Nobody Believes The Real Clear Politics Averages

*TRUMP INTERNAL POLLING: TRUMP LEADS IN ALL BATTLEGROUND STATES pic.twitter.com/PPQnSsryDp

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) October 10, 2024

A few people are starting tgo say it: Election tilts toward Trump as suspicions grow that some polls may be masking true size of his lead,

Harris currently leads Trump by 2.0% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, with 49.1% support to his 47.1%. That figure includes a Rasmussen Reports survey showing Trump with a two-point lead, a Reuters/Ipsos survey showing Harris up two, a Morning Consult poll with Harris up five, a Yahoo News poll with the race tied, and a number of other surveys. A New York Times/Siena College survey showed Harris up three points.

Actually, as of this morning, Harris's RCP lead is down to 1.8%, having been at 2% or more for many weeks. But as I've been saying all along, the national average is meaningless, since it's the Electoral College that casts presidential votes. And Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics would be the first to agree -- so why do they keep publishing this as though it means anythihg? The piece goes on:

But pollsters have pointed to an apparent disconnect between state and national level polls, with state-level surveys increasingly shifting toward Trump while Harris seemingly holds steady at the national level. They have further observed two consistent patterns of national polling that appear to vary widely due to methodology.

. . . Polling averages currently show Trump poised to take Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Arizona. Harris, for her part, holds narrow leads in Minnesota and Nevada. Should such results hold, Trump would handily carry the Electoral College, barring major upsets. The campaign released its own internal polling in a Thursday memo, showing Trump winning all seven of the key battleground states it tracked.

Which is jusst another way of saying the RCP average is meaningless. But the corporate media consensus for weeks has nevertheless been been that the race is a "stalemate", "razor thin", "essentially tied", "margin of error", and so forth. Here's the standard narrative at The Hill:

Vice President Harris’s slim national lead over former President Trump narrowed after the vice presidential debate last week, a survey published Monday found.

Harris is leading Trump by 2 percentage points, 48 percent to 46 percent, in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted after the debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

Yet again, the national lead, slim or fat, is meaningless, but the narrative keeps putting it in the lede. The piece goes on,

Polling after the Sept. 10 presidential debate, by comparison, suggested Harris was the winner, and her campaign has since pushed for a second debate against Trump. The former president has rejected the idea.

Her sharp performance, though, fell short of moving the needle in the key swing states needed to win in November. Nationally, Harris currently holds a 3.4 percentage point lead over Trump, according to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ aggregate polling, which has grown just slightly since the day before their debate, when she had a 3.2 percentage point lead.

So Harris is in the lead in a chimerical narional average, but she "fell short of moving the needle", another cliche. The Debate: Did It Move the Needle? Can a VP Candidate Actually Move the Needle? Bill O'Reilly: Did Kamala Harris Move The Needle? And so forth.

So we have the logical problem that the race is "deadlocked" in Kamala's favor, but she needs to "move the needle". Why, if she's ahead? We'll get sone sort of answer along the line that well, the polls had Clinton ahead by x in 2016, but Trump actually won by y, so we need to add a fudge factor to Trump's numbers, so the race isn't really "deadlocked" the way you might think it is if we use that word. So why do they use that word? Why do we need to add a fudge factor? That's when the professor decides he needs to answer some other student's urgent question, and we move on.

The first link at the top of this post cites contrarian pollster Richard Baris's objections to the consensus view:

“More polls today showing Harris down in keys states but also running way behind Clinton and Biden in another blue state. To the point I made yesterday, it's simply not possible for her to win the [popular vote] if she is running this poorly in NY, MD, NJ, CA, etc. Not possible math,” he wrote.

“I'm watching this being covered as a good thing for Harris. It's an absolute catastrophe for her,” Baris wrote, in response to Mason-Dixon/Telemundo data showing Harris leading Trump among California Hispanics 55% to 35%. Biden, by contrast, won that bloc 75% to 23%. Those figures mark a 32% swing in one of the state’s largest voting blocs toward Trump.

In other words, if Harris is losing so many of key Democrat constiutuencies -- labor, ethnics, Catholics, Jews, Latins, black men, and so forth, especially in populous blue states, but "the polls" say she's still getting a national majority, there's soething seriously wrong with "the polls", or as Baris puts it, "not possiblle math".

I'm increasingly convinced Trump is going to outperform significantly in this election.