Trump-mentum Peaking with the Autumn Leaves
A Commentary By Brian C. Joondeph
Election Day is rapidly approaching, and Donald Trump is teaching a master class in campaigning and peaking at the right time. Fortunately, he is still the Republican candidate despite efforts to remove him from the ballot through lawfare and several failed assassination attempts.
This past weekend, Trump served French fries at a McDonald's in battleground Pennsylvania, relating to the working class far better than his opponent, Kamala Harris, who made unverifiable claims about having worked at McDonald's during a college summer. Despite her claims, McDonald’s has no record of her previous employment. Where are the media “fact-checkers” on Harris’s bogus assertion?
Trump was a rock star at the Al Smith Dinner, which supports Catholic charities. At the same time, Harris declined to attend, despite decades of tradition for presidential candidates to participate in the lighthearted roast. Instead, Harris told a pair of attendees at her rally who shouted, “Jesus is Lord,” that, “You guys are at the wrong rally.” In one weekend, she told Catholics and Evangelical Christians to get lost.
These events are the snapshots and sound bites that decide elections. But what about the numbers? Ultimately, elections are about votes. Leaving aside questions about who is voting and how those votes are counted, the winner is the candidate receiving the most votes.
In their latest survey of likely U.S. voters, Rasmussen Reports found that “Former President Donald Trump has regained a two-point lead over Vice President Kamala Harris in the latest daily tracking poll of the 2024 presidential election.”
AtlasIntel, the most accurate pollster of the 2020 presidential election, shows Trump with a three-point lead over Harris nationally. Notably, they sampled an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, eliminating the common Democrat oversampling bias present in many polls.
Many of these other pollsters are included in the RealClearPolitics average, which this week shows Harris with less than a one-point lead over Trump.
Given how Trump typically outperforms national polls, Harris’s less than one-point lead bodes well for Trump.What if we looked at the past two presidential elections, specifically the RealClearPolitics average? In 2020, 14 days before the election, Biden was up by 7.5 points. In 2016, Clinton was up by 5.6 points.
Biden barely won by a margin of about 44,000 votes across a handful of battleground states. Clinton lost, meaning Trump out-performed the national polling average by at least six points. What does that mean for Harris’s one-point lead in national polls?
National polls don’t decide the election. Instead, state elections do so in accordance with the Electoral College. Most states are clearly red or blue and not in play. However, a few battleground states will likely determine the Electoral College tally. How are the polls looking in those specific states?
RealClearPolitics tracks polling averages for battleground states. Trump leads in each state:
Pennsylvania: Trump +0.8
Arizona: Trump +1.8
Nevada: Trump +0.7
Wisconsin: Trump +0.4
Michigan: Trump +1.2
North Carolina: Trump +0.5
Georgia: Trump +2.5
Let’s look at these battleground states 4 years ago, during the Trump versus Biden election. Fourteen days before the 2020 election, Biden was +4.2 in the RealClearPolitics battleground average. And Biden won by fewer than 50,000 votes in those battleground states. Presently, Trump is +1.2 across those same battleground states. Once again, this bodes well for Trump on November 5.
Betting odds are another way to look at the race. They reflect what people “expect” to happen by putting their money on the line rather than what they “prefer” to happen, as reflected in opinion polls.
RealClearPolitics presents an average of the betting odds, giving Trump a 60% chance of winning compared to only 38% for Harris.
Why does Donald Trump underperform in the polls compared to real-life voting? One possibility is "the submerged Trump vote," as the American Spectator describes. “Many Trump voters fear speaking with pollsters due to well-publicized abuses of the FBI and the rest of the surveillance state.” The article further explains:
But with the advent of the Biden-Harris regime, all of that changed. And with the targeting of the MAGA movement, Trump voters began to consider the legal risks of voicing their support of Trump.
In other words, why risk drawing the unwanted scrutiny of the FBI, the equally politicized Justice Department, and the rest of the federal surveillance and regulatory behemoth for the sake of taking a poll?
This would certainly explain the discrepancy between polling and actual election results in 2016 and 2020. Will 2024 follow the same pattern?
At this point, Trump has the momentum, or in his case Trump-mentum. His popularity is peaking along with the beautiful autumn foliage around the country.
Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a physician and writer.
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