Despite some small recent trends favoring Donald Trump, 2024 presidential polls remain stubbornly very close, both nationally (where Kamala Harris leads by 1.7 percent according to the FiveThirtyEight averages) and in the seven battleground states. Trump currently leads in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, while Harris leads in Michigan and Wisconsin, per FiveThirtyEight, but no one leads in any battleground state by more than 2 percent.
Polls are not, of course, perfect by any means. So the big question right now is whether they are “off” in some systemic way that conceals the fact that one of the two candidates is really on track for a decisive win. As it happens, two iconic political-media gurus have weighed in on this question all but simultaneously, with neither professing to have a definitive answer.
Polling and forecast wizard Nate Silver (founder of FiveThirtyEight but now out on his own) has a New York Times op-ed that expresses a “gut” view that Trump has a small advantage, but nestles it in arguments that polling errors could go in either direction. He reminds us that state polls in 2016 and both national and state polls in 2020 underestimated Trump’s vote, and also notes an explanation that could again show an underestimation of that same vote:
“[T]he likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias. It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them.
“Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve. Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization. Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.”
But Silver concedes it could work so well that polls are actually overestimating Trump’s vote:
“[T]he new techniques that pollsters are applying could be overkill. One problem with using one of those — “weighting on recalled vote,” or trying to account for how voters report their pick in the last election — is that people often misremember or misstate whom they voted for and are more likely to say they voted for the winner (in 2020, Mr. Biden).
“That could plausibly bias the polls against Ms. Harris because people who say they voted for Mr. Biden but actually voted for Mr. Trump will get flagged as new Trump voters when they aren’t.”
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki drills down into some comparisons of 2024 polls and the actual 2020 vote in key demographic categories and suggests there are signs the Trump vote is now being captured fully. In Michigan and Wisconsin, ground zero for 2020 polling errors based on underestimation of white working-class voters, Trump’s lead in that demographic is actually higher than his 2020 performance. So maybe the pollsters have successfully adjusted for past polling errors. Meanwhile, the Harris camp has grounds for suspecting her ultimate vote could be poorly reflected in the polls:
“From Harris’ standpoint, part of the hope now is that polling is undercounting her support with what have long been core Democratic constituencies: Black, Hispanic and young voters …
“The concern for Harris, obviously, is that her Hispanic support is far lower than Biden’s was, both in the 2020 polls and the final election results. But much of Trump’s new Hispanic support comes from younger voters who have not participated at high levels in past elections. If these voters end up sitting on the sidelines in this election, Harris could end up faring much better with Hispanics than the polling now shows. It’s also somewhat encouraging for her that Biden performed better in the election with Black voters than polling had suggested. Harris will need this to happen again.”
There’s a reason Team Trump is devoting much of its get-out-the-vote strategy to low-propensity voters. If he doesn’t reach and motivate them, he could underperform compared to polls showing him making gains among Black, Hispanic, and first-time voters.
If the polls are wrong, it could again be good news for Trump or instead good news for Harris. We just don’t know right now, even though many fearful Democrats and triumphalist Republicans share Nate Silver’s “gut” feeling that the 45th president wins all ties.
“The numbers of protesters had dwindled substantially in recent weeks,” one reporter in Portland observed last week, “but reports of heavily armed, unidentified, camouflaged federal officers abducting people off the street into unmarked vehicles and meting out violence on the people of Portland have thoroughly re-energized the populace.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/trump-protesters-portland-troops-police-protests.html
You’re not upset about Trump occupying U.S cities with his uninvited private federal army, (with this administration they could be Russians for all we know) youre not bothered by what they’ve done there.
You’re upset with Portland (or any city now) for not welcoming them? Because anything less is a gift? Or is it that you think they should’ve hidden and/or laughed about what a sham it all was tucked away somewhere safe? Maybe you believe if everyone just behaved and didn’t say or do anything to upset Trump, he’d finally be a good boy and then no one would get hurt.
With the election coming up, when do you think it would be acceptable for Americans to take Trump and Barr’s occupation of U.S cities seriously enough to just even be alarmed by it?
Portland had dwindling numbers of protesters and Trump’s militia arrived uninvited. And now they’re being sent to other cities. They were coming no matter what (I think they were planning this back when they were talking about their solutions to homelessness in Democrat ran cities)
When do you think a protest is appropriate?
And regardless of who is responsible, do you believe that if violence occurs the reason for a protest immediately becomes invalid?
I agree, up to a point. But how about if instead of what seems to be a generalized opposition to racism and police brutality set of demands, the demonstrators focused on exposure to and opposition to voter suppression? How about if they popularized Shelby vs. Holder? How about if they created a nationwide effort to collect funds to allow ex-felons in Florida to vote, in the process exposing the persistent Republican efforts to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Americans?
The rioters consider their intentions so noble that their disastrous results do not matter.
Agree. We have hard enough of a time swatting down false reports or disassociating ourselves from right wing or police agitators so we don’t need to contribute to the problem.