Where Things Stand.
A jumbo edition of 'Polls in One Place'.
This post first ran on our sister Substack newsletter, Political News Items. We’ve decided to make it available to News Items subscribers as well.
From time to time, people ask me about “the state of the race” for president. This is the first of two parts of my answer. It is analysis, not opinion.
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The polls have it tied in the seven so-called battleground states that will decide the outcome of the presidential election in the Electoral College. Those seven states are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. If you click on the hyperlinks, you’ll see a statistical tie in all seven.
It’s close nationally as well, although I think it is safe to say that Vice President Harris will win the national popular vote by at least 4 million votes, based on past results (Clinton won by 3 million votes in 2016, Biden won by 7 million votes in 2020). If she loses the popular vote, she will lose all seven battleground states.
One way to look at presidential election campaigns is to ignore the candidates and explore the political environment. How the electorate sees “the big picture” doesn’t necessarily determine how this or that “persuadable” voter will vote. But it’s hard to win if you’re swimming against the tide, and the tide is going out on the Biden-Harris administration. Whether it takes Kamala Harris with it isn’t certain. It wouldn’t be a surprise.
Let’s review the bidding:
1. Do you think the United States is on the right track, or is it headed in the wrong direction?
Right track: 30%
Wrong direction: 60%
(Source: nytimes.com)
2. NBC News:
The latest NBC News national poll finds 65% of registered voters surveyed earlier this month say the country is on the wrong track, while 28% say it’s on the right track. The figure is one of the “warning signs” for Democrats ahead of November, said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the poll along with GOP pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies. “While the wrong track data is now under 70% for the first time since September 2022, it is still a terrible 65% for the party in power,” Horwitt said. “Related, the cost of living remains the dominant issue, and the share of voters who say their family’s income is falling behind is the highest we have recorded at 66%.” Views of the countries’ direction do fall along party lines, with 92% of Republicans saying the country is on the wrong track, compared to 36% of Democrats and 70% of independents. McInturff pointed to the pessimism about the country’s direction as one of the factors explaining the relatively low levels of enthusiasm about the election. Asked to rate their interest in the election on a scale of one to 10, 65% marked themselves a 10, or “very interested” in the election. That is a 10-point drop from the same point in the 2020 election. (Source: nbcnews.com, italics mine)
3. Key Measures of the 2024 President Election Environment:
Nearly all Gallup measures that have shown some relationship to past presidential election outcomes or that speak to current perceptions of the two major parties favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party. Chief among these are Republican advantages in U.S. adults’ party identification and leanings, the belief that the GOP rather than the Democratic Party is better able to handle the most important problem facing the country, Americans’ dissatisfaction with the state of the nation, and negative evaluations of the economy with a Democratic administration in office.
(Source: news.gallup.com)
4. Here’s a significant sidebar from the Gallup survey:
Nearly identical percentages of U.S. adults rate Donald Trump (46%) and Kamala Harris (44%) favorably in Gallup’s latest Sept. 3-15 poll, during which the candidates debated for the first time. Both candidates, however, have higher unfavorable than favorable ratings. Trump’s unfavorable rating is seven percentage points higher than his favorable score, and Harris’ is 10 points higher.
Harris’ bump in favorability after her unexpected nomination as the Democratic presidential nominee has moderated somewhat, while Trump’s favorability is up five points since last month, returning to the level he was at in June.
Despite the overall negative tilt in favorability, both candidates enjoy nearly unanimous positive ratings from their own party faithful and negligible positivity from the opposing party. While majorities of independents view Trump and Harris unfavorably, the former president holds a favorability edge over the current vice president with the group -- 44% vs. 35%, respectively.
Here’s the chart.
(Source: news.gallup.com)
Assuming this poll is accurate (and we do), the fact that 60% of Independents have an “unfavorable” opinion of Vice President Harris is surprising. If that number doesn’t improve, her path to victory is vertical. In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by 9 percentage points (52%-43%) among Independents, according to Pew Research.
“Favorability”, of course, doesn’t necessarily translate as preference. You can have an unfavorable view of Trump and still vote for Trump. The same is true for Harris. That said, for a Harris supporter, 35% favorable among Independents is an unhappy number. (Source: pewresearch.org)
5. This from The New York Times:
Voters across the Sun Belt say that Donald J. Trump improved their lives when he was president — and worry that a Kamala Harris White House would not — setting the stage for an extraordinarily competitive contest in three key states, according to the latest polls from The New York Times and Siena College.
