The relatively minute shifts in national and swing-state polling after the dramatic events of the past month suggest that Donald Trump has a hard ceiling. The good news for the Republican nominee is that he appears to still be in the lead — but that lead is shrinking, and the Democratic Party is dramatically rejuvenated.
The most recent New York Times/Siena poll found that 87 percent of registered voters approved of President Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race, and only 9 percent disapproved.
You’ll notice that the right-of-center “poll truthers” didn’t come out to question that one. Nobody’s arguing that the poll had too many landline and not enough cellphone users, or that the sample had too many old people or too many young people or wasn’t correctly balanced in terms of race, sex, or ideology.
No one’s questioning that poll result because it makes sense based on what we know. Joe Biden is really old; almost all Republicans were happy to see the old man bow out, and almost all Democrats were happy not to be stuck with him as their nominee anymore.
When it comes to polling, a lot of “unskewing” commentary amounts to “I don’t like that poll result; therefore, I will insist that it is illegitimate.”
That same Times/Siena poll found Donald Trump just barely ahead of Kamala Harris nationally, 48 percent to 47 percent among likely voters and 48 percent to 46 percent among registered voters.
A whole bunch of recent polling is finding results in the same ballpark — mostly Trump ahead by one to three percentage points, and every once in a while, Harris ahead by one or two percentage points. It’s a close race. Harris is performing considerably better than Biden was, but you wouldn’t want to bet your mortgage payment on her winning. Nor would you want to bet your mortgage payment on Trump’s winning, given his narrow and shrinking lead.
(No, we don’t select our president based on a national popular vote, but recent history tells us that, if a Republican wins the popular vote, he’s just about assured to get considerably more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by two percentage points and finished with just 227 electoral votes. So, if you’re Harris, you really want to be ahead by more than two percentage points.)
Can the polls be wrong and consistently overestimate Democratic support while consistently underestimating Republican support? Yes — Susan Collins’s 2020 Senate race in Maine is probably the most vivid example of this. But if you’re part of a Republican campaign, you wouldn’t want to count on performing ten or more percentage points better than your final polling numbers.
One of the quiet stories of this past insane four weeks or so is what the polls showed after Joe Biden had just about the worst month possible. He botched the debate and looked like a decrepit, forgetful, mumbling geriatric in his subsequent appearances; Trump survived being shot in an assassination attempt and looked fearless and defiant doing it; the Republicans enjoyed a successful national convention; the initial rollout of J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate went just fine; and the first 20 minutes of Trump’s acceptance speech may well have been the apex of his campaign. (Alas, Trump talked for another hour and ten minutes.)
And yet, when the RealClearPolitics average for the Trump vs. Biden matchup ended July 21, Trump was ahead 47.9 percent to 44.8 percent in a two-way race. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West thrown in, Trump was ahead of Biden 43.4 percent to 39.2 percent.
In other words, after Biden had been metaphorically dragged across concrete for a month, and just about everything had gone right for the Republican nominee, Trump led by three to four points. That’s a 3.6 roentgens of a result — “not great, not terrible.”
What this past month has taught us is that Donald Trump has a hard ceiling.
There are a lot of Americans who love Trump, and a lot of Americans who hate Trump, and a small sliver in the middle who don’t particularly like him but who are at least theoretically open to voting for him. But even in the near-best-case scenario of 2016, Trump won 49 percent of the vote in Florida, 47.5 percent of the vote in Michigan, 49.8 percent of the vote in North Carolina, 48.8 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, and 47.2 percent of the vote in Wisconsin.
Trump really needs the non-Trump vote split in a fashion that keeps Kamala Harris’s 40-some percent below his 40-some percent.
A lot of Trump fans walk around believing that a large majority of the country loves their man as passionately and intensely as they do — and it’s just not true. On a really good day for Trump, about 47 or 48 percent of poll respondents will say they feel favorably toward Trump. On the bad days, it’s in the mid 30s. Just about every day, well over 50 percent of poll respondents say they feel unfavorably toward him.
It’s not that Harris is, to use one of my favorite phrases, a whirling dervish of raw political charisma. But an enthusiastic Democratic party and a full-throated cheerleading effort from the mainstream media are a potent combination.
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