Are we seeing a typical late cycle polling phenomenon?

As the election becomes closer, the pollsters become more concerned with being right than giving people what they want to hear.

I have always maintained that pollsters (especially those commissioned by the media) are looking to create a narrative as much as they are looking to track one early in any polling cycle. In other works, there is an event (such as a debate) that people might think will change the outlook of an election. So a media outlet commissions a poll that asks a whole bunch of questions about an event prior to asking the main question about why they will vote for. This is what is considered a push poll in that the poll uses leading questions to push the respondent in a particular direction before asking the main question of who you will vote for. The problem with this sort of poll is that you might actually change someone's mind by asking the question (and some of those asking the question might be actively attempting to). But the other 100 million voters who did not have someone talk to them will not have changed their mind. That makes the poll inaccurate. But this is how the media can spin an event into suggesting it mattered more than it actually did.

Now, not all polls are push polls, but other pollsters (especially those who are commissioned by media outlets) can do other things with demographics and such to push a narrative such as Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden being ahead by nearly or even over double digits. Were either of them really ever that far ahead? Now as those elections drew near, both Clinton and Biden still led comfortably, but not by the larger margins they did during September. Those polls probably moved three or four points in the closing weeks, although they still ended up wrong. Either way, this phenomenon of pollsters overestimating Democratic support early in the cycle and then showing movement to the Republican down the stretch has been going on since I started watching polls.

So one has to wonder if that is part of what we are seeing now. When all three network pollsters saw movement towards Trump (when not much changed) there would seem a need for a reason behind it. Is it just that they do not want to be wrong with their final polling? Nobody really remembers the polling from September, and pollsters are generally judged on the accuracy of their final poll. The difficult thing here is that Harris never led by the numbers that Clinton and Biden did. So there might not be as far to go to become accurate, but even these 2–3-point swings in certain pollsters seem to be adding up.

So it begs the question? Is there really momentum for Trump, are we just seeing some self-correction coming from pollsters who wanted us to believe Harris was ahead, or are we seeing something of a combination of both? Either way, this is dangerous territory for Harris as there really can be such a thing as election momentum. There are (believe it or not) people out there who will follow the pack, either because they are swayed by polling movement or because they want to say that they voted for the winner. This little bit of momentum might be coming at the right time to become something bigger. I guess the next couple of weeks will tell the tale.