2024 Pre-Election Political Polls | POLL - Trump would have had 7 point lead over Biden

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I will continue to worry until after the election is over. But this is like the Heels being up 4 against dook, with the ball. It's going to take a heckuva performance from dook, and some bad plays from UNC, to lose the game.

Dems appear to be the one galvanizing new voters. The issue here is the numbers.
Dems appear competitive across several states, including ones that Pubs won last election (i.e., North Carolina).
Stock market and economy are doing well. Yes, it could always be better. But with rate cuts imminent, that is a good thing.
Who is more likely to alienate potential voters, Trump or Harris? I'm going with the former.

If you could get an honest answer from the people running Trump's campaign, I bet virtually every one of them would admit that they would rather be Kamala Harris now, as opposed to Donald Trump.
 
I will continue to worry until after the election is over. But this is like the Heels being up 4 against dook, with the ball. It's going to take a heckuva performance from dook, and some bad plays from UNC, to lose the game.

Dems appear to be the one galvanizing new voters. The issue here is the numbers.
Dems appear competitive across several states, including ones that Pubs won last election (i.e., North Carolina).
Stock market and economy are doing well. Yes, it could always be better. But with rate cuts imminent, that is a good thing.
Who is more likely to alienate potential voters, Trump or Harris? I'm going with the former.

If you could get an honest answer from the people running Trump's campaign, I bet virtually every one of them would admit that they would rather be Kamala Harris now, as opposed to Donald Trump.
This is a good analogy except we've all seen dook make up those four points in the blink of an eye.
 
Note on Nate's model. Those state-by-state probabilities look weird, right? How can Trump have a 87% chance of winning the election if he wins NC, but Kamala has a 90% chance of winning if she wins PA? What if she wins PA and Trump wins NC, as in 2020?

The answer, I think, is correlation. Those numbers suggest that splitting PA and NC is unlikely. If Trump wins PA, it means he's having a great night and he probably wins NC too. If Harris wins NC, she's having a great night and she wins PA also.

Still, the correlation between PA and NC seems odd to me. Uh, oh -- I'm using my eyeballs to judge the model! Exactly what I've been saying I shouldn't do. and I shouldn't. But those numbers imply that PA and NC are quite likely to go the same way (I could figure out the probability of that based on that data, but I'm rusty with my Bayes and it would take me longer than it's worth), which is weird considering that they almost never have in the past. I think they have only gone the same way in 16 and 08, and 08 was a landslide so it doesn't really count (just like 84 doesn't count, given that Reagan won everywhere). Of course, the rejoinder is "how often have the polls in both states looked almost identical" and well, that's why we have a model I suppose. Still.
 
“…
Here’s when you can expect more reliable polls:

  • Online polls from outfits like Morning Consult and YouGov will be out first. While these are decent polls, they typically don’t show a lot of movement from poll to poll.
  • Traditional pollsters usually take 3 or 4 days and then another day or two to finalize before releasing the numbers. That means it’ll be Sunday or Monday before we see any of those polls.
  • By the middle of next week we’ll begin to see some quality state polls that we can compare to the national polling averages to see if the debate changed anything.
At that point the debate will be old news.

How much of a bounce should Kamala Harris expect? Nate Silver notes Mitt Romney got a bounce of around 4 percentage points after his debate win against Barack Obama in 2012. And Donald Trump got roughly 2 percentage points following his win against Joe Biden in June. …”

 
Do you think there is a chance ?
absolutely. the pre-debate Quinnipiac poll had kamala up 3 points in NC.

 
“…
Here’s when you can expect more reliable polls:

  • Online polls from outfits like Morning Consult and YouGov will be out first. While these are decent polls, they typically don’t show a lot of movement from poll to poll.
  • Traditional pollsters usually take 3 or 4 days and then another day or two to finalize before releasing the numbers. That means it’ll be Sunday or Monday before we see any of those polls.
  • By the middle of next week we’ll begin to see some quality state polls that we can compare to the national polling averages to see if the debate changed anything.
At that point the debate will be old news.

How much of a bounce should Kamala Harris expect? Nate Silver notes Mitt Romney got a bounce of around 4 percentage points after his debate win against Barack Obama in 2012. And Donald Trump got roughly 2 percentage points following his win against Joe Biden in June. …”

I think the max bounce here is probably 1.5 or so. The electorate is almost set at this point. But 1 or 1.5 would make a huge difference.
 

"...To be clear, we have no idea whether the polls will be biased consistently one way or the other in 2024.

Maybe Trump will be understated again: if so, he is almost certainly going to win the election given how close the polls are now.

Maybe Harris will be understated: if so, she is in a great position to win given that she appears to already lead in enough states to win 270 electoral votes, albeit barely.

Or there might be little bias either way, or inconsistent bias depending on the state, in which case this election will be very hard to confidently predict based on the current numbers. Polling error is not necessarily consistent from year to year—while polls understated Trump in 2016 and 2020, the longer-term history of polling errors is a bit more mixed, per this helpful chart from the Pew Research Center based on American Association for Public Opinion Research data.


Our best guess is that because Trump’s polling position is better than 2016 and 2020, it’s likelier that he’s at least not being as underestimated as much as he was in previous elections, if he is being underestimated at all.

For one thing, other indicators do not really suggest that we’re in the midst of an electoral environment that is much stronger for Republicans than the past two elections (those indicators include special elections in 2023 and 2024 and the recent Washington state top-two primary).

While Democrats have now nominated three different opponents against Donald Trump, Trump himself will be on the ballot for a third straight time. It just doesn’t seem likely to us that he will do markedly better than he did in either 2016 or 2020, which is what would happen if the polls were biased against him again.

The third installment of the Trump trilogy will likely look a fair amount like the first two installments as opposed to being dramatically different; this is why we’ve long expected a close and competitive election, with only the last few weeks of Joe Biden’s candidacy really making us seriously consider the possibility of Trump doing substantially better than his previous presidential runs. The close polls suggest a close election: That seems realistic.

However, we also are on guard for subtler versions of the polling error we saw in 2016 and 2020. Again, Harris doing better in Wisconsin than she is doing in Michigan and Pennsylvania is something that raises our eyebrows, given actual recent results and the more pronounced Wisconsin polling error in 2016 and 2020. We also are suspicious of Harris’s better polling position in North Carolina than Georgia; note that the polling was generally closer to the mark in the latter than the former in both 2016 and 2020. ..."

[Lots of data in the linked article]
 
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