Still licking their wounds from sketchy polling that underestimated Republican nominee Donald Trump's performance in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Democrat pollsters are injecting some skepticism into Democrat Kamala Harris' recent surge in the polls.
All but two polls in 2016 had Trump losing to Hillary Clinton in 2016. And in 2020, Trump lost by a closer margin to President Joe Biden than polling suggested. It led to a powwow of five of the party's top polling firms to collaborate on a postmortem of what went wrong, Politico reported.
This past week in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, party pollsters mulled whether they have figured it out or if it's déjà vu all over again. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Harris leading Trump by 1.5 points. FiveThirtyEight.com has Harris leading by 3.7 points.
Chauncey McLean, the president of Harris superPAC Future Forward, said Monday, "Our numbers are much less rosy than what you're seeing in the public.
"We have it tight as a tick, and pretty much across the board," he added.
Harris campaign chairwoman Jen O'Malley Dillon said this week that "we don't have it," referring to a clear path for victory.
"We are a polarized nation in a challenging time and despite all the things that are happening in this country, Donald Trump still has more support than he has had at any other point. ... It is going to come down to every single vote," she said.
Trump lost to Biden in 2020 with 74.2 million votes, the second only to Biden's 81.2 million in the highest number of votes ever earned in a U.S. presidential election. Trump garnered just shy of 63 million votes in 2016 — when he won.
The challenge for pollsters in 2024 is whether they've correctly accounted for the Trump bump.
"I feel much better educated about those problems," Nick Gourevitch, a partner at Global Strategy Group, told Politico. "I don't think there's any pollster in America who can sit here and say ... that they're 100% sure that they fixed any issues in polling. I think that would be silly."
Said former Biden pollster John Anzalone, "Something's gonna happen in 2024. You and I, right now, don't know what that is."
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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