With just over a month to go until election day, all eyes are on the seven key swing states that will decide the race – and if recent polls can be trusted, things are looking good for Vice President Kamala Harris.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – can those polls be trusted?
Dave Wasserman, elections analyst for the Cook Political Report, joined KNX News’ daily political show Countdown 2024 to break down the data.
Listen here:
“So we found that Kamala Harris was ahead in five of the seven key battleground states, but not by more than a point or two or three in any of them,” he explained. “In North Carolina, we found a tied race at 49-49 in a head-to-head between Harris and Trump, and the only state where Trump was narrowly ahead was Georgia, where he was up two.”
But he notes that all these results are within the margin of error, and polls are quite infamously subject to election perception-breaking error. In both 2016 and 2020, polling underestimated former President Donald Trump’s support.
“Trump's base skews towards voters who have lower levels of social and institutional trust, and that includes trust in the media and trust in polling, so his base can be harder to sample, particularly in years when turnout is very high – as we expect this November – which brings out a lot of more peripherally engaged voters,” Wasserman said.
Wasserman said Trump still leads with voters on immigration and the economy, and with current polling so tight, he still has a path to victory.
“If you took each one of these results at face value, Harris would narrowly prevail in the electoral college,” he said. “If these polls – not just ours, but others – are off by even a fraction of how much they were off in ‘16 or ‘20, Trump would win.”
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Listen to the full episode above to hear former State Department official Aaron David Miller walk us through how the conflict in the Middle East could affect the election. Catch new episodes of Countdown 2024 live at 2:30 p.m. every weekday through Election Day.
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