CNN’s Harry Enten: Trump Outperforming His Current Numbers ‘By Just a Single Point’ in November Will Lead to Victory
“We‘re talking about the closest campaign in a generation where a single point could make all the difference in the world.”
While the mainstream media has been predictably hyperventilating over the supposed “Kamala surge,” number crunchers like statistician Nate Silver have been busy sifting and sorting through all the available information to find out where we really are in the presidential race.
As Legal Insurrection reported Saturday, Silver threw cold water on Operation Demoralize by pointing to some problems for Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris related to her current polling trajectory in key battleground states.
“The problem for Harris is that Donald Trump has been gaining on her in our polling averages, too — at least in the most important Electoral College states,” since the Democrat National Convention, Silver observed. “[S]he’s actually losing ground since the start of the convention in swing state polls,” he also wrote.
Similarly, CNN polling expert Harry Enten has been weeding through the data from some of those same states and found that if Trump outperformed his current numbers by a mere point in those battlegrounds, victory would be his:
“We‘re talking about the closest campaign in a generation where a single point could make all the difference in the world,” Enten told CNN anchor John Berman on Friday.
[…]
“How many days have we had this campaign, where one candidate was ahead by at least five points nationally? Look at this. Zero days, zero days. The fact is, this race has been consistently tight in a way that we have never seen before, Mr. Berman,” Enten said.
[…]
“My goodness gracious, that is how tight we are talking right now across these seven battleground states. It is a race, Mr. Berman, that is well within the margin of error when you look across these seven key battleground states that will determine this election,” he said.
[…]
“Look at this. If Trump outperforms his current polls by just a single point, you take that Kamala Harris win and – look at this – Donald Trump gets 287 electoral votes,” he said, comparing it to Harris’ 251 votes in this scenario.
Watch:
This is the closest presidential campaign 60+ years. The race has been consistently close in a way I've never seen. If the polling is off by a single point in the key swing states, the winner would flip.
The bottom line is this election is up for grabs with 2 months to go. pic.twitter.com/vmZH3PIVxR
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) September 6, 2024
Reading between the lines there, the race being so tight in the states mentioned is especially problematic for Harris considering in all of them, the numbers are within the margin of error, meaning that the “leads” she has are essentially meaningless right now.
Further, not talked about by Enten but definitely worth mentioning considering the closeness of the numbers is what some political observers have called the Trump bias problem in polling, which we saw play out in 2016 and 2020.
As Pew Research Center explained last month:
Confidence in U.S. public opinion polling was shaken by errors in 2016 and 2020. In both years’ general elections, many polls underestimated the strength of Republican candidates, including Donald Trump. These errors laid bare some real limitations of polling.
[…]
In 2020, a post-election review of polling by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) found that “the 2020 polls featured polling error of an unusual magnitude: It was the highest in 40 years for the national popular vote and the highest in at least 20 years for state-level estimates of the vote in presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial contests.”
How big were the errors? Polls conducted in the last two weeks before the election suggested that Biden’s margin over Trump was nearly twice as large as it ended up being in the final national vote tally.
Contributing to that bias prooblem is “non-response bias,” as New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn discussed during the 2022 midterms:
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, most pollsters concluded that the polls probably underestimated Donald J. Trump because of something called nonresponse bias. In short, Mr. Trump’s supporters were less likely to respond to surveys than Joe Biden’s supporters, even among people who had the same demographic characteristics.
Whatever the case may be, considering Harris’ decline in post-convention swing state polls and coupling that with the margin of error and Trump supporters being less likely to respond to pollsters than supporters of Democrat candidates, there’s plenty of time and room in the coming weeks for Trump to surge ahead, something journalist Mark Halperin has been talking about for the last couple of weeks:
“There’s some public polling already, there’s more coming. There’s some private polling that suggests that nationally in the battleground states, she’s not ahead. She might be ahead on paper, but well within the margin of error. And there’s some battleground states now where I think Donald Trump, on this trajectory, is going to be ahead,” Halperin said.
“And it may be, regardless of what happens in the interview and regardless of what happens in the debate — it may be that by the middle of September when things have calmed down, when the Trump campaign has had time to prey on some of the weaknesses that I suggested, that he’s ahead in all the Sun Belt states, and ahead in Pennsylvania and competitive in Michigan and Wisconsin,” Halperin said.
