I’ve been writing about the trends in polling, and about the RealClearPolitics (RCP) averages, since the general election season started. There have been fits and starts; President Joe Biden was headed for a catastrophic loss, of course, until befuddled old Joe dropped out and let the Democrat Party apparatchiks anoint Vice President Kamala Harris as the candidate. Harris saw a slight bump after that because she wasn’t Biden; she didn’t get much of a bump out of the convention, and maybe a small one from the one presidential debate. Aside from those little bumps, the trend has been clearly towards former President Donald Trump; slowly, but surely, Trump has been gaining ground.
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As you know if you’ve been reading my prognostications, I don’t place much stock in individual polls. I reference the RCP averages because they, to some degree, discount the outliers and give a decent picture of the state of the race and, more importantly, they can show trends. And, again, the trend is towards Trump. With every public appearance, Kamala Harris sinks her campaign even deeper, until she’s at the point now where she would have to look up to see the bottom of the Barents Abyssal Plain.
Today – Thursday – we see a significant shift. My colleague Nick Arama gave an excellent summary of the state of the race Thursday morning:
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Nick wrote:
The RealClearPolitics average has Trump ahead in every battleground state except Wisconsin, where the difference is just 0.3 percent in Kamala’s favor. RCP has Harris up in the national popular vote at just 1.5 percent at this point. Given the electoral college bias that we’ve seen in prior years, that’s bad news for Harris as that likely would mean a Trump win if it holds.
In the short span of hours since Nick wrote those words, that has changed. As of this writing, on Thursday afternoon, the RCP average for Wisconsin has flipped to Trump. The Trump/Vance ticket, in the RCP averages, holds a clean sweep of the seven battleground states. Here’s where we stand now:
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- Arizona: Trump +1.1
- Nevada: Trump +0.5
- Wisconsin: Trump +0.1
- Michigan: Trump +0.9
- Pennsylvania: Trump +0.5
- North Carolina: Trump +1.0
- Georgia: Trump +0.9
These numbers, if they are accurate, and if they hold for three weeks, give Trump/Vance a convincing win, 312-226. A cautionary note: These margins are all well within the margin of error for most polls. Another cautionary note: Over the last two presidential election cycles, 2016 and 2020, polls all underestimated the final Republican vote. Now, maybe pollsters have adjusted their sampling models, found whatever was causing that, and fixed it. Then again, maybe they haven’t.
Pennsylvania, of course, remains a crucial state – maybe the crucial state. And it’s not looking good for Harris/Walz, either.
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The flip in Wisconsin is in large part due to a Rasmussen poll taken 10-09/10-13, which has Trump ahead by 2 points. Before that, in Wisconsin, was an Insider Advantage poll, 10-08/10-09, which produced a tie, and a Quinnipiac poll, 10-03/10-07 which again had Trump up by 2.
Harris, her campaign would no doubt point out, still leads in the national tallies in the RCP averages, by 1.5 points. But honestly – who cares? That’s not how we choose presidents. That number just plain doesn’t matter. It’s a statistical curiosity. That’s all.
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Trends, folks. It’s all about trends. The RCP numbers in the battleground states still show a close race; they’re still within the margin of error. But, looking at the trends, I’d much rather be in Trump’s position than in Harris’.
