The Election is On! What Are the Polls Saying?

Both nominating conventions are past and election season is heating up. It’s not yet the home stretch but certainly the second half of the game.

Where are the polls now and what if anything can be inferred?

Remember that polls are a snapshot in time, querying a small group of individuals and extrapolating that to the entire population, in the case of political opinion polls, likely voters.

The surveyed sample is important as oversampling Republicans versus Democrats versus Independents will skew the results. Statistical weighting can even out a skewed sample, but it all comes down to educated guesses, the ultimate survey occurring on Election Day November 5.

Rasmussen Reports is one of my favorite pollsters as they survey “likely voters” rather than simply registered voters or whoever responds to the survey. They offer recent polling of the battleground states.

Such a poll is more revealing than a national poll as the U.S. presidential election is not a single national election but rather 50 separate state elections based on the Electoral College. Winning the national popular vote doesn’t always translate to winning the election as Hillary Clinton discovered in 2016.

Rasmussen Reports recently surveyed a handful of battleground states and found the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris quite tight.

In a telephone and online survey, they found that, “If the election were held today, 48% of Likely Voters in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would vote for Trump, while 47% would vote for Harris.

That’s a toss-up. But there are still a few months until election day and there will undoubtedly be at least one October Surprise. What issues are voters focused on?

Just like when Bill Clinton challenged George H.W. Bush in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Thirty-five percent (35%) of battleground state voters say the economy is the most important issue for them, followed by border security (17%) and abortion (13%).

Surprisingly illegal immigration and the border falls far behind the economy. That may change as news of Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado, Chicago, and New York City makes news. Many other cities likely have or will face the same.

An illegal alien truck driver killed a Colorado man and received less than a one year prison sentence. Voters may change the 2024 election mantra to “It’s the border, stupid.”

Rasmussen Reports noted voter sentiment, “On the issue of illegal immigration, 61% believe the government is doing too little to reduce illegal border crossings and visitor overstays.”

In addition, “Fifty-nine percent (59%) believe it’s likely that the increased illegal immigration in the past few years was purposely allowed by the Biden administration.” Kamala Harris is the number two in that same Biden administration and has been for almost four years.

She is Biden’s “Border Czar,” despite media efforts to gaslight the opposite. If Trump can effectively tie Harris to the economy and the border, which is patently obvious, it puts Trump in the driver’s seat on the two top election issues. That should be Trump’s focus, not relitigating the 2020 election or Joe Biden’s worsening cognitive decline.

What do other polls say? The Real Clear Politics average of 12 polls shows Harris up by 1.9 points, but again these are national polls. But they too have an average for battleground states.

In Arizona, it’s Trump up 0.5 points, a tie in Nevada, Harris up 1.4 points in Wisconsin,   1.1 points in Michigan, 0.5 points in Pennsylvania, and Trump up 0.7 points in North Carolina, and 0.2 points in Georgia.

The bottom line is today things are too close to call. As Rush Limbaugh often said ahead of elections, the deciding factors may be largely or completely unknown at this point.

Wars, pandemics, power grid outages, or other calamities may be lurking. Scandals too, although Trump is the most investigated human being in history, since his famous escalator ride in Trump Tower in June 2015.

If he had skeletons in his closet, we would know about them by now. Could Trump be imprisoned under lawfare? Will Harris crash and burn as Biden did in his debate performance a few months ago?

On the non-quantitative side, Trump appears cool and confident. Harris is using fake accents to pander to ethnic audiences and either cackling or ignoring inconvenient questions from the media.

Mail in ballots will be dropping shortly and voters will be choosing long before the race is over. And at this point it is far from over. Buckle up for a wild September and October and enjoy the show!

Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a physician and writer.

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