CV NEWS FEED // Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is tied with or leading Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the nationwide popular vote per multiple newly released polls.
Trump is on track to become the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush accomplished this feat as a sitting president 20 years ago.
In Trump’s 2016 upset victory, he still lost the popular vote by just over two points to failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton – despite Trump winning the Electoral College by a substantial margin.
During a CNN broadcast Friday, the network’s senior writer and political analyst Harry Enten declared, “Trump may win the popular vote!”
“Everyone has been talking about this idea that Trump may win in the Electoral College, but Kamala Harris may win the popular vote,” Enten said, “but Trump may finally get his great white whale.”
Enten, who is widely described as a “data guru,” indicated that a New York Times / Siena poll conducted earlier this week showed Trump and Harris tied for the popular vote. However, he added that this poll “is actually right in the middle of the spectrum when we’re talking about recent polling data.”
The analyst pointed to polls from CNBC and The Wall Street Journal which showed that Trump was leading Harris in the popular vote by two and three points.
On the other hand, Enten said, a Say24 poll by “a bunch of academics” has Harris leading Trump by three points in the popular vote.
“The bottom line is,” Enten stated, “with the popular vote, which we really haven’t focused upon,” this is “a very, very tight race.”
Before the 2004 election, in which Bush won the popular vote by 2.4 points, the last time a Republican presidential nominee did the same was in 1988. That nominee was Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush.
The younger Bush and Trump won their respective elections in 2000 and 2016 despite narrowly coming up short in the popular vote.
American presidents are elected solely using the Electoral College, with the national popular vote having no direct bearing on the outcome of presidential elections. This has been the case since the framers of the Constitution created the office of the presidency, and with it, the Electoral College, in the 1780s.
>> THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE: WHAT IT IS AND WHY WE NEED IT <<
As of Friday afternoon, leading prediction website Polymarket gave Trump a 65% chance of defeating Harris in the election – but a significantly smaller though still notable 41% chance of winning the popular vote.
In recent decades, the Electoral College has tended to favor Republican candidates due to the Democratic vote being more concentrated in heavily populated states such as California, and the Republican vote being spread out across more parts of the country.
Some observers took to X (formerly Twitter) to comment on the recent popular vote polling.
Radio host and Outkick founder Clay Travis wrote, “Democrat panic is fully setting in.”
Another X user predicted: “If Trump wins the popular vote, the electoral college will be a landslide.”
In a Friday post on his website Silver Bulletin, renowned statistician and polling expert Nate Silver discussed the New York Times poll to which Enten had referred: “This poll is hardly alone in showing Harris’s national lead slipping.”
“Quite a few recent national polls show a tie or Trump slightly ahead, in fact,” Silver pointed out.
In the same post, Silver implied that the border crisis – which has intensified to unprecedented levels during the Biden-Harris administration – may be a major reason Harris’ chances of winning appear to be slipping away, and a second Trump administration is inching closer and closer toward inevitability.
To make his point, the statistician cited the example of left-wing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent unexpected pivot to a more pro-border security stance:
I don’t closely follow Canadian immigration policy debates. Still, my stereotype has long been that Canada … has always been incredibly accepting of immigrants. Subjectively, cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver can feel like multicultural utopias. And this shows up in the objective data, too. In a Gallup survey in 2020, Canada was the single most accepting country of migrants
Silver then recounted that on Thursday, a friend of his had texted him a news story about Trudeau’s seemingly sudden shift on border policy.
>> PODCAST EXPOSES HARRIS’ BORDER ROLE <<
As Silver noted, the friend had written “something along the lines of ‘This is why Kamala is going to lose.’”
“And I think he makes a pretty good argument,” the expert continued, highlighting that the “immigration issue … shows up prominently in” the Times poll.
In his post, Silver wrote that he has “done a little algebra on the backend here to calculate the net number of votes gained or lost by Harris based on issue groups,” according to that poll.
From his math, he determined that immigration has cost Harris a net share of 12.5% of the vote. This is coincidentally the same percentage of the vote that the issue of abortion has cost Trump, per Silver’s tabulation – meaning the two issues essentially cancel each other out.
However, Silver also found that the economy and inflation combined cost Harris a net 15.8% share of the vote – more than any issue had cost Trump:
This data tells a really clear story. Immigration and the economy are huge liabilities for Harris. In fact, they’re basically her only liabilities. They offset strong issues for her on abortion, democracy, and Trump’s personal attributes. Interestingly, voters who couldn’t name a most important issue also leaned strongly toward Harris — but that may be a sign that she’s offering voters more vibes than substance.
>> FOX HOST CONFRONTS HARRIS ON THE BORDER CRISIS <<
