A couple national polls, one on immigration, and SIX on Pennsylvania

The latest NY Times/Siena polling presents some counterintuitive findings. Kamala Harris ties Trump in its national survey of likely voters but she has a lead just outside the margin of error in the most fought-over battleground state, Pennsylvania. The results seem oddly inverted, but Harris is plenty pleased. She'd much rather have a 4-point advantage in the indispensable keystone state than be tied there in exchange for an especially volatile +4 nationally.

Another oddity is how the two fared in the poll's query about who did well and by how much in the 10 Sept. debate. Not quite a squeaker for Harris.

And Trump's:

Only in America's immovable hyperpartisanship could a presidential nominee land so many deathblows on her debate opponent as he proceeded, battered and bloodied, to make a first-rate-triple-A jackass of himself and yet move her support needle not one point.

The only objective conclusion to be drawn is that nearly half the American electorate is more than just deeply loyal to their man. Sustaining that loyalty requires that they be willfully and utterly out of touch with reality. It takes real effort to be deaf and blind so as not to hear and see the ghastly human atrocity before them.   

Scripps News/Ipsos surveyed American adults on the sole issue of immigrants. The graph shows the poll's central finding. Many of those forcibly removed would be men and women who've lived and worked in the U.S. for years; their children, American citizens — and probably left behind. I would have liked to see a pointed follow-up question about voters' support for mass deportation of long-residing parents, who number in the millions. 

Writes Scripps: "House Republicans have made it a priority to champion legislation that would add additional safeguards to prevent non-citizens from casting ballots." The news outlet then notes that "there is little evidence that illegally cast ballots have had an impact on the results."

I do wish the political press would stop injecting this "clarification" into its stories. Another is "there is no evidence of wide-spread voter fraud." Neither does anything to clarify. Instead, both foster misunderstanding and denote the very meaning they don't intend to convey.

Little evidence? Ah, then there is evidence. No wide-spread fraud? Double ah! Not widely spread maybe but spread nonetheless. The wordings suggest something substantial even though fraudulent voting is so infinitesimal as to be nonexistent. What about authentically clarifying the matter with, e.g., "A review of the 2016 election found four documented cases of voter fraud." (Three of the four were Trump voters.)

A few quick ones.

In national polling of a Harris-Trump contest with no other candidates included, Fox News' traditional pollsters of Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) found this.

A Washington Post survey (no pollster identified) of Pennsylvania's likely voters:  

Another poll of Pennsylvania's likely voters, by Marist, mirrored the Post's. 

The Hill/Emerson College's comprehensive survey of likely voters in swing states. (I pruned the July-August segment to enable a larger, more readable font on the page.)

Franklin & Marshall, likely voters, Pennsylvania: 

And finally we have this from Quinnipiac, again, Pennsylvania:

"Harris receives 51 percent support among likely voters, Trump receives 45 percent support, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver each receive 1 percent support."  

Since Quinnipiac's 14 August polling of the state, Harris has made gains. Then it was Harris 48% and Trump 45. 

 

(Permit me to whine. I could have had this post up at least an hour earlier if I hadn't had to make several attempts at inserting each image. A couple days ago I made 13 stabs at slipping an image into a post before I gave up. Another post that day required nine attempts, the effort I abandoned before reaching the inexorable 13. For this post I averaged "only" about five tries each, but that there were nine images involved was what consumed so much time. OK, now that I've whined and wiped my tears, perhaps I'll have a go at a fresh post, which might very well become another exercise in stab [expletive] stab [expletive] stab [expletive].)  

Comments

[Anne J]

Polls are too confusing and stress inducing.

[ssdd]

Yeah the “little evidence/no wide spread” thing aggravates the hell out of me, too. Trump and the GOP are *lying*. It’s a fact. Just say it.

[VoiceOfReason]

It is suspicious at least that no matter what happens, the polls are almost always stuck within the margin of error. There seems to be little movement in spite of the debates, Trump’s convictions, his increasing dementia, his boring nonsense spewed at high volume in rallies where half the audience leaves, or anything else for that matter. One almost has to conclude that having a neck-and-neck race feeds the media’s craving for a horse race. It also feeds into the strategies of the two parties. For the GOP, they want their voters (and the Democrats) to think they’re winning, so that if they lose they can scream about a stolen election (sound familiar?). For the Democrats, they want to be perceived as the underdogs when demographics and issue specific questions show that they’re not—so that our people will not grow complacent and take our foot off the gas.

If we start considering the constituents of the Trump vote, we have to subtract some pretty significant blocks of voters from Trump’s 2016 base. First, the Nicki Haley voters who said they will never vote for Trump. Have they all gone mad and returned to the Trumpian sewer? I doubt it. Second, that portion of Republicans who said they’d never vote for a convicted felon—the same question applies. Third, the number of GOP women who are sufficiently pissed by Dobbs to vote for Harris, or at least not vote for Trump, especially in the five Trump states with Pro-Choice amendments on the ballot. Fourth, how many GOP voters died from COVID? Fifth, how many have died from other causes. And let’s not forget the Democratic ground game or Harris’ huge cash advantage. No, I don’t believe the neck-and-neck thing. I suspect that the sample universes behind the polls are not being assembled to reflect what’s happening now, but rather rely on what happened in 2016. So I’m more optimistic than the polls.

[VoiceOfReason]

Disappointed that the rather long (two paragraphs) comment I made last evening, which I doubt I could reconstruct, was deleted from the comment section.

[VoiceOfReason]

Thanks PM...

[PM]

VoR, I've not seen that happen for quite a while. It got stuck in Typepad's spam filter, so I never saw it pop into my inbox (comments are automatically forwarded to me by email). To compensate for the error, I'll post your comment in the main body since it's a good argument and you did put some time into it. I apologize for Typepad.