The Polls at the End

When the polls generally showed Kamala Harris ahead and surging after President Joe Biden withdrew from his re-election race a few months ago, Democrats embraced those numbers with relief and confidence, even as they continued to be favorable through her party’s national convention and up to naming her running mate.

Harris’s choice of Tim Walz, and the string of unvetted controversies that arose from his past, marked an end to the surge, but the establishment pollsters, many of whom are paid for by the establishment media, continued to show Harris-Walz, and most Democrat incumbent senators in competitive races, ahead.

In recent days many of these polls have reversed, and more and more are showing not only Trump ahead but several GOP Senate challengers also ahead or virtually tied in their battleground races.

This turnaround was not surprising to many Republicans and others who doubted there was more than an inevitable and brief surge post-Biden and expected the polls to be more realistic as Election Day approached.

A number of independent and admittedly conservative pollsters, including Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Atlas Intel, as well as the famed Gallup Poll, showed quite different numbers all along, asserting that their polling was not affected by any political or commercial bias.

As I have pointed out several times in this cycle and in previous cycles, even if some pollsters “massage” their numbers to fit the media and political narrative, these pollsters are compelled to report their numbers more accurately just before an election so that when the actual results are known their poll numbers are not so far off they lose their credibility. Public polling is, after all, a business, and its credibility and reputation are extremely important.

Political campaigns and partisan strategists have no such constraints, and when polls turn against them, the classic tactic is to cast doubt on the polls — which is increasingly what’s happening among Democrats in the closing days of the 2024 national election cycle.

There is also the fact that in recent presidential elections, particularly in 2016 and 2020, most of the establishment pollsters undercounted the number of voters who voted for Donald Trump, often by 2 to 4 points.

Whether this will be true again this year is, of course, unknown. Despite most pollsters claiming they will not do it again, there remains a legitimate question about an ongoing negative bias against Mr. Trump.

With only a few days before Election Day, such aggregate polls as the Real Clear Politics average are publishing poll numbers relatively different from those they published only a few weeks before. Polls that formerly had Harris-Walz two to five points ahead nationally are now reporting that the race is either tied or that the Trump-Vance ticket is one to three points ahead.

GOP Senate challengers in competitive races who were said by these polls to be four to double digits behind now are reported to be tied to three points ahead. Even some Republican challengers reported to be way behind are seeing their races tightening.

The Senate race in West Virginia was not ever in doubt, and the GOP Montana nominee has recently maintained a lead well outside the margin of error. But only in recent days have the numbers shifted dramatically toward GOP nominees Bernie Moreno in Ohio, Eric Hovde in Wisconsin, Mike Rogers in Michigan, and David McCormick in Pennsylvania — each of whom has polls reporting them slightly ahead, tied, or slightly behind. With Trump now leading in many polls in Arizona and Nevada, GOP candidates Kari Lake and Sam Brown see their races tightening.

Of course, some of the poll number gains can be attributed to undecided voters making up their minds. Republican recruitment for Senate races in 2024 has been notably better than in 2022 (when expected GOP gains became a net loss of one seat). And unlike 2022, Donald Trump is on the ballot.

I always point out that election polling is not precise. It is at best an estimate or guess about what voters think at the time the poll is taken. Sample size, how the pollster subjectively adjusts the raw data according to demographics, gender, and political affiliation, and effective randomness of the sample can each affect the result.

What we do know historically and by common sense is that public polls are much more likely to be most accurate just before the election.

The national polls reflect the popular vote, and the Republican ticket was not expected to win more votes than the Democrats’ ticket in 2024. What decides the election is the tally of the Electoral College votes from each of the states. In order to win the necessary 270 electoral votes, the Democrats historically need to win the popular vote by three to five percentage points.

As, and if, most polls move to the Republicans in these final days of the 2024 election cycle, readers can draw their own conclusions about what will happen when the votes are actually counted.

Barry Casselman is a contributor for AMAC Newsline.