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New Polling: More Red Flags for Team Blue

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  October 14, 2024 2:01 PM

To continue with an ongoing theme, the polling is not looking especially great for the Harris campaign lately.  National trends must be concerning for Democrats, particularly among some traditionally blue-aligned demographics.  CNN's polling guru just said that the numbers suggest "Donald Trump's going to put up the best performance with Black voters since Richard Nixon in 1960...among Hispanic voters, Donald Trump's going to put up the best performance for a Republican since 2004."  We have indications that some of their internal polling may look worse than what public surveys are showing.  And some of the big picture data metrics also appear to represent major red flags, especially when placed in recent historical context. Battleground state surveys show an incredibly tight race, suggesting that it's a coin-flip contest.  This dynamic could accrue to Democrats' advantage, if the polling is correct, because of their superior ballot operation and turnout machine -- and the fact that they have become the party of the highest-propensity voters.  

But is the polling correct?  As we've written multiple times, if we see anything close to the misses of 2016 and 2020, that would bode rather well for the Trump campaign. This chart provides a handy visual aid in underscoring the point: 


I don't know how the election will turn out.  I do know that the Trump campaigns from the previous two cycles would have taken these mid-October battleground numbers in a heartbeat:


Ipsos, for reference, has been an especially Trump-negative pollster, so a battleground tie in their data is notable.  The 2016 and 2020 iterations of the Trump campaign -- who were trailing in the RCP national average by seven and ten points around this point in those cycles -- would also absolutely take numbers like this in a nanosecond:


Trump virtually tied, or possibly even slightly ahead, on a national scale would portend very dark things for the Democrats, if it's borne out in reality by voters. As a point of reference, NBC's mid-October survey gave Biden an 11-point lead over Trump in 2020.  Their final poll of that race put the margin at ten points.  Biden won by four-and-a-half points.  Meanwhile, is it possible that JD Vance's debate victory made something of an impact?  A fresh CBS poll shows that 35 percent of respondents said that the Vice Presidential forum made them more likely to support the GOP ticket, while only 30 percent said the same of the Democratic ticket.  Speaking of Vance, he continues to excel in interview settings, deftly turning this question on illegal immigrant crime back against ABC's host yesterday:

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"Do you hear yourself" is the perfect reply to a question framed and premised the way it was.  Finally, on the polling, it appears the talking point has gone out -- from liberal New York Times columnists to the Obama pod bros. Hmmm: