The New York Times has several pieces out parsing the results of its latest surveys with Sienna College, including those showing Harris with a 4-point lead in Pennsylvania and Trump with a 6-point lead in Arizona and noting the Democrats’ continuing struggle with Hispanic voters. But Ezra Klein, one of their most prominent pundits, urges readers to “Ignore The Polls.”
Here’s a bit of advice to help maintain your sanity over the next few weeks until Election Day: Just ignore the polls. Unless you’re a campaign professional or a gambler, you’re probably looking at them for the same reason the rest of us are: to know who’ll win. Or at least to feel like you know who’ll win. But they just can’t tell you that.
Which isn’t quite true: most races are so lopsided that the outcome really isn’t in doubt. But Klein is certainly right that, in a relatively tight race like that between Trump and Harris, there’s just too much uncertainty for the polls to be all that predictive. (Although, even there, we already know the almost-certain winner in 42 or 43 states.)
Back in 2016, Harry Enten, then at FiveThirtyEight, calculated the final polling error in every presidential election between 1968 and 2012. On average, the polls missed by two percentage points. In 2016, an American Association for Public Opinion Research postmortem found that the average error of the national polls was 2.2 points, but the polls of individual states were off by 5.1 points. In 2020, the national polls were off by 4.5 points and the state-level polls missed, again, by 5.1 points.
This is more than the margin any candidate consistently has in any of the swing states. Which is what makes them swing states to begin with.
As of Oct. 10, The New York Times’s polling average had Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points nationally. That’s tight, but the seven swing states are tighter: Neither candidate is leading by more than two points in any of them.
Imagine the polls perform better in 2024 than they did in either 2016 or 2020: They’re off, remarkably, by merely two points in the swing states. Huzzah! That would be consistent with Harris winning every swing state. It would also be consistent with Trump winning every swing state. This is not some outlandish scenario. According to Nate Silver’s election model, the most likely electoral outcome “is Harris sweeping all seven swing states. And the next most likely is Trump sweeping all seven.”
Which, one must admit, is decidedly unhelpful as predictions go.
After a discussion about polling methodology debates (see Nate Silver‘s “New York Times polls are betting on a political realignment” for a longer take), Klein observes,
Here’s the other reason you can safely tune out the daily polling news: The polls are remarkably, eerily stable.
A week before the Harris-Trump debate in September, Harris led Trump by three points. Then came the debate, during which Trump turned in the second-worst debate performance in recent memory. Then came another attempted assassination of Trump, after the shooting at a campaign rally in July. Then the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 50 basis points. Then Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. Then came the vice-presidential debate. Then came a surprisingly strong jobs report. In this period, Harris released an 82-page booklet of policy proposals and Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Trump in the Jan. 6 case, filed a 165-page brief adding new details of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. After all that, Harris is now leading Trump by … three points.
Which is rather remarkable. I’ve been saying for a very long time that public opinion on Trump is baked at this point. There’s simply nobody who is going to vote in the election who doesn’t have a firm view of who he is. That was also true of Joe Biden but is decidedly not the case with Kamala Harris. Even granting that the overwhelming majority of voters are reliable partisans, it’s amazing that her support hasn’t moved at all as people get to know her.
But it really comes down to this:
There are voters who are still undecided, but they are, almost by definition, voters who pay less attention to political news and are either so uninterested in politics or so cynical about both candidates that nothing has yet caused them to make up their minds. There are many more voters whose minds are made up but may or may not actually fill out ballots by Election Day. These are the voters who will decide the election, and they’re not tipping their hands yet.
For most of the cycle, the pundits were talking about the “double haters,” who strongly disliked both Trump and Biden. I would have thought that swapping one of the hated candidates for a fresh new face would have brought most of these folks over to the Not Trump side. Thus far, it just hasn’t happened.
To the extent one is looking for answers—and especially to the extent that they’re causing added anxiety—Klein is certainly right: the polls aren’t going to help you, so you might as well just wait until the morning after the election to see what happened.
For the kind of people who read political blogs and listen to political podcasts—even in non-election years!—though, the polls are quite useful. While they won’t tell us who’s going to win Pennsylvania or Georgia, they do provide insights into attitudinal shifts that will shape that outcome. That Trump is appealing to young Black and Hispanic men in a way that Mitt Romney and George W. Bush didn’t is interesting. Ditto the fact that there’s now a huge divide in how those with and without a college education vote.
If you’re only interested in the topline results, the polls aren’t terribly useful. At best, they’re entertaining in the way that sports talk is: a way to pass the time until the games are actually played. But, if you’re interested in the factors that contribute to the results, the polls and the analysis of the microtrends are the best way to understand our shifting political landscape.