The polls found that Mr. Trump has gained a lead in Arizona and remains ahead in Georgia, two states that he lost to President Biden in 2020. But in North Carolina, which has not voted for a Democrat since 2008, Ms. Harris trails Mr. Trump by just a narrow margin.
The polls of these three states, taken from Sept. 17 to 21, presented further evidence that in a sharply divided nation, the presidential contest is shaping up to be one of the tightest in history.
“Setting the stage for an extraordinarily competitive contest in three key states” is one way to describe these results for Team Blue. Another way to look at it is: Former President Trump has had bad week after bad week for more than a month now and, according to this poll, remains the favorite to win Arizona, Georgia and (maybe) North Carolina. Imagine where he’ll be if he stops trying to lose the election.
6. Basic facts regarding immigration:
The U.S. immigrant population has grown sharply over the decades, from 9.6 million in 1970 to 31.1 million in 2000 and almost 48 million in 2023. These totals account for immigrants in the country both legally and illegally.
Immigrants make up about 14.3% of the nation’s population, a near-record high. They are dispersed across all states and metro areas. And nearly three-quarters of registered voters say they know someone who was born outside of the United States, according to the survey. (Source: pewresearch.org)
7. Fact Sheet, U.S. Department of Homeland Security:
On September 25, Patrick J. Lechleitner — ICE’s deputy director and de facto acting head — sent a bombshell letter to Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and 22 other House members revealing that 425,431 convicted criminals — including thousands of murderers and sex offenders — and 222,000-plus other aliens facing criminal charges are on the agency’s non-detained docket of removable aliens, known to the agency but at large in the United States……
As of July 21, more than 13,000 aliens convicted of homicide, 15,811 convicted of sexual assault, 9,461 convicted of other “sex offenses”, 851 convicted of kidnapping, nearly 3,400 convicted of weapon offenses, 2,000-plus convicted of robbery, 4,627 convicted of forgery, 56,533 with dangerous drugs convictions, 14,301 burglars, and 62,231 aliens convicted of assault are all on ICE’s docket of non-detained aliens.
That doesn’t count hundreds of thousands of other convicted criminal aliens free to roam around the country (including one convicted of some unspecified “civil rights” offense), nor does it include more than 222,000 others still facing criminal charges for homicide (1,845), sexual assault (4,250), robbery (2,039), kidnapping (851), forgery (4,627), and myriad other charges. (Sources: homeland.house.gov, Andrew Arthur, cis.org)
8. The New York Times:
Last year over 70,000 Americans died from taking drug mixtures that contained fentanyl or other synthetic opioids. The good news is that recent data suggests a decline in overdose deaths, the first significant drop in decades. But this is not a uniform trend across the nation. To understand this disparity, it’s important to examine how we got here.
Today’s crisis is often described as a series of waves. But if you look at the data, it was more like a couple of breakers followed by a tsunami. First, prescription opioid fatalities rose. Then heroin deaths surged. And finally, illicitly manufactured fentanyl overtook all that preceded it.
Once fentanyl and other synthetic opioids dominate a market, whether a state is red or blue doesn't matter. Skyrocketing overdose deaths are nearly unavoidable, regardless of whether a state enforces tough penalties for drug possession or decriminalizes it.
Understanding how fentanyl saturated the drug supply, moving from the East Coast of the United States to the West, is critical to ending the worst drug crisis in American history. (Source: nytimes.com)
9. Fentanyl isn’t an abstract “issue”:
More than 40 percent of Americans know someone who has died of a drug overdose and about one-third of those individuals say their lives were disrupted by the death, according to a new RAND study.
Analyzing a national representative survey of American adults, researchers found that the lifetime exposure to an overdose death is more common among women than men, married participants than unmarried participants, U.S.-born participants than immigrants, and those who live in urban settings as compared to those in rural settings.
Rates of exposure were significantly higher in New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont) and in the East South Central region (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee) than in other parts of the nation.
The findings were published by the American Journal of Public Health. (Source: rand.org)
10. Immigration.
The “decreased” number has exploded. (Source: news.gallup.com)
11. Mass Deportation:
A majority of Americans support the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, according to a new Scripps News/Ipsos survey.
Fifty-four percent of respondents said they “strongly” or "somewhat support” the policy, including 86% of Republicans, 58% of independents, and 25% of Democrats.
