In almost every election since 1988, when George H.W. Bush ran successfully for Ronald Reagan's third term, Pennsylvania and its slowly shrinking treasure trove of electoral college votes has proven the will-o'-the-wisp for GOP candidates — except for Donald Trump in 2016. One oddly underrated pollster shows he might just pull it off again in 2024.
I don't cover the polls very often, but this particular story was worth my time — and yours, too.
Trump has proven notoriously difficult for pollsters to nail down. Many reasons were given for why Trump handily beat the 2016 polls in the key swing states that put him in the White House: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Some pollsters said they didn't survey enough people without college degrees, who swung hard for Trump that year. Others said they couldn't get enough Trump voters to answer the phone.
The situation was so worrisome for the State Steno Pool that you can find countless stories during Trump's first term with headlines like "What went wrong with polls in 2016? Can we trust them now?"
Trump outperformed the polls in 2020, too. But not by enough to overcome Joe Biden's hollow promises to serve as a healing moderate and certainly not enough to overcome the Mystery Mail-In Ballot Machine.
Maybe the polling organizations did undercount blue-collar Americans. Maybe conservatives just don't like talking to pollsters. Maybe conservatives who did pick up the phone didn't want to admit to a stranger that they were voting for Literally Hitler.
The reason for that little history lesson was to set you up for today's news out of Pennsylvania, courtesy of Black Insurrectionist on X:
Shocking Poll. AtlasIntel, the number one rated pollster, has come out with a new Poll. Donald Trump leading in most of the swing states. The biggest shock was Pennsylvania, Donald Trump has a 3-point lead, but that was not the shock, the shock was Trump with a 3-point lead when the sample was weighted heavily Democrat 8.4% more of the poll was from Democrat registered voters.
AtlasIntel's claim to fame was nailing it in 2020. Unlike everybody else, they did not produce polling results biased toward Biden. Theirs were the most accurate presidential polls four years ago. So keep that in mind when you read this Spotlight PA report from two weeks ago:
As of Sept. 16, Democrats made up 44% of registered voters in the commonwealth, down from a 2009 high of 51.2%, while Republicans were at 40.2%, up from 36.9% in 2009. Unaffiliated and third-party voters have boosted their numbers even more, from 11.9% in 2009 to 15.7%.
Now look at demographics from AtlasIntel's Pennsylvania poll:
(You can see the full results of their latest swing-state polling here.)
AtlasIntel oversampled Democrats by 1.5 points and undersampled Republicans by 2.9 points. Even more encouraging for Trump supporters is what's going on with college graduates. Only 37.4% of Pennsylvanians aged 25 or older have a college degree, but 53% of the likely voters sampled in this poll are college grads.
So the weird thing isn't that there are so many college grads in this poll — they are more likely to vote than people with just a high school diploma (or less). It's this:
Dems have an 8.4-point advantage in the poll.
But only a 3.8-point lead in voter registrations.
And non-college grads are probably undersampled.
Yet Trump is still up by three against Harris.
I don't know if Trump can beat the Philly ballot-printing machine again. Democrats got caught with their pants down in 2016 and didn't let that happen again in 2020.
But I like these numbers.
Recommended: So Now Conservatives Are Evil for Liking — [Checks Notes] — Attractive Women?
P.S. Help PJ Media keep the world safe for attractive women (and everyone else) by becoming a VIP or VIP Gold member. We need your support and you need independent news and analysis that isn't afraid to have a little fun. Join now during our 50% off SAVEAMERICA promotion.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member