Democrats, after having to publicly pressure their incumbent President to drop out of his re-election race in a historical embarrassment, seem to be back on track. National polling, which showed Donald Trump in the lead for 10 months between September 2023 and Joe Biden’s stepping down in July 2024, now shows Kamala Harris with a decent-sized lead, 1.8 points in the RealClearPolitics aggregate.
On the same site, she also has a narrow lead in the aggregate in the states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and she is tied with Donald Trump in Nevada—she looks like a candidate on her way to victory. Or does she?
It was Breitbart that first started publishing rumours about the Harris camp not being confident based on their internal numbers. However, since it was ‘only’ the right-wing Breitbart, not much attention was paid to it initially. But now, respected mainstream news site Axios has also published the story, even citing the chair of the Harris–Walz campaign Jen O’Malley Dillon in the piece. It is—for the Democrats—ominously titled ‘Dems are “the clear underdogs,” Harris campaign chair says’.
‘Make no mistake: we head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs. Donald Trump has a motivated base of support, with more support and higher favorability than he has had at any point since 2020,’ O’Malley Dillon told Axios.
What adds further credibility to the story is the fact that Kamala Harris is scheduled to make a campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire this week. New Hampshire is a state that President Biden won by 7 points in 2020. While Biden was trailing Trump in the state, Harris has a big polling lead—at least in public polling.
New Hampshire does not have a Senate election this year, giving Harris no additional reason to be there (unlike in the case of Donald Trump’s visit to Montana, where Republicans are looking to flip a seat in the upper chamber of Congress).
So what is the point of Harris wasting precious campaign time and resources in a state that is supposed to be safe blue?
This story is reminiscent of the time Hillary Clinton held a campaign rally in Michigan just a few weeks ahead of the 2016 election. Then, pollsters and pundits gave Donald Trump virtually no chance to win, so some questioned why Clinton was campaigning in a state that President Obama won by 10 points four years prior. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, rather smugly, explained to her viewers that it is because Clinton is looking to maximize her popular vote win—which still made little sense, given the fact that in that case, she should have been in the most populous states like California, New York, and Illinois. Anyhow, Donald Trump ended up winning Michigan by 0.25 points in 2016, and won the presidential election as well.
Other Good Signs for Trump
Donald Trump has also taken the lead in statistician Naet Silver’s model, which now gives him a 55 per cent chance for victory. Despite Harris leading the polls nationally and in multiple battleground states, Silver’s model takes into account historical overestimations of Democrats, specially at a time shortly after the Democratic National Convention.
Donald Trump is now also the betting favourite with most major bookmakers.
Additionally, the polling firm BigDataPoll released a national poll which shows Donald Trump in the lead by 1.2 points over Harris. This is somewhat significant because this polling form was one of the most accurate in the 2020 presidential election, giving Biden a 4.1-point lead nationally in their last poll before the election. Yet, for unknown reasons, they are not included in the two major polling aggregator sites, RealClearPolitics and 538. Meanwhile, mainstream firms who gave a lot less accurate final results for 2020 are.
Donald Trump also continues to do well with independents, winning the crucial voting block by one point in a recently released poll by TIPP/I&I, despite the poll showing him down by three points overall. As we wrote in an earlier article, President Biden won independents by nine points to give him his 4.5-point victory in the popular vote in 2020.
Pollster do not publish raw results, they weight their results for party ID, based on their best estimation of what the make-up of the electorate will look like on election day. An absurd example of that is a Michigan poll by ActiVote from late August, in which Donald Trump tied Harris, while the poll was weighted for a D+25 (!) sample. In that, most likely widely inaccurate poll, Trump was winning independents by a whopping 56 points.
One other positive aspect of the Trump campaign that is being overlooked is that his social media accounts constantly outperform those of Harris in engagement. That is despite the Harris campaign being better funded, thus having more resources for paid engagement.
On Facebook, where the user base is most likely to be the most similar to the American electorate in terms of age demographic, Donald Trump regularly gets tens of thousands of likes and other reactions to his posts. Meanwhile for Harris, that is usually in the thousands.
Does all this mean that Donald Trump will win the election in November?
Unfortunately, no. Polling will not necessarily follow past trends. The national polling aggregate by RCP has never been wrong on election day so far in terms of the popular vote winner, and the fact is, Kamala Harris is currently leading it.
Does all this mean that Donald Trump has a better chance than Harris to win the electoral college, and thus become the next president, as of now?
Yes, based on all the information available, that is the case. However, that can change.
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