Since Vice President Kamala Harris was installed at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, the corporate media have been at pains to portray her modest lead in the national polls as a shift of momentum in the presidential race. Last week, for example, Politico insisted, “Kamala Harris stole Donald Trump’s Republican convention bounce.” If this was meant to reassure nervous Democrats that simply dumping Biden and rebranding Harris is enough to defeat former President Trump, it’s cold comfort indeed. She got through her party’s “joyful” convention with the aid of her trusty teleprompter, but her national and swing state polls are underwhelming.
As recently as April 2, 2024 RCP showed her approval rating at 35.2 percent — 5 points lower than President Biden’s approval rating.
The RealClearPolitics average indicates that Harris holds a 1.5 point national lead as of yesterday. But at this point in 2016, Clinton led by 6 points and we know how that turned out. Moreover, the man Harris just replaced at the top of her party’s ticket enjoyed a 7 point lead at this point in 2020. Biden’s “victory” in that contest turned on dangerously narrow margins in a few key battleground states. RCP shows Trump slightly ahead in 5 of the 7 swing states where the election will probably be decided. Finally, it’s likely that the polls are understating Trump’s support just as they did in the last two presidential cycles. Recently, Nate Cohn discussed the 2020 polling debacle in the New York Times and suggested a possible cause:
National polls overestimated Mr. Biden’s winning margin by around four points. The error was even larger in the key battlegrounds. All considered, it was the worst year for the polls in a competitive presidential race since 1980 … The source of nonresponse bias in 2020 is hotly debated, and depending on the explanation it may or may not pose a challenge in 2024. One popular theory blames the pandemic, as Democrats were disproportionately likely to stay at home — and take polls. If so, polling would return to normal with the end of the pandemic.
That theory, however, doesn’t explain why the polls overestimated Clinton’s support in 2016. As Cohn admits, the problem could be that Trump’s supporters simply don’t trust the media or pollsters enough to take a survey: “If so, polls might still be underestimating him, even now.” Another, more plausible, possibility is that a large proportion of Trump’s supporters are middle and working class voters who earn their paychecks with their hands and don’t have time to answer a cell phone and talk to a pollster. They include electricians, plumbers, carpenters, auto mechanics, heavy equipment operators, nurses, technicians, ad infinitum. Many of these Americans don’t have four-year college degrees, but they vote.
This would explain the inaccuracy of the polls in 2016 and 2020 without any need to get into the issue of biased pollsters. As the Pew Research Center recently reported, “Voters who do not have a four-year degree make up a 60% majority of all registered voters.” It’s likely that pollsters are failing to reach representative samples of these voters, though most insist their models have been adjusted to account for that. As Gilad Edelman writes in The Atlantic, “The pollsters know they messed up in 2020. They are cautiously optimistic that they’ve learned from their mistakes. Of course, they thought that last time too.” This is why pollster Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen Reports doesn’t buy the hype about the Harris lead:
We have over 5,000 national respondents for the 2024 race. And basically what it boils down to is that Donald Trump is still beating Kamala Harris, although maybe not by as many points as he was beating Biden about six weeks ago. But, if that’s news for you, then basically it’s because the entire polling industry is colluding with the mainstream media to create this false narrative that somehow Kamala Harris is now winning big and essentially running away with the 2024 race. I’m here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth.
Rasmussen Reports is often described in the corporate media as a “Republican” pollster. In fact, according to the RCP Pollster Scorecard, Rasmussen tends to err in favor of the Democrats when its polling is inaccurate. Mark Mitchell’s skepticism concerning polls that show Harris ahead of Trump involves her long history of very low approval ratings and the suspiciously rapid reversal of that four-year trend. As recently as April 2, 2024 RCP showed her approval rating at 35.2 percent — 5 points lower than President Biden’s approval rating on that date. Now we are expected to believe that she is over 45 percent, one point above Trump. The new Rasmussen poll shows Trump leading Harris nationally 49 to 46 percent.
All of which means that, unless the pollsters have solved the problems that plagued them in the last two presidential elections, it’s probable that the Harris lead is fictitious and Trump’s support is 2 to 4 points higher than the public polls suggest. It’s important to remember that Trump, for the first time ever, maintained a consistent lead in most national and swing state polling averages from last fall until three weeks ago. Trump never led in 2016, yet he defeated Hillary Clinton. Likewise, he never led in 2020, and just barely lost to Biden. Now he is allegedly trailing Kamala Harris, who until 60 days ago, was regarded as a drag on the Democratic ticket. Seem implausible? It’s no illusion. Donald Trump is still leading in this race.
READ MORE from David Catron:
The Harris Teleprompter Is Economically Illiterate
Harris Can Avoid Reporters But Not Economics
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