CV NEWS FEED // Over the past few weeks, several media outlets have advanced a narrative that momentum in the 2024 presidential election has been swinging toward Democratic nominee Kamala Harris since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her.
Multiple sources have characterized this alleged change in the race’s trajectory as a pro-Harris “bump.”
However, while many national polls do show that Harris’ opponent, former President Donald Trump, has lost some ground since Biden’s withdrawal, analysts have cautioned that there is more to the most recent polling numbers than what immediately meets the eye.
During an appearance this week on the left-wing news channel MSNBC, NBC News Senior Political Editor Mark Murray told hostess Andrea Mitchell that in a crucial battleground state, Harris is in fact not polling significantly better than Biden with several key voter blocs.
“So, what’s interesting is that young voters and also … black voters did not change all that much between where Biden was in Pennsylvania in July and where Harris is now,” Murray said, adding: “Independents did not move in Harris’ direction.”
Murray’s analysis is welcome news for Trump’s camp.
In the months prior to Biden suspending his campaign, Trump had been dominating polls among independent voters.
Trump had also been making historic gains among black voters, Hispanic voters, and young voters – groups that have historically voted overwhelmingly Democratic.
On July 23 – two days after Biden announced he was exiting the race and backing Harris – Murray wrote in a piece for NBC News that according to prior polling, Harris may have a “steep” challenge with winning over independent voters in particular.
Murray pointed to an NBC poll that combined “responses from surveys conducted in January, April and July before Biden’s exit.”
The poll “finds Harris not only underwater with those swing voters in terms of her popularity but also with lower net scores than Biden has,” the analyst wrote.
Murray wrote at the time:
Among independent voters, 28% view Biden positively compared to 53% who see him negatively (for a net rating of -25), according to the polling. Harris’ standing among those voters: 20% positive, 49% negative (-29).
Among self-identified moderates, Biden enjoys a 43% positive, 44% negative score (-1), while Harris is at 33% positive, 43% negative (-10).
And among persuadable voters — respondents who don’t vote reliably for either Democrats or Republicans — Biden is at 26% positive, 53% negative (-27), compared with Harris at 19% positive, 51% negative (-32).
Last week, The Washington Examiner’s Jeremiah Poff wrote a piece titled “Kamala Harris’s polling bump is not what it seems.”
The piece was published just two days after Harris announced her controversial selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate.
Poff cited recent polls that showed Harris polling better than Biden both nationally and in the swing state of Wisconsin.
“Harris’s position is hardly as rosy as the polling numbers indicate,” Poff explained:
To begin with, Trump has always outpaced his poll numbers. In 2016 he won Wisconsin by less than a point after trailing in the polls by an average of 6 points. In 2020, Biden won the state by roughly the same margin but had led in the polls by an average of 7 points.
In 2020, Biden led national polling by an average of 7 points but ended up beating Trump in the national popular vote by 4.5 points, a margin that barely carried the Electoral College by less than 50,000 votes.
Furthermore, Poff wrote that “even setting aside the misses that have plagued the polling industry when Trump is on the ballot,” the current polling data may still not be painting the full picture of the White House race’s true state.
Poff pointed out that “the latest polls showing a bump for Harris have skewed samples that could be the source of the vice president’s improvement over Biden.”
Poff noted that a national poll that showed Harris up by four points “sampled 7% more Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents than Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.”
“But even with such a skewed sample, Harris could only manage a national lead of four points,” Poff added.
This poll was sponsored by The Economist, a left-leaning British newspaper.
Since the United States votes using the Electoral College, the national popular vote does not determine the winner of presidential elections. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by two points but still handily won the election with 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227.
Political observers generally agree that the electoral college tends to favor Republicans due to their voters being more spread out across the country – as opposed to Democrats who tend to cluster in deep-blue cities, many of them in deep-blue coastal states.
