Roughly ten days after Joe Biden was forced out of the race, and Kamala Harris was tapped as the new torch-bearer for the Democrats, a leader at a major right-leaning organization -- which spends significant resources on high-quality, private polling -- told me their data had taken a serious downward turn for Trump across key states. The overall Senate picture looked worse. Trump’s leads over Biden, reflected in lots of public and private polling were gone. Remember, the private polling was what lots of Democrats were freaking out about, leaving to Biden's defenestration. The former president went from moderately comfortably leading nearly across the board to trailing (or at best tied) in several important battlegrounds. In Senate races, most of the theoretically winnable races were looking like duds for the GOP. That trend continued for awhile…until it didn’t. There has been a rebound, I'm now told, and it has been detectable over more than one poll in their series.
I take all polling with a grain of salt, recognizing how badly even some polling averages have missed in recent cycles. With that said, here is what was shared with me this week:
And here are the corresponding Senate numbers, which are much more competitive in several contests than a lot of the public data has shown, for what it’s worth: pic.twitter.com/buv52sAvq5
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) September 4, 2024
According to these findings, in the presidential race, Trump is up by 16 points in Montana, and 11 in Ohio. As a point of comparison, Trump carried those states by 17 and eight points, respectively, four years ago. Pennsylvania is exactly tied, reflecting much of the public polling. Trump is ever so slightly ahead in Michigan (this is the third recent poll showing him up one or two points there), and similarly situated in Nevada. Harris has an equally statistically-insignificant lead of a single point in Wisconsin. In the Senate contests, Republican challenger Tim Sheehy continues to look like the party's best shot at flipping a currently-blue seat, outside of the apparent slam dunk gain in West Virginia. If the GOP could win both of those seats and hang onto all of the seats they're defending (the closest are Texas and Florida, where recent surveys give incumbents Ted Cruz and Rick Scott modest-to-sizable leads), that would be sufficient to flip control of the upper chamber. By no means is that a lock. But with more challenging cycles ahead, Republicans would love to maximize their gains in 2024, if possible.
Most of the public polling has suggested this will be a tall task. The polling reviewed above, however, depicts a more competitive battlefield. Bernie Moreno in Ohio could benefit the most from Trump coattails in the Buckeye State, though coattails aren't really much of a factor in these races. This poll has Moreno virtually tied and up by a point on Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown, despite his own dismal favorable numbers. If Moreno can improve his image, and drive home a consistent message (likely exposing Brown as a loyal Biden-Harris handmaid), that looks like the third most winnable seat on the map. Democrats have tiny (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) to moderate (Michigan) to somewhat comfortable (Nevada) leads in the other states, but those are almost all more optimistic numbers than we've seen elsewhere. Sure, maybe they're outliers, or perhaps the winds are blowing a bit more favorably these days. I certainly do wish we had data out of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina in this batch, but I'll take what I can get. Here are the takeaways from the group that furnished me with the numbers above:
- Trump team needs to regain its footing. Focus in the issues that matter and prosecute the case against Harris.
- Top of the ticket is not going to pull senate candidates across the line. Need to run their own race and not get distracted by the presidential because the races aren’t correlating.
- These GOP candidates made up some ground in recent weeks however the races are, and will be extremely close and Candidates need to run through the tape.
In short, it’s a very close electoral environment, and any irrational doom or exuberance is not realistic or constructive. I'll add that it's fair to be skeptical of data leaked by an ideologically-aligned organization. I will say, though, that I've been offered some insights into this organization's private polling on and off for years. Some of it has been favorable to Republicans or conservative causes, while other data points have looked a lot darker. Indeed, as noted above, this exact polling series looked pretty bleak for Trump and Republicans not long ago, in the early-to-mid stages of Kamalamania. That negative data, shared with me at the time, presaged similar movement and trends in other outward-facing polling. At the very least, Kamala Harris' hype-driven momentum seems to have leveled off a bit. We are looking at a jump ball race, maybe with a slight Trump edge (which is what Nate Silver seems to be seeing too). Next week's debate could matter a lot. Speaking of Silver, I'll leave you with this:
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Setting the convention bounce stuff aside, there just hasn't been much positive state polling data entering the system for Harris lately. https://t.co/EFKpUM9kET
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 3, 2024
UPDATE - For what it's worth, I got this text from a GOP operative who saw my tweets embedded above: "I’ve been seeing similar...def possible the debate could be determinative."
