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October 28, 2020

Following the (Cancelled) Money

Where campaigns are spending big or pulling out can tell you a lot

 

This, the money, should be followed. 401kcalculator/Creative Commons

**First Ballot**

A strange thing happens with elections in the modern data-driven era.
People believe that access to public polling gives them real-time
information into the electoral picture, and if they read enough of the
Real Clear Politics average and the FiveThirtyEight forecast, they can
handicap every race and be a hit at parties.

This neglects the fact that an army of professionals are paid to know
more about these races than the average doomscroller. There's a
significant amount of private polling, and what of those internal polls
get shared publicly often puts the best spin on it. There's
district-level polling of the presidential race that the pros
selectively leak to polling analysts; David Wasserman of the Cook
Political Report has talked a lot about that this year
,
and how it shows critical deficiencies for Trump in a way it didn't in
2016.

One shorthand for how the pros think about their chances in various
races is to look at their late-game decisions for moving around money.
Campaigns cancel ads or move a bunch of money in ads into races in late
October, and that information can be found. When the House or Senate
campaign arms, or the presidential campaigns, or outside groups with a
lot of money to spend, make sudden moves late, the assumption is
they're reacting to something. With limited funds, they want to
maximize them, and not waste them on an obviously out-of-reach race. At
some level, the ad cancellations are more accurate than the polls on the
big questions of who will win easily and who's still in a fight.

So what does that tell us right now?

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Let's start with the presidential race. The big story yesterday is
that the Trump campaign pulled most ads out of Florida

for the final week. The RNC picked up some but not all of the slack.
Trump is focusing ads largely on four Northeast and Midwest states:
Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Biden, armed with a bigger
war chest, is spreading money around liberally, in pretty much every
close state except Texas.

You have to separate out the fact that Trump's grifter campaign stole
a bunch of the campaign dollars and put them at a disadvantage, and that
Biden has a huge lead in cash on hand. But this says to me a few things.
First, Trump's campaign has given up on Wisconsin, which is in the
same region as the states he's competing on air in but is getting no
money. Second, Trump's team feels he can get away without much ad
support in many states he won in 2016, like Florida, Georgia, North
Carolina, and Arizona (especially the latter three). Third, Biden's
camp has a lot of paths to victory and doesn't need Texas to be on the
list of them. However, Mike Bloomberg has supplemented with a $15
million ad buy in Texas and Ohio
,
based explicitly on his own polling, so maybe Biden's just letting
outside groups do the work there. (Kamala Harris is visiting several
cities in Texas on Friday; travel patterns is another tell from
campaigns that goes beyond polling.)

Advertising in presidential races have questionable impact; everyone
knows who's running and most people have made up their minds. At the
district level this is much more critical. The parties have an idea of
who can actually win and who can't, and are ruthless down the stretch
in positioning resources. Sometimes they're wrong, but it's a good
guide to what they're thinking.

First off, Democratic congressional candidates are swamping Republicans
on the air
,
by more than 2:1. GOP candidates with no chance of winning running
against Democratic celebrities like Maxine Waters

and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

are the only ones spending large amounts of money, more than some
Republican Senate candidates!

That makes the GOP outside groups much more critical. The Congressional
Leadership Fund, the main House Republican Super PAC, is propping up
Republican House candidates in TX-22, NY-22, VA-05, and MN-01; three of
those are defending Republican-held seats (only NY-22, where Claudia
Tenney is a former Congresswoman seeking her seat back, would be a
pickup). Interestingly, CLF made a late ad buy in the district of Cheri
Bustos , the
head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who represents
a somewhat purple district. That would be big for bragging rights but
doesn't necessarily change the overall picture. The National
Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) just made a $14 million ad buy
in 28 House
races; only 10 of them are currently held by Democrats. This suggests
that Republicans are just trying to limit the damage.

Daily Kos Elections has put out a "Triage tracker
"
showing last-minute ad cancellations. Republicans and Democrats
cancelled their late ads in ME-02, showing confidence that Rep. Jared
Golden (D) has that sewn up. The DCCC cancelled reservations for
incumbents in PA-08, MI-08, MI-11, and TX-07, expressing confidence in
those seats. And the NRCC bugged out of TX-22 (an open seat where
Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni nearly won in 2018), even though the
Congressional Leadership Fund is spending there. DK Elections made 18
race rating changes

yesterday, and 15 of them were favorable to Democrats.

In short, Democrats are going to hold the House, and the question is
only how many seats they're going to pick up.

**Read all of our Election 2020 news here**

It's A Good Time To Donate!

Pandemic Watch

There's not going to be any stimulus package

before the election, and hopes for one after the election hinge on the
results. I could take a "victory
" lap
for being aware that there was no way this was going to happen but
there's no victory here; it's a deeply sad situation that will have
millions of people needlessly suffer.

We now must rely even more on the Federal Reserve, which seems to do its
best work getting journalists to write glowing profiles

about Jerome Powell. For a rather different take, read Katie Porter's
letter to Powell

about the central bank buying JPMorgan Chase corporate bonds.

Also we have a terrific piece today from Rachel Cohen

about what the science says about transmissibility of the virus in
children and the efficacy of reopening schools. With close to 800,000
kids infected

and the serious implications of leaving kids behind in early learning,
it's one of the most fraught debates of the pandemic. Read it
!

**Read all of our Unsanitized reports here**

We Really Can't Do This Without You!

**Days Until the Election**

6.

Today I Learned

* Brett Kavanaugh is an idiot on voting rights but the election isn't
automatically, inescapably going to be stolen, says Rick Hasen
.
(Washington Post)

* Trump strands supporters at the Omaha airport

in freezing cold, in a metaphor for what he thinks of them? (Iowa
Starting Line)

* Democrats shift messaging in the final week, telling voters to NOT
mail in ballots
,
but to use dropboxes, go directly to precinct locations or early voting
sites, or however they can be delivered. (Politico)

* The Trump website was hacked by crypto scammers
.
(New York Magazine)

* Darrell Issa losing in his comeback would be something, though this is
an internal poll showing a tossup
.
(Political Polls/Twitter)

* Facebook is supposed to be banning political ads in the final week but
some of Trump's are getting through
.
(HuffPost)

* The poll everyone's taking: can you tell a Trump fridge from a Biden
fridge
?
(New York Times)

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