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:
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):
On a related note, a new New York Times/Siena poll confirms that the “euphoric” August honeymoon for Kamala Harris is over:
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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