Emily DeLetter’s “Presidential election polls 2024: What polls are saying just 2 days before Election Day” shares some interesting data at USA Today: “With just two days before Election Day, polling suggests the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remains neck-and-neck….National polls provide a snapshot of the country as a whole, and a majority of the national polls released Sunday suggest either a tie between the candidates or Harris taking a narrow lead….In a surprising turn, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Harris leading Trump in Iowa by three points, a state that previously went for Trump in 2016 and 2020….The poll of 808 likely Iowa voters, which includes those who have already voted as well as those who say they definitely plan to vote was released late Saturday and conducted by Selzer & Co. from Oct. 28-31….Harris is leading Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters in Iowa, according to the poll, which has a margin of error of ± 3.4 points….This follows a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with four point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll, where he had an 18-point lead over President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time….“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co, told the Des Moines Register, part of the USA TODAY Network. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”
From “Trump and Harris are both a normal polling error away from a blowout” by G. Elliot Morris at 538: “In 2020, polls overestimated Biden’s margin over Trump by about 4 percentage points in competitive states. As of Oct. 30 at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, the margin between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump in 538’s polling averages is smaller than 4 points in seven states: the familiar septet of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That means that, if the polling error from 2020 repeats itself, Trump would win all seven swing states and 312 Electoral College votes….Of course, if the polls are off, it won’t necessarily benefit Trump. The direction of polling error is impossible to predict in advance, and polls have overestimated Republicans plenty of times in the past. In a scenario where the polls overestimate Trump’s margin by 4 points in every state, Harris would win all seven swing states and 319 electoral votes….Based on how much polls have been off in the past, our election model estimates that the average polling error in competitive states this year will be 3.8 points on the margin.* This error is not uniform across states — for example, states with different demographics tend to have different levels of polling error — but, generally speaking, when polls overestimate a candidate, they tend to overestimate them across the board. In other words, the model is expecting a roughly 2020-sized polling error — although not necessarily in the same direction as 2020. (In 50 percent of the model’s simulations, Trump beats his polls, and 50 percent of the time, Harris does.)….Nationwide, our model expects polling error to be greater than 2 points in either direction 62 percent of the time. In other words, there’s only about a 1-in-3 chance that polls miss by less than 2 points (which we would consider a small polling error historically)….Of course, the probability of a blowout either way depends heavily on the popular vote outcome. If Harris wins the national popular vote by 3 points, she’s much likelier to win the states that will decide the Electoral College than if she loses the popular vote by 3….Meanwhile, our model reckons Harris needs to win the popular vote by 2.1 points to be favored to win the election because swing states are more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole. And if she wins the popular vote by 4.5 points (Biden’s popular-vote margin in 2020), she is favored to win in a blowout of her own.”
Domenico Montanaro explores “10 key demographic groups that could decide the presidential election” at npr.org and writes: “The largest single voting group is white voters. Republicans have been dominant with them in the last 20 years, but with the growing Latino and Asian American populations, white voters have been on a sharp decline as a share of the electorate since the 1990s….Because of that demographic change, former President Barack Obama was the first candidate to win a presidential election with less than 40% of the white vote in 2012. Democrat Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 when she got 2 points lower (37%). Biden won four years later and was above 40%….The October NPR/PBS News/Marist poll showed Harris winning 45% of white voters. If that were to hold, it would be the highest share for a Democrat since 1976. But Harris still only had a 2-point lead over Trump in the survey because of Trump cutting into margins with Black and Latino voters….Almost nothing now is a better predictor of how white voters will vote than whether or not they have a college degree. White voters with college degrees had long been reliable Republican voters. But that changed between 2016 and 2020, when Biden won them narrowly….Polling suggests Democrats’ advantage with them could balloon in this election….White voters without degrees, many of whom live in rural areas, are declining as a share of eligible voters in the country. But in key states, they still make up a larger percentage of eligible voters than whites with degrees. That’s true, for example, in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. In every one of the seven swing states, white non-college voters made up a higher share of the electorate than in 2016.” Read the rest of the article for a more in-depth look at pivotal demographic groups right here.
Some insights from “Our Final 2024 Ratings” by Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and J. Miles Coleman at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “What has surprised us down the stretch, meanwhile, is that Georgia and North Carolina are both gettable for Kamala Harris. A week or two ago, we were taking it almost for granted that while these states would of course be close, they would break toward Trump at the end. This is now far from guaranteed. Trump himself was campaigning in North Carolina on Saturday, Sunday, and today. While we have heard some arguments as to why this isn’t that big of a deal, we do take this as something of a signal about that state, particularly when combined with our own intel and the stubbornly close polls. Nevada, also apparently super-close, saw Republicans get out to a lead in the advance vote, leaving it an open question as to whether Democrats could catch up….Of the Industrial North battlegrounds, our strong prior has been that Michigan was likely to be the bluest of these states. We are sticking with that prior belief despite obvious signs that Harris has not nailed it down….Pennsylvania may be the biggest wild card, and the most responsive to whatever has (or has not) changed in the final days of the campaign, because it ultimately does not have that much advance vote. Something like 70% or even more of the total Pennsylvania vote will be cast on Election Day, clearly the highest of the 7 key battlegrounds, according to calculations we made from turnout expert Michael McDonald’s overall turnout forecasts and reporting of votes cast so far….Our prior belief heading into the election season was that Wisconsin would be the hardest Industrial North state for Democrats to hold, both because it was the closest state Joe Biden carried in the region and because it skews whiter and more rural than the other two. Yet this does not seem to be the elite consensus down the stretch of the campaign nor is it what polling averages indicate: Harris is doing very slightly better in Wisconsin polling compared to Pennsylvania. This, in addition to the Keystone State having the most electoral votes of the 7 key states, explains the conventional wisdom that suggests Pennsylvania is the most important. We do also have to remember that 2016-2020 Trump polling underestimation was greatest in Wisconsin, although such a large error this time would suggest Trump winning the state by several points, which seems far-fetched….Some recent polls show Trump with narrower-than-expected margins in states like Kansas and Ohio, as well as Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, where several polls suggest Harris is likely to outperform Biden’s 2020 showing. We also think it may have implications in neighboring Wisconsin, which is in some ways similar to Iowa, although that could be off-base. The abortion rights issue, especially salient in Iowa because of a new, 6-week ban there, could be having a major local impact, which could make the finding less generalizable to other states that don’t have such a ban in place. Or it could be that Trump strength with white voters is just being underestimated again, even by someone who has been excellent at detecting that support in the past.”
