Polling firm AtlasIntel, rated the most accurate pollster of the 2020 presidential election cycle, delivered some excellent news to Team Trump over the weekend.
Their latest survey, conducted on Sept. 11 and 12 (entirely after the debate), showed former President Donald Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 50.9-48. The poll’s margin of error is 2 points.
When third party candidates were added to the mix, Trump’s advantage grew to 3.6%.
The news from Atlas got even better. Harris currently leads Trump in the RealClearPolitics average of head-to-head national polls by 1.7%. Based on that number, if the election were held today, Atlas calculates that Trump would have a 75% chance of winning in the Electoral College by a margin of 283.5-254.5.
However, when we account for the average polling error from the 2020 election cycle of 4.3%, which would put Trump in the lead by 2.6%, his probability of winning in the Electoral College increases to 99.9%. The predicted outcome under this scenario would mean a landslide for Trump—321 to 217.
Media Bias/Fact Check, a website that rates pollsters on their political bias and credibility, classifies AtlasIntel as one of the “least biased” pollsters. According to this site, “these sources have minimal bias and use very few loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appeals to emotion or stereotypes). The reporting is factual and usually sourced. These are the most credible media sources.”
The report concludes, “Overall, we rate AtlasIntel as Least Biased based on polling that minimally favors the right. We also rate them as a high factual pollster based on a 2.7-star rating in predictive polling.”
As rosy as this scenario may sound, it’s not too far off (at least directionally) from what Democratic polling guru Nate Silver, who openly supports Harris, has reported.
On Saturday, his model put Trump’s probability of winning the Electoral College at 60.1% and Harris’s at 39.7%.
Silver’s latest (no tossup) map shows Trump winning the Electoral College by a margin of 312-226.
The RCP polling averages track results from 18 separate pollsters, and the extent of their political bias varies.
As Hot Air’s Duane Patterson explained in a Monday post, “Of those 18, 14 of them over the course of the last decade have missed the actual results in favor of the Democrat candidate. Four missed in favor of the Republican. So if 78% of the polling consistently reports polling that overstates the final margin for Democrats, how much is that average miss? 4.6%. The least amount of error on behalf of the Democratic candidate is 2.2%, and the biggest miss is 6.1%, but the sweet spot for missing is just a touch over four-and-a-half.”
Patterson also provided an excellent explanation of why Democratic candidates typically lead in national polls.
He noted that approximately 165 million Americans voted in 2020. Based on Harris’s current national lead of 1.7%, that would mean she is ahead of Trump by roughly 2.8 million votes. Patterson wrote:
Take a look at how California voted. It’s as deep blue of a state as there is in the Union, and they voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. The final margin, once they finally finished counting a couple months after Biden was sworn in (I exaggerate, but not by much), was 63-42. In raw vote totals, Biden netted 5.1 million more votes just in the Golden State than Donald Trump. Going back to the RCP average as of Sunday, if Kamala allegedly has a 2.8 million lead nationally, and would have roughly the same results out of California, you could actually make the case that if you were to take California out of the equation, Donald Trump is actually leading the national vote in the remaining 49 states by a little under 3 million votes.
The 2024 presidential race has been highly unusual, as we all know. Voters are still digesting Sunday’s news of a second assassination attempt on Trump. Democrats have been worrying out loud about how this will impact the election. Amazingly, some are trying to blame Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric for what Attorney General Merrick Garland wants us to refer to as the “incident,” as Mary Chastain wrote about on Monday.
The reality is that it’s the Democrats’ own violent rhetoric that brought on the assassination attempts. They’ve spent the past nine years telling Americans that he is as vile as Hitler and poses an existential threat to our “democracy.”
There was a reason why sales of George Orwell’s legendary novel “1984” topped the charts at Amazon and elsewhere in 2021. Acutely aware of where the Biden administration led the country, Orwell’s words, written in the 1940s, had suddenly become eerily prescient.
In one of the most memorable quotes from the book, the novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, opines on the “Two Minutes Hate,” a brief period during which party members would gather to watch a film about the “enemy of the state,” Emmanuel Goldstein, and spew vitriol at him. Smith notes, “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.”
Although the Democrat’s modern version of these hate sessions may be less overt than those of the Oceania party members, their intentions and the results are the same.
Here’s the Democrats’ version of “Two Minutes Hate”:
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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