Put not thy faith in polls, but they can be interesting. I’ve maintained since, well, always, that individual polls aren’t always all that meaningful; it’s the trends we should be looking at.
Still, sometimes one comes along that is cause for hope. An Emerson swing-state poll taken from September 15-18 appears to have former President Donald Trump succeeding in Grover Cleveland-ing himself into a non-consecutive second term in the Oval Office.
Emerson College polling conducted between Sept. 15 and 18 in seven electoral battlegrounds finds the former president leads in five and would get 281 electoral votes if this map holds up, pushing him over the winning threshold of 270 with room to spare.
Trump leads Vice President Kamala Harris in Georgia (50% to 47%), Arizona and Wisconsin (49% to 48% in both states), Nevada (48.4% to 47.7%), and Pennsylvania (48% to 47%), giving him 62 electoral votes total from the battlegrounds.
Harris is ahead in North Carolina (49% to 48%) and Michigan (49% to 47%), good for 31 votes from that pair of swing states.
But is this really cause for hope? Color me skeptical. Remember what I said about trends? Let’s take a look at the RealClearPolitics (RCP) polling averages for those states:
- Georgia: Trump +2.0
- Arizona: Trump +1.6
- Wisconsin: Harris +1.2
- Nevada: Harris +0.2
- Pennsylvania: Harris +1.0
- North Carolina: Trump +0.1
- Michigan: Harris +1.7
If we take those averages at face value and plug them into RCP’s electoral map, that gives the Harris/Walz ticket a 276-262 win.
That’s not encouraging, and it explains why the Trump campaign is hitting Michigan and Pennsylvania.
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Trump’s narrow lead in Emerson also isn’t translating into coattails.
As other polling has shown, Trump’s appeal atop the ticket isn’t helping down the ballot, where Republicans lag behind their party’s standard bearer in major races in every state.
In Arizona, Kari Lake runs 7 points behind Trump, trailing Democrat Ruben Gallego 42% to 49% in the race for the Senate.
Mike Rogers is also 5 points behind Trump’s pace in the Michigan Senate race: Democrat Elissa Slotkin leads 47% to 42%.
Trump’s whisker-thin Nevada lead isn’t saving Sam Brown in the Senate race either; he’s on track to lose to Democratic incumbent Jacky Rosen, 41% to 48%.
This is concerning because even if Donald Trump wins, he needs a comfortable GOP majority in Congress to enact much of his agenda. The current RCP Senate map predicts 50 seats going to the GOP, and 44 to Democrats, with six toss-ups; the House map shows 207 Republicans to 196 Democrats, with 32 toss-ups. These are not comfortable margins.
It is as I’ve said all along: This race is not going to be a walk-over. The Trump/Vance campaign had better be prepared to fight to the finish, because this is going to be a nail-biter, especially in Pennsylvania, where we can expect both candidates and both political parties to expend a lot of capital. This year Pennsylvania will be the bellwether, and if Kamala Harris carries that state, we can all go for an early night, because it’s hard to see how Trump/Vance eke out a win without it. And Emerson only has them up by a point; that’s not a comfortable lead by any measure.
Get out there and vote. Make sure all your (Republican) friends and family get out there and vote. Remember: The only poll that counts is the one on Election Day.
