I wanted to look at a decent number of new polls out today. They paint a mixed and complicated picture. There’s no other way to put it. Two new national polls have a tied race. On it’s face, that’s not a great sign for Harris. A tie popular vote is very likely to mean defeat. But it’s not that simple. The two polls are from Pew and the Harris Poll. Pew is a very solid poll but generally unfriendly to Democrats in recent cycles. So for instance at the height of the Kamala surge they had her up one point over Trump. Now it’s even. Not a big a difference. The Harris poll (really the zombie Harris poll now owned and operated by Mark Penn) meanwhile is not just extremely unfriendly to Democrats but closer to Rasmussen territory. (Just to avoid confusion, let’s christen it the Penn-Harris poll.) In other words, we’re not just talking a house effect generally unfriendly to Democrats but really a question in my mind whether it should even be considered a legitimate poll. Taken together I think it’s fair to assume there may be some leveling off of Kamala Harris’ support. But I don’t think there’s real evidence of some kind of sea change in the race.
The upshot is what we know. The debate is going to be a big deal. Trump is mostly holding on to his faction of the electorate. There appears to be a small but significant chunk of voters who are considering Harris but are not yet locked in. Both the debate itself and the news conversations kicked off by it will play a big part in determining how that all plays out.
Meanwhile, a bunch of swing state polls out today confirm not only that the race continues to be close in the states that make up the Electoral College but that we don’t even know what kind of close it’s going to be. For instance, there are four polls out today for North Carolina. Two of those show three point margins for Harris; one shows a single point lead for Trump and the last has a tie. This gets into subjective territory, but I would say the most trusted of the pollsters in that group are SurveyUSA and Quinnipiac, both of whom show Harris with a three point lead.
It’s probably better to take a broad impressionistic view than to try to piece together what we’re hearing from each individual poll. On balance they’re all telling us in different ways that the election is super close. But we can’t rule out a scenario in which North Carolina is Harris’ big South/Sunbelt pick up state, as opposed to Georgia. Or maybe she loses Pennsylvania but wins Nevada and North Carolina.
Mind you, I’m definitely not predicting any of these things. I’m simply saying the scattering of poll data we have makes it hard to rule those scenarios out. On balance, states tend to move in unison. If Harris beats Biden’s 2020 margins, she’ll tend to do it across the board, rather than different states moving in different directions. And the same if she fails to match his 2020 margins. That’s not a rule of course. North Carolina Republicans nominated a historically terrible nominee for governor this year. Perhaps his drag on the ticket makes the difference in North Carolina and thus nationwide.
There are a lot of possible scenarios. It’s super close. I still think it’s a tossup with an advantage to Harris. But there are a bunch of different ways you can reasonably look at this data. If the general impression from the polls is accurate and it remains this way on Election Day, it’s very possible the election gets won on the ground with field organizing in the critical states.
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