Tipsheet
Premium

Hmm: Does Dems' Internal Polling Show Harris Trailing Trump in a Crucial Swing State?

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  October 10, 2024 10:05 AM

Remember this post from last week?  I offered a warning about conservative glee over something Democrats' Senate nominee in Michigan said on a fundraising Zoom call.  She'd expressed concern about her party's position in the state, noting that Kamala Harris was "underwater" in their internal polling.  My take on this was that she knew she was on camera, and may have even leaked the clip herself.  Her purpose was to motivate donors to open their wallets up a bit wider for her campaign, and using fear as a motivator is a tried and true political technique.  I also wondered if she was making it sound like Harris was trailing in Michigan, per her internals, as opposed to being underwater on favorability -- which is a very different metric.  Well, I stand by all of that, but a new report from the Wall Street Journal has me wondering if perhaps those admonitions may have been more authentic than I thought they were. 

Might there really be something significant brewing in the upper Midwest?  We learned a few days ago that Democrats have grown increasingly worried about the fate of Wisconsin's incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin.  Internal polling, we were told, was showing her barely leading, within the margin of error.  Are those fears real?  They're real enough for the Cook Political Report to shift the race into 'tossup' status:


Here's what Axios reported last week:

There is growing Democratic fear over how quickly the Wisconsin Senate race is tightening, with party insiders worried they could shockingly lose the critical contest, Axios has learned...Sen. Tammy Baldwin's (D-Wis.) lead in both public and internal polls has deteriorated, and Republicans are flooding the state with cash to pull off the upset...Baldwin leads by just two points in internal Democratic polling, a source familiar with the campaign told Axios. That is much closer than what public polling has shown for months. Democrats are on pace to be outspent by Republicans in the state every week until Election Day, with an infusion of around $20 million from GOP sources.

Relatedly, there's a nugget in the new Journal story mentioned above that caught my attention:

Democrats have privately grown worried about Kamala Harris’s standing among working-class voters in the crucial “blue-wall” states—particularly in Michigan...Recent polling shows Harris and Trump essentially tied in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin...An internal poll done by Democrat Tammy Baldwin’s Senate campaign last week showed Harris down by 3 percentage points in Wisconsin, while Baldwin was up by two points, according to a person familiar with the poll. The person said much of the narrowing is due to Republicans’ strength with noncollege-educated men. Public polling has shown Harris with a slight lead in the state.

We should take all polling with a grain of salt, including leaked internal polling. But the Harris campaign does appear to be making some uncharacteristic moves in the last several days, including a flurry of interviews from both members of the ticket. They've been avoiding such interactions like the plague, arguably for good reason. If they felt confident and comfortable, why would they alter course? It's not a leap to conclude that they're also seeing concerning numbers -- perhaps like the bolded sentence in the excerpt above -- and believe they must change their approach in order to try to salvage their chances. I'll also remind everyone that the most glaring and memorable gap between polling projections and actual electoral outcomes in the 2020 cycle came out of the Badger State.  The polling average anticipated a comfortable Biden win in Wisconsin four years ago.  That average -- the average! -- was off by six full percentage points.  The Wisconsin polling miss was even larger in 2016, when Trump narrow won the state, even as the final average favored Hillary Clinton by more than six points. 

A friend offers the good reminder that the canary in the coal mine for Democrats in 2016 were internal campaign polls showing a much more concerning landscape than public polling was projecting.  Perhaps we are seeing a reprise of that phenomenon again.  After all RCP's Tom Bevan keeps talking about how much the current environment reminds him of the 2016 cycle.  Meanwhile, current public polling continues to contain a lot of contradictory noise. A few national polls (Reuters/Ipsos and Yahoo) that have been some of Harris' strongest have each moved four points in Trump's direction, while the national New York Times/Siena survey just shifted four points in Harris' direction. The Times' fresh polls of Florida and Texas show Trump ahead in each, by margins slightly better (+7 in Texas, versus +5) and much better (+14 in Florida, versus +3) than his 2020 victory margins in each state.  And this large poll showed Harris up two points nationally, which is the average, while the battlegrounds are excruciatingly close: