Nobody Believes The Real Clear Politics Average

Here's the conundrum leading up to the debate, from David Strom at Hot Air:

Kamala could appear on stage drunk out of her mind, vomit on the moderators, and do a striptease revealing she is a lizard person, and her poll numbers would only drop by 3 points.

Everybody anticipates this, because it's what happened after Joe Biden's disastrous June 27 -- his performance was so outlandishly bad that Nancy Pelosi had him off the Democrat ticket within a month -- but the polls didn't shift a bit in the wake of the debate. In fact, this was the basis of Joe's own argument for why he should stay, the polls hadn't changed, the race was still within the margin of error. Nancy Pelosi didn't believe it, and the rest is history.

I think it's also understood that by "the polls", people mean the Real Clear Politics average, but nobody will quite come out and say this. And as of this morning, it has Harris leading the notional popular vote by 1.8, the top battlegrounds by 0.2, and the Electoral College 273 to 265. And nobody believes it, not even RCP. Yesterday it ran a piece by Byron York, a doyen of conventional wisdom, Key state polls: Another mess in the making?

The purpose of a polling average is to avoid some of the errors of individual polls by grouping a bunch of them together. So instead of looking at one or two particularly accurate or terrible polls, look at how the group performed. But some averages are better than others, and all can be wrong if the underlying polls they include are wrong.

. . . In [2020], according to the Brookings calculation, the combined RealClearPolitics average missed a state’s final result by an average of 1.1 points, while the combined FiveThirtyEight average missed the final result by 2.1 points.

. . . Now look at those numbers and apply them to today’s Harris-Trump race in the seven states. Almost all of the poll averages are closer than the average error even in the more accurate RealClearPolitics average and certainly in the less accurate FiveThirtyEight average. There’s just no safe way to say who is leading right now, much less who will win in November.

CNN's data analyst concluded the same thing last night, again without directly mentioning RCP:

CNN’s enthusiastic Senior Data Reporter Harry Enten said Friday that the presidential contest is historically tight and that the slightest shift in momentum could alter the outcome. Moreover, he added, if Donald Trump outperforms current polling by a mere point—which is certainly possible, if not likely, given recent presidential elections—he’ll be strolling into the Oval Office in January 2025.

Yesterday, Nate Silver posted an analysis whose subtext is that "the polls" aren't reflecting the real state of the race:

[T]he Electoral College is starting to look like a challenge for Kamala Harris. This was a problem for Democrats in 2016, of course, and also in 2020 — when Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points, but the tipping-point state, Wisconsin, went for Biden by only 0.6 points.

But wait -- doesn't RCP say this morning that Harris has the Electoral Col;ege by 273-265? Apparently Nate Silver doesn't believe this. He goes on farther down,

The problem for Harris is that Donald Trump has been gaining on her in our polling averages, too — at least in the most important Electoral College states. If, say, Harris had gained 1 point, when the convention bounce adjustment was expecting her to gain 2 points, that would look like more of a rounding error in the model. Instead, though, she’s actually losing ground since the start of the convention in swing state polls.

. . . Harris is ahead by 3.0 points nationally, a tick better than the 2.3-point lead she had coming into the convention. Although I’d note that this is down a bit, too. Her lead peaked at 4.3 points on August 23 in our last model run before Robert F. Kennedy dropped out and we removed him from our model. Still, her national polls are fine; it’s the state polls that are the big issue.

In fact, relative to the start of the DNC, Harris has lost ground in 6 of these 7 states.

. . . This remains an extremely winnable election for Harris, especially with the debate looming next week. But there’s now a 20 percent chance that she wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College.

Silver's latest projection, according to Newsweek:

gives Trump a 60.1 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, compared to Vice President Kamala Harris' 39.7 percent, with the former president taking 277 electoral votes to the vice president's 260.

The latest prediction gives Trump his highest chance of winning since July 30.

The model also shows that the Republicans have made a net gain of between 0.1 and 2 points in every swing state other than Georgia and Wisconsin in the past week. Meanwhile, Trump leads in every battleground state other than Michigan and Wisconsin, where the candidates are tied.

I've been highly skeptical of Real Clear Politics, both its poll aggregates and individual commentators like Sean Trende, all along. It's especially puzzling that "the polls" have consistently shown so little movement this year in the face of so many unprecedented developments.