Things are looking really good for Donald Trump based on the polls. He's leading in the RealClearPolitics polling averages nationally and in the battleground states. That's a good position to be in, and many Trump supporters believe that he'll perform even stronger because pollsters have proven to not be great at capturing his supporters in their surveys.
The feeling is that while the polls show a close race with Trump having the edge, Trump is headed for a landslide victory because he will beat the polls, as he has in the past two election cycles. But you shouldn't make that assumption.
In a recent discussion on CNN, the network’s polling analyst, Harry Enten, challenged the popular belief that polling consistently underestimates Donald Trump’s support. According to Enten, it would be unprecedented for a party to beat polling expectations in three consecutive presidential cycles across key battleground states. “It’s never happened. Zero times since 1972,” he says.
Enten dug deeper into the data, noting that pollsters tend to discover when they’re off base and modify their methodologies accordingly. He explained, “What normally happens is the pollsters catch on… they make adjustments.”
According to Enten, this trend explains why, historically, polls haven't consistently underestimated either party. “They make adjustments, and I think that helps to explain why we have never seen that the same party has been underestimated three times in a row in presidential elections at least over the last 52 years.”
Interestingly, even the handful of pollsters who gave Trump an advantage in the 2020 election showed him outperforming by up to eight points in certain Great Lakes battleground states. This year, Enten points out, “The best polls for Trump actually only have him running about 3 points ahead of the polling average,” a far cry from the 2020 margin. Enten concludes that this time around, there’s just not the same kind of evidence suggesting that Trump will outperform poll averages.
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It would be easy to dismiss Enten as a CNN hack who is just telling the network’s liberal viewers what they want to hear. But Enten hasn’t been one to do that. When the numbers look bad for the Democrats, he doesn’t mince words.
Adding to his case, Enten highlights the 2022 midterms, where polling in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin underestimated Democrats by an average of four points. If this underestimation applies again in 2024, Enten argues, it could lead to a Kamala Harris sweep, with her winning key battlegrounds and amassing 319 electoral votes.
I don't think that the polls are biased four points in Trump’s favor. But if the polls are generally on point, that means we have a coin flip of a race, which means that this race will be decided on the ground on Election Day.
Enten’s takeaway? He urges viewers to pause and reconsider the assumption that Trump will outperform expectations. “A lot of folks are sort of counting on that Donald Trump will, in fact, be underestimated by the polls,” he says, but the data this time around suggest otherwise.
Don't count on polls underestimating Trump:
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) October 29, 2024
1. No party has ever been underestimated 3 pres. cycles in a row.
2. In 2020, right leaning polls correctly said averages were way off. In 2024, averages look a lot more like the right leaning polls.
3. 2022: Dems were underestimated. pic.twitter.com/yHetD2Bzbx
I could offer you all kinds of reasons why Trump should outperform the polls, but the truth is that no one will really know for sure until after the election.
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