Democrats are increasingly worried that pollsters are undercounting Donald Trump’s voter support, rating his prospects of winning November’s presidential election as much higher than headline opinion polling figures suggest.
While most national surveys show consistent, though moderate, leads for Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, some supporters are unnerved by the small margin of her advantage in three northern battlegrounds – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – which are deemed must-wins in her quest for the White House.
Although some polls have shown the vice-president with leads of between four and six points in Pennsylvania – generally judged the most important swing state – others show Trump trailing by smaller deficits. Narrower gaps separate the two in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Harris’s lead is just 1 or 2%, according to several different recent polls.
Underpinning Democrats’ fears is the knowledge that Trump greatly out-performed predictions in all three states in 2016, when he narrowly won them en route to his election triumph over Hillary Clinton, and in 2020, when he was pipped by Joe Biden by far smaller margins than forecast.
The worries are compounded by the latest New York Times/Siena poll, which records Trump performing more robustly in three Sun belt battleground states – Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina – than he has in weeks.
The survey shows the Republican nominee leading by five points – 50 to 45% – in Arizona, which Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, and four points – 49 to 45% – in Georgia, which was won by the president by a similar margin. In North Carolina, where Trump is trying to avoid being tarred by revelations over past comments by Mark Robinson, the GOP’s candidate for governor, he has a smaller advantage, 49 to 47%.
Putting the Democrats’ worries into perspective are projections showing that Trump will win all seven designated battleground states – the seventh being Nevada – if he outstrips polling predictions by the same margins he achieved in losing the 2020 election.
A separate projection by Focaldata – using a model that takes into account different demographic factors in determining the likelihood that certain cohorts will vote – reduces Harris’s lead by an average of 2.4% across swing states.
“In an election which could be decided by just 60,000 voters in November, this margin could easily be the difference between a right and wrong call on the election winner,” writes Focaldata’s Patrick Flynn. “Pollsters who simply rely on self-reporting [in defining likely voters] may be subject to another polling miss in Trump’s favor.”
The one piece of encouraging news for Harris is that she will win every swing state except Georgia if the polls turn out to be as wrong as they were in the campaign for the 2022 congressional midterm elections.
That has not placated some Democrats, who note that both Clinton and Biden were performing better against Trump in polling – both nationally and in swing states – than Harris is now.
“That’s ominous. There’s no question that is concerning, but you’re working as hard as you can work, no matter what,” the Hill quoted one unnamed Democratic senator as saying. “My sense is there’s not a lot more you can do than we’re already doing.”
John Fetterman, the Democratic senator for Pennsylvania, told the same site that Trump was a threat despite some buoyant recent polling for Harris in his state. “Polling has really been seriously damaged since 2016 … Trump is going to be tough in Pennsylvania, and that’s absolutely the truth,” he said.
In a further worrying sign for Harris, the New York Times/Siena poll indicated that her “bounce” from this month’s debate against Trump – which most surveys indicated she won – was the smallest enjoyed by any presidential debate-winning candidate in the 21st century.
“On average, Kamala Harris is faring about one point better across 34 polls that measured the race before and after the debate,” wrote the New York Times’ chief polling analyst Nate Cohn, concluding that the contest remained deadlocked despite the encounter.
“George W Bush, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and, yes, Donald J Trump earlier this year, all peaked with gains of at least two points after their debates.”
