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Oct 15, 2020 Biden leads Trump by 10 in RCP avg of nat'l polls. Oct 15, 2024 Harris leads by 1....

-lowcountrydawg

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And Trump leads all of the battlegrounds with the exception of Wisconsin, which he trails by 0.3 pts. The panic is for good reason. If we have learned anything since 2016, it is that not only does Trump always outperform polls using traditional methods, he also always breaks late.

His 10 point deficit on this date in 2020 went down to 7 before the election. He lost by 4 nationally, but less than 1 pt electorally.

Trump voters are naturally skeptical of cold call pollsters. And that skepticism is probably even higher given the even more super-charged divisive environment and distrust of big tech well earned the last four years.

Furthermore, so much of the anti-Trump vote is rooted in hatred for Trump. Is that a voter that breaks late? Hell no. That is a voter that would have crawled over broken glass six months ago to vote for Trump.

The biggest issue I see for Harris is that a late breaking vote is the most likely vote to simply vote on issues. A vote that gets pissed off every time they check out of the grocery store. And this voter not only isn't required to love Trump, it is also a voter that may not have even voted in the past, but now will given the fact that they are pissed.

The working class is more than ever the class of Trump. And that is the part of the electorate most likely to outperform historical turn-out, because the economy is not working for them the way it is working for the NVIDIA shareholder, who has the luxury of prioritizing J6 and abortion over inflation. The J6 / abortion voter has always been priced in, and it got a bump when Harris replaced Biden, but that already happened.

For that reason I think the turnout models for republicans likely under-count the "pissed off factor" towards the incumbent party. Maybe there was an element of that in 2016, but the low / middle class wasn't hurting nearly as badly then, plus they had the recent memory of the late Bush years and the GFC to make them feel things were better than the last time a republican was in office.

If anything, there may be reason to believe the now famous Trump under-polling factor may be even more pronounced this year. And he is 9 pts ahead of where he was last time.
 
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