Wargaming the Electoral College: This Pollster Just Said Landslide

From PJMedia.com

Donald Trump looks like he might win every swing state and also Kamala Harris is up by six points in the latest ABC News poll and has put Texas and Florida in play.

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Wait, wut?

Let’s cover the absurdities first because that’s my beat. 

On Monday, ABC News ran the headline, “Harris support rises among some likely voters: POLL,” and, if you thought they meant that’s what happened in the latest poll… well, that’s on you, bub.

As previously reported, Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump by a slight 4 percentage points, 50-46%, among all adults and registered voters alike, and by 6 points, 52-46%, among likely voters in the latest ABC News/Ipsos poll. While those numbers are virtually identical, closer assessment shows movement to Harris in some groups when comparing all adults with likely voters — notably, those younger than 40, younger women in particular and Black people.

“As previously reported” is doing an unconscionable amount of work in that sentence. National Review’s Jeff Blaher noted today that ABC did not conduct “a new poll — though they attempt to disguise it as such — but a reanalysis of an old poll. The data comes from a poll “taken between August 23, the night Kamala Harris spoke at the Democratic National Convention, and — through the four days of post-convention media afterglow — August 27.”

In other words, ABC News cherry-picked some data from an older poll taken during the height of Kamalajoymania and reran it as fresh news.

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Shameful and shameless puffing by ABC News.

Meanwhile, The Hill tried to make hay today with an Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey claiming that “Florida and Texas are within the margin of error.” Yeah, no. Even the most pessimistic numbers — and those would be Emerson’s — show Trump at 50% in both states and with slightly higher favorability ratings than Harris. It isn’t until the fourth paragraph that The Hill’s Jared Gans admits that “Not much independent polling from major institutions has been done on Texas and Florida since Harris became the Democratic nominee.” And it isn’t until the 10th graf that he admits that “Flipping either Texas or Florida may be a stretch.”

Ya think?

Others have already covered the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, “the first lead for Mr. Trump in a major nonpartisan national survey in about a month,” according to Nate Cohn. But the stories I read didn’t bother repeating the most curious detail uncovered by NYT/Siena. 

“Almost 30 percent of voters said they needed to learn more about her,” Cohn’s report on that poll admitted right up top in the subhead — which is a remarkable thing to say about someone who has served as vice president for four years, been intermittently running for president for almost six years, and been the joyful recipient of almost two straight months worth of eager lip service from the State Steno Pool.

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Meanwhile, Nate Silver published a piece midday Monday revealing that his analytical model gives Trump a 53.4% chance of winning Wisconsin, 54.9% in Michigan, 60.8% in Nevada, and — holy cow — a 64.9% chance of winning Pennsylvania.

His map looks like this:

Just because the model looks like Trump could enjoy the biggest win since George HW Bush in 1988, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

Give money to your favorite candidates. Volunteer for the phone lines or ringing doorbells.

And vote as many times as they’ll let you.

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All articles possibly rephrased by InfoArmed.com

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