The headlines say that as of October 30th’s polls, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are running neck and neck. But is that true?
In FiveThirtyEight’s Recent Polling Average Update, which pulls together roughly a hundred national and state polls, Harris leads Trump, even though her edge is a slender 1.8%. In the Cook Political Report average of 21 of the nation’s polls, Harris is ahead by a mere 1.2%. But, yes, once again, she is ahead.
What’s more, according to Cook, Harris has been consistently ahead since August. And even in the conservative, pro-Republican TIPPinsights poll, the poll MAGA’s Newsmax relies on, Harris has a one percent lead.
Then there’s what really counts, who wins the most votes in the electoral college. According to the election tracker from England’s The Economist, Trump and Harris are tied at 269 electoral college votes each. But even here, there’s a hitch. Harris’ votes have risen six points in the last week. Trump’s have gone down six.
Another election predictor is crowd size. Trump packed Madison Square Garden’s 19,500 seats with his sold-out rally on Sunday October 27th. That’s a very impressive figure for a city—New York– that votes pure Democrat.
But two days later, Harris filled the White House ellipse with a crowd that spilled over onto the National Mall. According to Newsweek, one Harris staffer estimated that crowd at over 75,000. When Mr. Trump gathered his faithful followers at the same Ellipse on January 6th, 2021 to do what he called stopping the steal, his crowd was only 43,000. So Harris with her 75,000 crowd vastly surpassed Mr. Trump’s mere 43,000. In fact, Harris outdid Mr. Trump by close to two to one.
But are crowd sizes and poll numbers accurate predictors of who will win the presidency? How is their track record at predicting election results? Good but not perfect. In 2020 huge Trump rallies failed to predict that Biden would win.
And when it comes to rally sizes, The Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation reveals a startling fact. Donald Trump’s rallies have been attracting an average audience of 5,600 enthusiasts. Less than you might think. Even worse, that’s way down from the 8,100 Mr. Trump was drawing in 2017.
And there’s even more troubling news for Mr. Trump. His opponent, Kamala Harris, has been attracting audiences that average 13,400. In other words, Kamala Harris’ audiences are almost three times the size of the audiences of the modern master of the political rally, Donald J. Trump.
However, poll numbers are far better predictors than crowd size. In 1816, when the famous showman PT Barnum was six years old, his family’s general store in Bethel, Connecticut, had customers take a kernel of corn and pick which barrel to toss it in, the barrel labeled with the name of the Federalist candidate or the barrel labeled for his opponent, the Democratic-Republican. Yes, when Barnum was six, there was a party called the Democratic-Republican party. And the barrels were a primitive form of a poll.
So-called scientific polls first came to prominence 120 years later, in the election of 1936, when university professor and specialist on public opinion George Gallup ran a poll that successfully predicted the winner of that year’s presidential race—Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The presidential election-statistics resource 270towin shows that over the last fifty years, polls have almost invariably been right. The exception was 2016, when the pollsters underestimated the popularity of Donald Trump. But in 2020, the polls were back on track again.
So the question is, are the polls underestimating the popularity of Donald Trump once again? Or are the polls doing just the opposite, underestimating Mr. Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris? The size of the crowds at Harris’ rallies, the crowds nearly three times the size of Donald Trump’s, tend to hint that this time it may be Harris who is underestimated.
References:
National : President: general election : 2024 Polls
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https://www.cookpolitical.com/survey-research/cpr-national-polling-average/2024/harris-trump-overall
https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-2024-election/prediction-model/president
https://ash.harvard.edu/articles/the-real-numbers-tracking-crowd-sizes-at-presidential-rallies/
https://www.270towin.com/2024-presidential-election-polls/
Kamala Harris Makes Her Closing Argument at the Ellipse
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https://www.newsweek.com/kamala-harris-crowd-size-washingtion-dc-rally-1976987
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on the highest-rated overnight syndicated talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast AM. Bloom’s new book, coming out in February, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is wrong. For more, see http://howardbloom.net.