Welcome to How Good Is This, Really?—renamed from the original How Bad Is This, Really?—a recurring feature in which we take the temperature of the presidential election and what seems likely to happen in November.
There’s been quite a bit of polling released since we suggested, at the end of our last polling column, that an impending round of postdebate surveys could bring some clarity to the presidential race. Unfortunately, clarity is not quite what was delivered.
Let’s start with the good news from Kamala Harris’ perspective, which is that she’s been doing relatively well in national polls and seems to be solidifying a lead in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A recent CBS News poll has her up 4 nationally, while NBC News had her up 5; she’s averaging about a 3-point lead, even when older polls are included, in the big national-poll aggregators.
Of course, national polls don’t really give us a clear picture of how “close” the race is, thanks to the Electoral College. But in the Midwest, meanwhile, a string of relatively strong state-level polls have given Harris average leads of around 2 points in each of the aforementioned states. A poll commissioned by Wisconsin Watch and released Monday—which you’d think would have a lot of credibility because, like, they’re really watching Wisconsin—puts her up a whopping 7 points in Badger territory.
The good news from Trump’s perspective is that he is continuing to hold strong in Arizona and Georgia, particularly in the New York Times/Siena College polls released Monday. Times/Siena has Donald Trump up 5 in Arizona and 4 in Georgia (within the margin of error), pushing him out to 2-point leads in those states in the Times’ averages. What it adds up to is a sense that Harris is pulling (very slightly) away in states with older and whiter populations, while Trump is pulling (very slightly) away in younger and more diverse states. In something of an echo of his surprisingly big 2020 win in Florida, he appears to be doing well in those places with disaffected voters who plan to cast something like a protest vote for him because he’s the most disruptive candidate available.
This leaves Nevada and North Carolina as the two states most up in the air at this precise moment. They’re toss-ups by any measure, but if you had to say someone is ahead, you’d say Harris probably leads in the former and Trump in the latter.
North Carolina is where things have just gotten extra spicy and potentially Harris-friendly, though, in that CNN just exposed the Republican candidate for governor as having described himself as a Nazi on a pornography forum called Nude Africa. His name is Mark Robinson, and for anyone who’s been following his race, neither the Nazism nor the pornography aspects of the story likely came as a surprise, which speaks to what a bad idea it was for North Carolina Republicans to select him as a candidate in the first place. He is a nut, folks.
Polls showed that Robinson was almost certainly going to lose his race even before Naked Africa Hitler–gate broke, but the problem now for Republicans is that Trump’s chances of winning the state will be worse with a major GOP scandal at the top of voters’ minds as voting gets underway. Democrats, naturally, have already begun running ads emphasizing the ties between Trump and Robinson; the former president endorsed Robinson in March by comparing him to Martin Luther King Jr. (Robinson is Black, and if you just learned this fact, you have now put exactly as much thought into the MLK comparison as Trump did.)
Just over a week ago, Pennsylvania was the big subject of discussion in polling world. Now that it’s behaving a bit more like Michigan and Wisconsin—i.e., looking relatively “safe” for Harris, insofar as that’s possible to say given the absurdly small margins we’re working with in this race—North Carolina can now take its place, at least until the next crazy news thing happens somewhere else, as the state under the magnifying glass.
A Robinson-abetted Democratic best-case scenario in the Tarheel State would also be a microcosm of a best-case scenario for Harris nationwide. Dems are hoping that as we enter the campaign’s home stretch, swing voters or soft Republicans will be turned off by this or that loathsome Trump headline while Democrats remain hyped up about their relatively young, exciting candidate. This could ultimately create, in a reversal of what happened in 2016, an enthusiasm and turnout gap that is not currently anticipated by the likely voter models that pollsters are using.
That is the daydream that Democrats have, anyway. The bad news for them is that there is no way to prove that something that is not currently being measured is happening, because it is not currently being measured. So they’re just going to have to wait and see. Sorry, Democrats.
We conclude this column with a rating on the Shovel Meter, a measure of exactly how sedated you might want to be, on a scale of one to five shovel blows to the head, if you’re concerned about Trump’s reelection.
Today, four blows—one for every thousand or so posts that Mark Robinson made on a pornographic web forum—as we approach Election Day with only the tiniest sliver of daylight between the campaigns. Can’t these states just make up their minds?
