Technically, neither. The election is November 5th. No one wins until votes are counted.
Sure, I’m being snarky – it’s my schtick – but it brings up a valuable point to remember: only votes count. All else is hot air.
That includes your beloved polls, my snarky commentary, the endless talking head parade on a variety of media, rally size or lack thereof, donations whether big or small, the whole campaigning shebang. All of it is just noise. At the end of the day, only the votes matter.
That means your vote matters, Dear Reader.
It also means don’t let the hype lead to tripe. Vote responsibly. Know who you’re voting for and why. Vote for the candidates that best represent what YOU, Dear Reader, think is best for this country, its people and yes, the rest of the world.
Being the biggest kid on the crazy block has its drawbacks.
If you’ve considered carefully and think that one party’s platform is the best indicator of what those candidates will do, and you approve, there’s nothing wrong with voting straight party. If you just like the color and the two positions you think the party has, please stay home until you grow up.
The 26th Amendment may have been a mistake.
Okay, lecture is over. You still want to know the future. FYI: never make fun of people who read their horoscopes every day. Wanting a prediction of an election result this far out is just as bad.
Which is not going to stop me from giving you one, at least one with a lot of caveats. Hey, a girl has to pay the bills, doesn’t she?
So, let’s do this. Harris v Trump, the idiotic polling:
Above is the whole silly section included in the RCP Average. Oooh, scary! Lookie at all the blue!
First off, the average is useless. Statisticians rarely use it because it doesn’t really tell you anything. The median is far more useful. If you think I’m wasting my time taking the medians (plural) on that worthless mess, I have a bridge to sell you, cheap.
So we’re taking this mess apart and learning how to read this stupid thing. Oh, quit whining, it’ll only take a minute and once you know the tricks, it’s a lot easier to deal with this stuff.
First up. we’re ditching all these old polls. I’m stuck with the multiple day polling which has some minor issues of its own, but they are usually minor so I’m not tossing the whole list. Understand, a poll is a cross section. The longer your polling period, the less likely it is to accurately represent what people thought at a given time.
Think about this election and all the stuff that’s happened in just under two months. Could some of those events have changed people’s minds? Sure. So a poll that includes both a time before and after isn’t going to tell us much about what people are now thinking, is it? So while multiple day polling is okay sometimes, the period of time covered can’t be very long.
Here’s the revised list. Yep, I just cut off anything that didn’t have an August date after the tenth. It should be after the 23rd but pollsters are playing chicken right now so we work with what we’ve got.
Well, that’s better. I could take the medians now but we still have some junk to eliminate. I’m tempted to dump Emerson with that sample size of only 1000, but to be consistent, I’ll only dump polls under 1000. Since there are none, let’s move on.
Voter type. There is no excuse to use registered voters this late. Millions are not going to suddenly register. Those who have decided to vote are probably already registered. We can safely ignore the few exceptions as outliers. We now want to know how likely voters plan to behave.
Bye-bye RV polls!
Much better. Now, the sharp eyed will notice I took out Pew. Pew is the best poll on this list but it uses a different methodology for how it handles voters. Apples only, please. In other words, we don’t want to mix different types of polling data. Yes, RCP does this. No, they shouldn’t.
But we still have issues. Rasmussen is on here twice and what the heck is Data for Progress (D)? So the older 8/8 – 8/14 Rasmussen poll gets dropped. What about Data for Progress?
They’re a paid pollster that works primarily for the Democrats. For our purposes, that’s a negative. That’s not to say they are a bad agency. The problem is that they have a baked in bias – their bread and butter is made serving the Democrats polling needs. Make no mistake, Republicans have their own favored polling agencies – both parties need them to help guide campaigns. But they bring a cloud with them and in this instance, I don’t see a good justification to keep them. Pity, I do like me a larger sample size, but off they go.
Now we’re down to two contestants:
So, we have a media company with a larger sample size and a lower margin of error and an independent polling agency with a newer poll end date. We’re down to the part where we can easily dump them both on minor grounds but there aren’t any great reasons to dump either one. That I don’t like CBS is not a reason.
