Blog/Analysis

Our Speakers:

👤 Greg Goldner (Founder & Managing Director, Resolute Public Affairs)

Greg Goldner is the founder of Resolute Public Affairs (est. 2002), a strategic communications and advisory firm with national reach and impact. Greg has earned the trust of Fortune 100 CEOs, industry association executives and public officials with his forward-looking insights and acutely perceptive strategic thinking. Twice  named by Chicago Magazine as one of the most powerful people in Chicago, he has deep experience working with US Government departments and winning political campaigns.

👤 James Kanagasooriam (Chief Research Officer, Focaldata)

James is Chief Research Officer at Focaldata. He has extensively polled across most of the electoral events since the 2014 Scottish Referendum, and latterly in 2019 came up with the concept and seat list of the "Red Wall". He has international polling experience directly on campaigns across the US, Canada and UK in particular. He writes regularly for The Times and Spectator.

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The headlines:

1. 🙌 Thank you Joe. Biden’s departure has entirely upended the dynamics of the race. The United States is on course for the closest presidential race since 2004. While Harris is having a full-blown honeymoon, the amber lights are flashing: Harris’s core voter is the ‘anti-Trump woman’, reflecting a voter base buoyed by negative cohesion rather than clear ownership of policy issues.
2. ◀️ The return of the “left edge”. Our swing state polling shows Democratic gains post-Biden are down to the “left edge” of the Democratic Coalition coming back. The worry for Harris is that the types of voters she has gained are not as efficiently distributed in the swing states as Biden’s gains among older, white, Christian voters in 2020, meaning there are signs of life for Trump under the surface.
3. 🤏 Look at the fineprint. We’re live to a number of sources of polling error - running in both parties’ favour - which makes pollsters’ sensitivity to sampling and weighting schemes critical.