The poll, which focuses on the most talked about immigration policies of the 2024 campaign, showcases major partisan divides between voters on how to address one of the biggest topics of the presidential race.
Thirty-nine percent of respondents called immigration a top issue for them this campaign, second only to inflation, which topped the list at 57%. Trump has a ten-point advantage on who respondents think will do a better job handling immigration (44%-34%). (Source: scrippsnews.com, italics mine)
12. Hispanics moving Red.
The economic woes from inflation look to have accelerated a shift of Latino voters toward Republicans, cutting in half a Democratic lead with a critical voting group in the lead up to a tight presidential election, according to an NBC/CNBC/Telemundo survey.
The survey of 1,000 Latino registered voters found the Democratic presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, leading the Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, by 54% to 40%. That’s considerably less than the 36-point lead that President Joe Biden enjoyed in the run-up to the 2020 election. Biden’s advantage was almost half again the 50-point lead that Hillary Clinton held over Trump in 2016, suggesting a longer-term trend that shows Latinos in the Democratic camp but in diminishing numbers.
“There’s an intensity around these issues that is quite striking,″ said Aileen Cardona-Arroyo, senior vice president at Hart Research, the Democratic pollsters for the survey. “The cost of living and inflation is really what is informing a lot of the way that people are thinking about economy and the economic future of the country.”
The survey was conducted from Sept. 15 through Sept. 23 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1%. (Source: cnbc.com)
13. Pennsylvania:
Vice President Harris and former President Trump are locked in a tight race in Pennsylvania, mostly unchanged since July. This despite the array of newsworthy events since then, including the Democratic National Convention, a presidential debate, and a second Trump assassination attempt.
The new Fox News survey of Pennsylvania voters finds Harris narrowly ahead of Trump by 2 points (50-48%) among registered voters, while the race is tied at 49% each among likely voters.
The July results, conducted shortly after President Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris, but before she was conclusively the nominee, were deadlocked at 49% each. But even in March, when Biden was the presumed nominee, the contest was close to even….
The economy is the top issue for voters this election and most Pennsylvanians have a negative view of the economy (71%).
More voters think Trump can better handle the economy than Harris by 6 points. Still, that’s half the advantage he had on the issue in April (+12 points over Biden).
Trump does best on immigration and border security (+17) and is also more trusted to make the country safer (+5). (Source: foxnews.com, italics mine)
14: Pennsylvania registations:
Although Pennsylvania has more registered Democrats than Republicans the gap has narrowed from a 51-37 split in 2008 to 44-40 today. Last week, Republicans added 12,600 more people to their list, compared with about 8,000 for the Democrats. All told, Republicans have added a net 135,000 people this year and the Democrats just 38,000. (Source: ft.com)
15. Michigan:
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI.) warned donors last week that internal polling for her Senate campaign shows Vice President Kamala Harris is "underwater" in Michigan, according to a video clip obtained by Axios. Winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is Harris' simplest path to victory. If former President Trump sweeps the Sun Belt, he'd only need to pick off one of those Blue Wall states to win the election. "I'm not feeling my best right now about where we are on Kamala Harris in a place like Michigan," Slotkin said during a virtual fundraiser on Wednesday with Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), according to a recording. "We have her underwater in our polling," Slotkin added. (Source: axios.com)
16. Wisconsin:
With less than 40 days until Election Day, the race is essentially tied in Michigan, with Ms. Harris receiving 48 percent support among likely voters and Mr. Trump garnering 47 percent — well within the poll’s margin of error. In Wisconsin, a state where polls have a history of overstating support for Democrats, Ms. Harris holds 49 percent to Mr. Trump’s 47 percent. (Source: nytimes.com)
17. Gender:
The public views gender as a larger threat to Kamala Harris’ campaign than they did in 2016 during Hillary Clinton’s campaign. About 4 in 10 adults think the fact that Harris is a woman will hurt her, while a third think it will help her and a quarter don’t believe it will make a difference. In August 2016, more said Clinton’s gender would be an asset than a threat, with 37% saying that it would help compared with 29% who said it would hurt. A third believed it would not make a difference.
Perspectives have also shifted on whether Donald Trump’s gender will help or hinder his campaign. Compared to 2016, more people now believe that his gender will help him (41% vs. 28%). Similar to 2016, only about 1 in 10 believe his gender will hurt him. (Source: apnorc.org)
Part Two will survey the surveys for signs that point to a Harris victory or, more accurately, Trump’s defeat.