The State of the Presidential Race as We Head Into the Final Month

  

Well, well, well.  It looks like someone is finally going to do the obvious.

With just 30 plus days to go, Kamala Harris may do what I thought she could and should have done in early August.

Top aides to Kamala Harris are heading into the final month of the 2024 presidential race still wrestling with how much distance she can credibly claim from Joe Biden as she looks for more ways to weave in breaks with him on the campaign trail.

As I wrote before:

Kamala Harris and her campaign are not doing enough to separate her from President Joe Biden and his administration. As the vice president for Biden, she is intrinsically tied to his administration and his left-wing policies. For that reason, during a year when that administration and its policies are resoundingly unpopular, it is imperative that she criticize Biden or otherwise separate herself from him in some significant way. Instead, Harris is just ignoring this problem and pretending that she had no power or responsibilities during the Biden administration, and thus, that nothing that happened can be blamed on her. (I wasn’t the border czar! I didn’t cause any inflation!)

Harris and her campaign are going to attempt to create this distance because she knows – her internal polls tell her – that she is going to lose the 2024 presidential election, if things continue the way they are.  No campaign abruptly changes its strategy near the end of the campaign unless they are behind, and fearing a likely loss.  I don’t have access to her campaign polling, or Trump’s, but I recognize her plight simply by understanding the public polling that we do have access to.

Let’s go back to RealClearPolitics, shall we?  

The RCP national polling average currently has Kamala Harris up 2.1% over Donald Trump.  However, because Donald Trump has an electoral edge in the battleground states – which can be seen here by the RCP battleground average, where Trump is ahead by .1% – I have theorized that Harris needs to be up by at least 3 points in the national average to be sure of winning the electoral college.  She isn’t there yet.  And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that the polling in 2016 and 2020 underestimated Donald Trump’s support, substantially, which should lead us to believe that it will do so again.

Further, last week, I pointed out that things are looking even worse for Harris when it comes to the national polling. 

There are now three scenarios, or tiers, for the polling. Tier 1 polls have Kamala Harris up by more than 3 points, including Reuters, Morning Consult, CBS, NBC, and Yahoo. Tier 2 polls have her and Donald Trump in a statistical dead heat, including Quinnipiac, CNN, Rasmussen, Fox, Harris X, and Siena. Tier 3 has Trump up by 3 or more, and is Gallup and Atlas Intel. (Gallup refuses to give us actual head-to-head numbers, because they stopped doing that in 2012. However, it can be figured out from what they do give us.)  These three tiers can’t all be correct.

I then theorized that the Tier 1 polls were very suspect, because: 1) the situation was bad for the Democrats, who are the incumbent party during a time when things are not going well; 2) it is very unlikely that pollsters, especially left leaning ones, have been attempting to correct their earlier polling problems; and 3) a leaked Democrat campaign poll result in Michigan was not possible if Harris was up nationally by 3 points or more.

Since that time, at least one of the Tier 1 polls – Yahoo – has flipped from a 4%-point Harris edge to a 47% tie.  The New York Post article that reported this assumes that the Vance-Walz debate changed the result.  I find that explanation dubious; although Vance clearly won the debate, no vice-presidential debate has, to my knowledge, ever substantially affected national polling for a presidential race.  And nothing else has happened of note.

My personal theory is that this is just an example of a pollster who is now implementing changes in his poll to avoid his earlier “large response bias problem that low-budget public surveys refuse to fix.”  And I assume that this pollster made the change because, with the election getting closer, there is now an increasing incentive for pollsters to make sure they get accurate numbers so as to protect their poll’s reputation and potential rating.  

Anyway, thanks to this and other new information, I would like add to those earlier reasons why I believe the Tier 1 polls are not be believed  – 4) that the Harris campaign is desperately looking for ways to break with Joe Biden’s record, thus showing it is currently behind, and 5) that one of my “little birds” on the campaign trail, working for a competitive congressional campaign, has informed me that their polling shows Donald Trump narrowly ahead in their district.  Which could not be true if Trump were substantially behind Kamala Harris in the national polling.

The question then becomes – what should we do with the Tier 1 polls?  Should we just drop them from the average?  And if we do, doesn’t this indicate, as my pessimistic buddy Cameron says, that we are making the same mistake that the GOP did in 2012 with the Mitt Romney campaign?

The easiest answer to this problem is to keep all of these suspect polls in the RCP, but to also understand that they are there, and that they are likely wrong, and that they will likely lead to an (additional) underestimation of Donald Trump’s support. 

And no, this is not a Romney “unskewing of the polls” situation.  In 2012, some Republicans analyzed polls they did not believe and made them more believable to these critics by shifting the results.  I am not doing that.  I am not doing anything with them at all.  

Since I don’t believe the Tier 1 polls are accurate, it means that either the Tier 2 or the Tier 3 polling is more likely correct.  Which, in turn, means that Donald Trump is the favorite to win the electoral college and become both the 45th AND 47th President of the United States.  

The only real questions then become: 1) whether Harris can really upend the race, somehow (perhaps by separating herself from Biden); 2) whether Trump wins the national popular vote; and 4) if he does win the popular vote, does he win it solidly (as the Tier 3 polls would indicate)?