Trump leading in a New Hampshire poll

Yeah, it is just a single poll, but who woulda thunk that any poll in NH would show the GOP ahead?

There is a lot that doesn't seem to make sense in this election when it comes to the polling. As of now, we have several polls showing Trump closing the popular vote gap or even leading. We show him gaining ground in places like New Hampshire and possibly even cutting into Harris' popular vote lead in New York.

On the flip side we see almost no movement in the battleground state polling, which has been consistently inconsistent from pollster to pollster with very little changes from poll to poll within the pollsters. While the subtle little changes taking place seem to be favoring Trump, there seems to be a glaring difference between the national scene and the battleground states in how the race seems to be shifting.

It's almost as if these battleground state pollsters have predetermined a net result and just fudge around that number by one or two points, but always settle right back where it started. Now I am not suggesting that is really what is happening, it just seems that these numbers have been pretty stubborn considering all the rest of the movement. It could be we are just at a point where there has been so much money poured into these battleground states that nearly everyone has already heard it all, have made up their minds, and are not moving off their choice. They are literally battling it out for control of the last one or two percent who have yet to make a choice?

The other option is that either the national polling or the battleground polling is missing something. Keep in mind that in 2020, Democrats held a partisan advantage of one percent nationally in the exit polling (37-36-26), but Republicans held an advantage in the seven battleground states by about three points (34.1-37.3-28.6). That is a four point partisan divide and is the main reasoning why it is expected that Harris would need to win by four points or so in the popular vote to win the battleground states. Either that or she has to do much better among the individual demographics in the battleground states than she does nationally.

Keep in mind, Biden won independents nationally by fourteen points but only won them in the battleground states by about seven points. Right now Trump is holding a slight one point lead with Independents nationally according to the thirty plus polling crosstab average I am updating and calculating as we go. For Harris to really be winning in these battleground states, she would have to be really running ahead of her national averages in the independents (rather than behind as Biden did), or there has to be some pretty serious demographic changes that have taken place in these states to the benefit of Democrats. Both of those scenarios seem very unlikely to me. This is why so often when I see an outlier showing Harris winning a battlegrounds state by three points or more, the crosstabs never really model out if we use the 2020 demographic breakdown.