After all the buzz of the last weekend polling onslaught, not much has actually changed.
Last minute polls really didn't move the actual needle much, although you would not have thought that according to those who are breathlessly making mountains out of every molehill. Harris got some reasonably good battleground state results from NYT/Siena. In spite of NYT/Siena having a miserable track record over the past two Presidential elections, the media fawns over them as if they are gold often time suggesting that Nate Silver believes they are a top three pollster. Other battleground polls were much better for Trump including Atlas, Hill/Emerson, Insider Advantage, and Trafalgar. All consistently better pollsters over the past two Presidential cycles. At the end of the weekend, what really changed? Nate Silver shows that the big three (Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania) all had a whopping 0.1% change over the past week.
Of course, the pundits and partisans made a huge deal out of the Selzer poll in Iowa and Nate Silver mysteriously added the state to his list of battleground states in spite of the average of the other pollsters (who are not Selzer) showing Trump up by an average of around eight points. Funny how everyone jumped on the one Iowa poll, while these same pundits ignored a similar New Hampshire poll from a local pollster showing Trump winning there. New Hampshire is way closer to being in play considering most of the polling there is five points or under and includes others within the margin of error. According to the Hill/DDHQ Harris only leads by 2.6% there. But nobody is talking about an upset there and how that would play out nationally. But Iowa?
Lastly, we are hearing non-stop "reports" of how worried everyone in the Trump world is. Someone asked a Trump surrogate what they were worried about, and that person said North Carolina, because there are a lot of variables with the hurricane and the unknown nature of things and you "never know what might happen there". Suddenly there were stories about how Trump was "losing sleep" over North Carolina as if it was the end of the world, when in fact, suggesting that your worst fear was not bad polls or bad early voting numbers, but the unknown from a natural disaster... is probably a show of strength. The other issue people keep bringing up is that there are more women voting early than men. But what people seem to forget is that many of those women are Republican women and Republican women will vote for Trump. I guess according to liberals, Trump is up in arms over being told that more women are voting early and in a continual rage about it. You know, because that is how he just is. Maybe it's just me, but at the end of the day I will take Republican women voters over Democratic men voters every time.
I don't know folks. I hate to beat a dead horse here, but it looks like for Trump to lose that pollsters will have to be suddenly overstating (not understating) his support and that it will need to be Harris who outperforms the polls (albeit by a sliver) to win. It's possible, but I still have a difficult time with the concept of all of the objective factors such as registration, early voting, a shift in national polling, all moving towards Trump, but every battleground state is filled with a whole bunch of polls showing the race well within the margin of error and simply not moving at all.
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