spark terrible political violence, for instance. But then you also see Trump winning 51-35 on who will “make our economy work better” and 45-40 on who will “promote a safe and secure society” and you can see it’s not just one question pointing that direction.
“They say that these are not the best of times, but they're the only times I've ever known”: is the electorate mad or just disappointed and resigned? Mad people vote. They turn out to send a message. Republicans - especially Trump’s biggest fans - have been mad since the 2020 election. Pre-Dobbs, it seemed as though Democratic voters in the 2022 midterms weren’t mad, they were just disappointed. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, suddenly Democrats were mad too. Everyone was mad! Mad people vote. Right now, voters across the board are somewhat tuned in and are all pretty ticked off for various reasons. But through a combination of factors (economy improving? campaign being miserable?) you can imagine the whole “vibe” shifting, and in either direction. You can easily see how voters get amped up by the rising toxicity of the campaign. You can also easily see how voters get burnt out and checked out. (Exhibit A: this Pew Research analysis of voters who are tuning out.) Whether this will be a high or low-turnout election will hinge on whether voters feel like the stakes are high and that there’s a clear difference between the candidates. Which, you would think the answer is obviously yes, and yet…
“It seems such a waste of time, if that's what it's all about; mama if that's movin' up then I'm movin' out”: Will young voters and voters of color in particular decide participating in elections is a waste of time this year? One number I’m tracking in my polling is the percent of key voter groups who report saying “Whether Trump or Biden wins really would not make a difference to me personally.” Very few seniors believe this (only 5%)! Very few white voters believe this (only 10%)! But among young voters and voters of color? The numbers are much higher. Over a quarter of Black and Hispanic voters, and nearly one-third of voters under age 30 choose this instead of “whether Trump or Biden wins really would make a difference to me personally.” Considering how important those voters are to the Democratic coalition, that should be a huge warning sign for the Biden campaign.
“I'm not willing to lay down and die, because I am an innocent man”: how will Donald Trump’s legal issues and his combative approach to court proceedings affect his chances of re-taking the presidency? I’ve long believed that most voters are not following the ins and outs of Donald Trump’s various legal issues. I follow national news as a part of my job and if you made me name, say, which judge is presiding over which case, I could probably only do a middling job at it. Normal people with real lives? No way. And yet, for our new Echelon Insights polling partnership with Puck we asked voters how much they are hearing about Trump and Biden respectively. More voters said they’d heard about Trump than Biden during the last week, and of those who had heard something, more reported having heard something about his legal issues than had heard about him winning the Iowa Caucuses! I’ve combed through the open-ended responses, and most of them not very detailed, but either take the form of “Trump is a criminal who might be going to jail soon” or “Trump is being persecuted”. Either way, this is a massive X factor hanging over everything.
“There's a place in the world for the angry young man, with his working class ties and his radical plans”: what will the Gen Z gender gap look like? My main beat for the last decade has been studying the youth vote. Essentially from the moment The Selfie Vote went to press, the story of the youth vote’s trend leftward has become primarily a story of young women moving left. AEI’s Daniel Cox has written this up in great detail and I’d recommend his report to all of you, but young women are in general more alarmed about everything than young men are, while young men are experiencing a very different set of challenges like social isolation and lack of economic opportunity further down on the income spectrum. I’ll be keeping an eye on how this gender gap shows up in the polls about Generation Z - both their disillusionment with Biden, their activation around the issue of abortion, and whether angry young men become a Republican constituency or simply stay home altogether.
“Well we're waiting here in Allentown for the Pennsylvania we never found”: how will the Keystone State break? I mean, this one is pretty obvious. Pennsylvania will be very important, both for the electoral college and the U.S. Senate! How can I not include this song in a list of this kind?
“I’m taking a Greyhound on the Hudson River Line, I’m in a New York state of mind”: what will happen with New York’s congressional map and will Republicans hold on to their swing seats there? At present, five of the thirteen GOP-held House seats listed as “toss-ups” by Cook Political Report are in the Empire State. But the state has also been ordered by the courts to redraw its Congressional map anyway. This is one of the big storylines to follow if you care about control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
“When I pressed her for a reason, she refused to even answer; it was then I felt the stranger kick me right between the eyes”: will Trump-induced polling nonresponse mess up the pre-election forecasts again? So far, the pollsters in 2024 have been pretty good! Votes are still being counted in New Hampshire as we speak, but no one should be gobsmacked by the result there (looking like a somewhat comfortable Trump win). In Iowa, the polls were pretty on the mark! But the threat of general election polls being affected by The Unpollable is still very real.
A few odds and ends from me before we part:
I did a focus group of Republican likely caucusgoers in Iowa back at the very start of the year. The New York Times ran the transcript and you can find it here. These were not a particularly Trump-favorable bunch, but you can see how they criticize him in one breath but then defend him in the next. I always love these looks into the psychology of voters and how they weigh the many pieces of information on their minds to choose for whom they’ll vote.
I went on The Ezra Klein Show to explain Trump’s appeal in the GOP. We recorded this before Iowa, but I think the conclusions hold up pretty well. Republican voters actually do like Trump! A lot! For a variety of reasons! If you want to understand more, please do listen.
I chatted with Frank Bruni and Mike Murphy about how we thought the primary would go. I was pretty sure this was Trump’s to lose, that he’d win Iowa handily, that DeSantis would run out of runway in this race and that Haley was facing a big uphill battle, especially post New Hampshire. I feel like these conclusions also hold up well!
As always, thanks for reading and subscribing. We’ve got a long year ahead of us, but maybe with new Billy Joel on the horizon, we can get through anything.