Watch (starts at around the 3:40 mark):
“I’m warning those of you who want Trump to lose that by the middle of next month, there’s a real possibility, based on what I’ve seen in terms of public and private data … that Kamala Harris could be where Joe Biden was,” says @MarkHalperin. “Only one electoral college path… pic.twitter.com/yFZTN8gijS
— 2WAY (@2waytvapp) August 28, 2024
On a related note, a new New York Times/Siena poll confirms that the “euphoric” August honeymoon for Kamala Harris is over:
The Harris bounce, blown:
NEW NYT/Siena poll:
Trump 48
Harris 47The results are "largely unchanged from a Times/Siena poll taken in late July just after President Biden dropped his re-election bid."https://t.co/GU2iUWDVsB
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) September 8, 2024
NYT/Siena: 61% of voters say they want the next president to bring a “major change” from president Biden.
——
Which candidate represents major change in this election?Donald Trump: 53%
Kamala Harris: 25%#1 (3.0/3.0) | Sept. 3-6 | 1,374 LVhttps://t.co/1bZh4UAZix pic.twitter.com/ETjvxyCMR3
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) September 8, 2024
New York Times poll Trump 2020 vs now among Whites
2020
🟥 Trump 49% (+7)
🟦 Biden 42%2024
🟥 Trump 54% (+14)
🟦 Harris 40%Trump has doubled his support among whites vs 2020 in the NY Times poll. This is huge as 67-70% of the electorate will be white.
— David D. Chapman (@davidchapman141) September 8, 2024
The bottom line here is that anyone who is falling victim to Operation Demoralize shouldn’t be. It’s just as simple as that.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
I’ll be extremely surprised if we hold an election, for at this point a Trump win is fairly obvious.
And if we do hold an election, it will probably be sufficiently blatant that everyone but the courts [for whom there is never anyone with standing to question the vote count] will know that the result is rigged. Dance cards will be full.
Subotai Bahadur
Harris will do really well. I project she will come in second place.
The lipstick the d/prog Poobah’s and their legacy media allies/adjuncts tried to apply to Harris doesn’t seem to be working. Kind of hard to overcome daily reminders of higher prices on purchases ….an average of 20% higher along with near daily
….along with near daily reports of another criminal attack by yet another illegal alien who the d/prog are giving huge amounts of $ hand over fist.
A lot of stuff and is considerably higher than 29%.
None of this looks good for the future of our country.
Both sides are convinced that the country will come unglued if the other side wins.
The other side is full of irrational loonies.
I read someplace that the winner has to win by a margin greater than fraud.
This is the critical issue in polling: the non-response rate.
To simplify, you contact 100 people to survey. 60% respond, 40% do not. Your published survey reflects the opinions of the 60%, yet no one knows anything about the non-responsive 40%. Are they predominantly for Harris, or Trump? Or, are they voting at all? Again, no one knows.
I’m not seeing in the polls where the response rate is mentioned. Perhaps it is disclosed, and I’m just missing it. But to me, the response rate is also a grade as to the accuracy of the polling. The lower the response rate, the higher the possibility of an accurate estimate.
I’m assuming you dropped a negative somewhere in that last sentence.
My own intuition is that know-it-all narcissists are much more likely to participate in polls than beleaguered Gray Men that no longer trust the media. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify for whom the bulk of each of these groups are likely to be voting.
You are correct, Henry. The last sentence should have included “non-” immediately before “response”. My apologies!
Good point. The lower the non response rate then the more effective the polling firm was in finding those hard to reach generally non responsive folks. That should translate into better accuracy b/c it incorporates the responses of folks the other polls miss.
On the other hand Henry offers up a fair point the probable voting patterns/policy perspectives of this group. The question is what’s the breakdown? Is it 90/10 or more like 65/35? When ascribing via educated guesswork the views for a group as large as 40% that is a huge range.
I can’t see a scenario where the average boots-on-the-ground blue voter (if there really are any), even casts a vote at all. I think they all stay home and secretly wish for a Trump win.
If you look closer, the 2016 and 2020 polls underestimated Trump in some swing states, but not all. In WI, Trump was greatly underestimated twice, slightly in PA and MI, and overestimated in NV twice. The polls in GA, NC, and AZ were about right. VA was not a swing state then, but is now. After Dobbs, Democrats started overperforming their polls, sometimes by a lot. I expect these two effects to sort of cancel each other out, and we will have a tied election, where a little extra turnout here and there will decide the winner. It all could come down to which states have sounder election laws and tighter recount procedures. For instance, I would have far more confidence in a VA recount than a GA one.
They predicted Hillary by a landslide, which meant blow out by Trump.
So “close” likely translates to Harris’ campaign will score about as well as RayGun’s break dancing routine.