Morning Consult

We are a little over a month till Election Day. The polls have been looking better for Kamala Harris than they did for Joe Biden, but a Donald Trump victory is still very likely. Cameron Easley provides some wise guidance on how to read the polls between now and Election Day. https://lnkd.in/e-v3T7f8

In this brief explainer, we will introduce why survey weighting is needed and how we typically weight data at Morning Consult. We’ll close with a case study on how we weight U.S. political research at the state-level.

Our latest swing-state surveys in partnership with Bloomberg News and companion research by our U.S. analyst Eli Yokley are now available here, along with a close look at views of Trump's/Harris' economic policy proposals: https://lnkd.in/ewZcKM4z Harris is ahead in 6/7 states we examine, with all results within the margin of error. More via link above. Snapshot of economic policy sentiment below.

Are you tired of seeing these posts about our global political Counter/Consensus briefing and wishing you'd been able to see all the charts and text? If you sign up for the *free* newsletter in the next 40 minutes, you can still get today's edition when it drops. Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/g7T7Hi2J 👆

The economy has been front and center in the U.S. presidential election as voters once again rate it as their most important issue. Our special report on the economy and the election explores: Which economic issues matter most overall and to undecided voters? How much voters trust Trump and Harris on the issues? Who voters hold responsible for the economy? What issues voters are hearing the most about? Voter concerns about the post-election economy?

I’m pleased to announce the launch of Morning Consult's Global Political Risk Ratings, a high-frequency political risk management tool covering 36 global markets, with historical coverage from 2017-19 onwards for the largest among them. Our ratings, which are narrowly defined to reflect the degree of public support for incumbent governments and offer forecasting leverage over the likelihood of economic policy uncertainty and social unrest, draw inspiration from sovereign credit ratings models — with markets assigned letter-based risk ratings reflecting underlying numeric scores. The ratings are intended to support data-driven risk management efforts in the context of corporate scenario planning, as well as portfolio management and investment decision-making, including by serving as quantitative political inputs into sovereign credit ratings models. Why the need for such ratings? The quantification of political risk over the past 5-10 years has created new opportunities for corporates, asset managers, and others to more systematically price political risk into scenario planning and investment decision-making. But to a large degree, existing quantitative political risk metrics are commonly issued on a low frequency, insufficiently responsive to political developments, subject to a high degree of analyst influence, and/or overly complex in design. Our ratings are intended to overcome these limitations: they're high-frequency (with both monthly and daily readings available), responsive, and derived systematically from retroactively stable survey data that is both transparent and straightforward to interpret. You can find the full suite of ratings materials here: 1. Global Political Risk Ratings (along with historical data access and a methodology primer): https://lnkd.in/egF8EiCA. 2. Monthly Market Commentary & Risk Outlook (MACRO) Political Briefing: https://lnkd.in/ePygnw_3 2. A launch memo covering corporate and finserv use-cases, and which outlines the comparative advantages our ratings afford: https://lnkd.in/e9-fje_e 3. A press release profiling the initial slate of ratings, including an upgrade for the United States: https://lnkd.in/eFUaHNWc DM if you'd like a copy of our initial companion market commentary. #politicalrisk #geopolitics

We’re pleased to announce the launch of Morning Consult’s Global Political Risk Ratings, a comprehensive political risk management tool covering 36 markets on a monthly basis. The ratings are modeled on sovereign credit ratings models — with countries subject to letter-based ratings as well as issuance of upgrades and downgrades — and are intended to support both corporate scenario planning and portfolio allocation strategies. Ratings are defined to reflect the degree of public approval of the incumbent chief executive and of their country’s trajectory in each rated market, and are associated with an increased likelihood of economic policy uncertainty and political unrest as a function of higher risk. In the inaugural edition, the U.S. has been upgraded on the back of Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential contest and Harris’ ascendancy to the top of the Democratic ticket, which drove improvements in the survey metrics underlying the ratings.

I'm very excited for the launch today of Morning Consult's Soft Power Rankings, a new data and analytical dashboard that leverages our global daily tracker data to infer both country-level and institution-level (e.g. EU, UN, NATO) soft power. In addition to cross-country rankings for 40 countries, you'll find trended soft power metrics for geopolitically important actors (e.g. China, India, the U.S./EU) and point-in-time metrics showing how major international institutions stack up relative to one another. Soft power is narrowly defined as global average net favorability of that entity among 42 peer countries. Complete country and organization rankings, downloadable trended charts and data available here: https://lnkd.in/gCsUUMFS. Below is one (incomplete) section of the rankings.

Some travelers have had enough. With revenge travel over and pandemic savings depleted, travelers say they’re planning fewer trips this summer, or skipping their vacations altogether. “After two straight years of strong gains, the number of Americans planning to take leisure trips is taking a dip,” states a summer travel report from Deloitte Insights. Gen Zs and Millennials, especially, are spending less on airfare, hotels, sports events and music concerts, according to Morning Consult. #travel #demand #costs