Stop Worrying About the Polls: Kamala’s Lead Is Fake
Yesterday, as I watched a podcast about my favorite NFL football team, a commercial interrupted my reverie. Yes, I know. Podcasts have commercials. However, this was not one of those “buy this, buy that, take this to end constipation” commercials. This was some angry man loudly complaining that Trump had failed to do X, Y, and Z. It made me angry, but not in the way intended. It motivated me to send a campaign contribution to Trump. I thought the Harris campaign deserved to know that.
Joy, vibes, and cackles, everyone! Currently, Kamala is up by 2 points in the Real Clear Politics national polling average and 3.4 points in the FiveThirtyEight average. Some of this is polling smoke and mirrors, and some is due to Democrats coming home to support their party’s candidate. For example, since Harris became the Democrat nominee, Robert Kennedy’s polling numbers declined from 9–10% of the vote to around 4–5%. So, yes, the polls have tightened up.
Can Kamala win? Only if the public buys into the massive public relations campaign touting her as a leader and the Democrats’ desperate attempt to blame Trump for the country being on the wrong track.
Keep in mind Kamala’s problems as a candidate. She is immersed in the world of identity politics. She has rarely been able to succeed without the help of powerful politicians. She has never run anything significant — no city, state, or business. She has managed her own offices but has a reputation as a terrible boss. She avoided most of the assignments given to her by the Biden administration, especially border czar. Finally, she is the misguided upper-middle-class daughter of a Marxist economics professor, which may account for many of her socialist views and her inability to connect with working-class folks.
Can Trump win? Of course he can. He has to focus on the issues and stay frosty. No name-calling, inappropriate remarks, or wandering off-topic.
Trump has other advantages. The main Trump-friendly issues are the economy, inflation, and illegal immigration, with 65% saying the country is on the wrong track, according to the RCP average. He has current and former Democrats supporting him, such as Elon Musk; Tulsi Gabbard; and, most importantly, Robert F. Kennedy. Also, the Democrats’ desire to raise the corporate tax rate and tax unrealized capital gains is motivating numerous Silicon Valley and Wall Street big-money players to back Trump.
Trump also has a secret weapon. It is the usually ignored and virtually un-pollable mass of Trump-supporters, AKA the hidden Trump vote. They are still there.
Now let’s take a closer look at the national results.
Remember: the RCP average of a multi-candidate race has Kamala up by 2 points. There are two obvious problems here. One is that only five out of the eleven polls are surveying likely voters. Polls of likely voters are usually more accurate than polls of registered voters. The second is that only four of the polls were taken after RFK Jr. decided to support Trump. It is not known how this will affect the polls in the future.
The FiveThirtyEight average says Kamala is up by 3.4 points. How they came to that conclusion is a mystery. If you look closely, many of the polling organizations represented here are not household names, such as Big Village, Kaplan Strategies, Angus Reid Global, etc. There is also a mishmash of polls of all adults, registered voters, and likely voters, and many still have RFK Jr. as a separate candidate. One poll from The Economist/YouGov, without Kennedy, has Harris up by 2 points.
The big question is whether these polls are reasonably accurate or biased. After all, it is easy to make Kamala appear more popular than she really is. All you have to do is sample more Democrats, more women, more minorities, or do more sampling in metropolitan areas.
According to a story in RedState, it is alleged that a recent New York Times/Siena poll was biased. Supposedly, the poll showed significant leads for Kamala in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that were dubious at best. This poll claims that Harris made massive gains with senior citizens and non-college white voters that may not be valid.
Another potential problem with accuracy is that most polling organizations are left-of-center on ideological grounds. Is it possible that they are deliberately inflating Kamala’s support to help her? According to pollster John McLaughlin, this seems to be happening.
“So what they’re doing is they’re polling fewer Republicans. They’re polling a disproportionate number of Biden 2020 voters. ... It’s ridiculous. So what they’re doing is they’re trying to pump Harris up. They’re trying to suppress our vote. And this is, you know, there’s smart people doing this, so I think it’s intentional.”
Another example is the Michigan Bloomberg/Morning Consult 5-way Poll from 7/28. This poll shows Harris with a 12-point lead. Sorry, but that is a Democrat fantasy. The next closest is the New York Times poll that shows Harris with a 5-point lead, which I believe is the same biased poll discussed above. If we remove both polls from the average, Harris’s lead shrinks from 2.3 points to only 0.4, essentially a tie.
One big issue with Kamala’s campaign is the national Democrat registration bias. There are more Democrats than Republicans in the U.S. by 3–4%, thanks to California and New York. If we assume that the other third-party candidates are drawing roughly 1% of the Democrat vote, Kamala should be ahead by 2–3%. And that is what the polls say. So if we exclude solid blue California and New York, the national race is a tie.
For reference, the RCP average had Hillary 6 points ahead in August 2016 and Biden up by almost 7 in August 2020.
The real killer for the Kamala poll surge may be response bias. According to Mark Harris, with political consulting firm Coldspark, educated Democrats are 3 to 4 times more likely to answer a poll than non-college Democrats. Also, they are way over-polling the high-turnout voters. Trump tends to have more support from working-class Democrats and low-turnout voters. Harris also claims they see a “historic response bias on surveys that is setting the table for a large polling miss this fall.”
National voter surveys overestimated Democrat support by 1.3% in 2016 and a whopping 3.9% in 2020. If Mark Harris is correct, and the polling miss is close to 2020 or higher, there is a good chance Trump will win.
One more thing. I am a big fan of actor Jeff Bridges. However, I find the whole White Dudes for Kamala thing to be both racist and silly. I am with Guys for Trump. We don’t care what you look like or where your ancestors came from.
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