I’m suspicious of that 2.1 MOE on the CBS poll but I’d be getting way too nitpicky to bash them on that. I’m much too lazy to dig through all the backside for a probably useless poll so far out. Two weeks before the election and I’ll be the most ruthless thing you’ve ever seen about all the little goo. This far out, it isn’t worth the fuss. CBS gets to play.
Not sure why it matters.
Rasmussen has Trump up by three but it’s in the margin of error. CBS has Harris up by three a whooping .9 of a point beyond the margin of error.
Those of you who think CBS wins and Harris is winning are wrong.
Later this week I’m going to do a whole thing, post and video on the margin of error because no one seems to know what this thing means. Here’s the extra short version: if it’s not out of the margin of error by at least the numeric value of the margin of error, it’s still too close to call. That means CBS’s poll is 1.2 points too small to be conclusive.
The less technical answer is that the whole thing is a wash.
So, I have no clue who’s winning, you say? Guess again.
Notice how many polls I could dump just on how old they were. Why aren’t any pollsters besides CBS, Data for Progress and Rasmussen doing polls? Well, they almost certainly are – excepting Pew which doesn’t poll as frequently – but they aren’t publishing them. Hmm, wonder why?
Okay, not really. They’re not publishing because they aren’t getting the numbers they want to see. Since the vast majority tend to favor the Democrats it’s not hard to guess what those numbers are starting to show.
Harris barely got a bump out of replacing Biden. Next week we’ll find out if the DNC helped her at all. But this week, we can be pretty certain her lead has evaporated. Trump is either tied or pulling ahead in a period of time where Harris should have the advantage.
No wonder the pollsters are ducking for cover. It’s too late in the game to fudge their numbers by much. Sure they can still pull the registered voter trick for a week or two, but they can’t keep up the cherry picking or they will be so far off that they’ll be shown as frauds when the election comes. Sure, they want to help the Democrats, but they want to be in business on November 6th, too. Have cake or eat cake, what a quandary!
Worse, the RFK endorsement of Trump is going to move the needle in what appears to be a tight race. Right on the heels of the DNC and what should be a bump for Harris. Next week’s polls should be hilarious.
Assuming any of these agencies have the guts to publish.
In the meantime, Harris can’t draw much of a crowd. No, the DNC doesn’t count as most of those people have to be there. RNC doesn’t count, either, at least not in crowd size. The DNC obsession with Trump made it flounder. It’s not time to play only to your base. It’s time to convince the undecideds to vote for you and they are mostly centrist. Dang, didn’t any of these Democrats read the playbook?
Rally size matters as we can safely extrapolate from it. Don’t get crazy – an extrapolation is just an educated guess and an educated guess is still a guess. But being conservative, each rallygoer is probably representative of a hundred more voters who will vote for that candidate. Suddenly 50,000 rallygoers in a swing state matters, huh? Especially if the other rally only has 500. My little calculator says 5,000,000 is more than 50,000.
If even half of each of those numbers are all voters in that state – remember, state borders can be close to rallies – that’s more than enough to change a close election. Sure, we can play with the extrapolation – it’s just an educated guess. But even dropping the multiplier to ten has has the same effect.
The reality so far has been that Harris’ rallies have lackluster attendance where Trump fills stadiums. It’s a good indicator – nothing more or less – that Trump has the advantage. Remember, Trump’s average attendance (yes, I meant to use average. I did say it is used sometimes.) is in the tens of thousands where Harris’ so far has been doing good to break into the thousands.
A guy willing to come out on a hot August day to wave a sign and listen to a presidential candidate is far more likely to go vote for that candidate on a mild November day, don’t you think? That’s the other reason rally size matters – it gives us a good indication of how a candidate is doing
Let’s just say Harris is not having a good time.
The polls will sort themselves out in the next week or two. But at this point, it’s Trump’s election to lose.
Harris does seem to be intent on beating him at something but winning at losing isn’t a great way to win elections. She needs a tight race – that helps Democrats keep their turnout up – but she can’t be seen as falling behind. She’s got to consistently perform better than Biden did. She’s out of freebie bumps. Now the real show starts.
I’ll have extra butter on my popcorn, please!
