Harris Puts Four Sun Belt States Back in Play, Times/Siena Polls Find
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are in close races across Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, crucial swing states that Mr. Trump had seemed en route to run away with just a few weeks ago.
Vice President Kamala Harris has stormed into contention in the fast-growing and diverse states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, not long after Donald J. Trump had seemed on the verge of running away with those states when President Biden was still the Democratic nominee.
The
new polls from The New York Times and Siena College show how quickly Ms. Harris has reshaped the terrain of 2024 and thrust the Sun Belt back to the center of the battleground-state map.
Ms. Harris is now leading Mr. Trump among
likely voters in Arizona, 50 percent to 45 percent, and has even edged ahead of Mr. Trump in North Carolina — a state Mr. Trump won four years ago — while narrowing his lead significantly in Georgia and Nevada.
Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are tied at 48 percent across an average of the four Sun Belt states in surveys conducted Aug. 8 to 15.
...compared with May, when Mr. Trump led Mr. Biden 50 percent to 41 percent across Arizona, Georgia and Nevada in the previous set of
Times/Siena Sun Belt polls, which did not include North Carolina.
[A dead heat in these four states is not great news for Donald Trump, and it represents a huge shift from earlier in the cycle, Nate Cohn writes.]
The new polls provide more evidence that Ms. Harris is successfully consolidating parts of the Democratic base...particularly younger, nonwhite and female voters.
Last week,
Times/Siena polling showed that Ms. Harris had pulled ahead of Mr. Trump by a narrow margin in the three northern battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin...offering a potential second route for Ms. Harris to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win.
In the new surveys, Mr. Trump is ahead in Georgia 50 percent to 46 percent, and, in Nevada, he has 48 percent compared to 47 percent for Ms. Harris. She has 49 percent of likely voters to Mr. Trump’s 47 percent in North Carolina, the only one of the seven core battleground states that he carried in 2020...
The Polls Have Shifted Toward Harris. Is It Real, or Something Else?
A review of the Trump team’s critique of our surveys, and the surprising fact that a lot of people don’t seem to remember how they voted.
Is this real?
At the center of this question is whether the Times/Siena polls have enough voters who supported Donald J. Trump in 2020. The Trump campaign released a
memo arguing that our polls would have actually showed a Trump lead if we had weighted the results properly.
The Trump campaign’s critique focused on something pollsters refer to as “recalled vote.” In the polls of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, respondents recalled backing President Biden over Mr. Trump by six points, 52 percent to 46 percent, even though Mr. Biden actually won these three states by an average of about 1.5 points. The Trump campaign used this data point to say Mr. Trump would have led if the poll had the “right” number of Trump 2020 supporters.
This isn’t an absurd argument. In recent years, many pollsters have embraced recalled vote in exactly the way the Trump campaign describes: as an accurate measure of how people voted in the last election, which can then be used to evaluate the partisan balance of the sample. As an idea, it makes logical sense.
...
There are at least three factors at play: A surprising number of people don’t seem to remember how they voted; people seem likelier to remember voting for the winner (Biden in 2020; Bush in 2000); and they seem likelier to report voting when they did not.
Despite this history, more pollsters have been using recalled vote in recent years. For some pollsters with lower-quality samples, recall vote is a blunt instrument that can hammer even the worst poll into the ballpark. Indeed, if you take the last year of Times/Siena poll respondents from Manhattan — which Mr. Biden
won by 74 points — you can produce an entirely plausible Trump +3 result for a national poll by weighting it to the 2020 result nationwide.
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