Why Polls Won’t Tell You Who Is Favored to Win the Election and Why That’s Good for Kamala Harris

Polling is an inexact science that has come under fire ever since Trump’s victory in 2016. We are in the midst of a political realignment, and that is warping many of our longstanding assumptions. This general confusion about where this change in America is headed has led people on both sides of the political aisle say the polls are fake news, despite them being historically accurate in 2022. Add in the fact that Americans are generally bad at math and don’t understand how there is not a big difference between Kamala Harris having a 55 percent chance to win and a 45 percent chance (which is the entire range she has pinged around in all year), and trust in polling seems to be at record lows in modern America.

The era of Nate Silver predicting 99 out of 100 states correct gave polling a predictive power in America’s eyes that it is not designed to achieve. Polls include margins of error because they accept that they may not detail the entire picture they are aiming to capture, and this year, that may be more important than ever to consider when looking at polling numbers.

The reason is because Donald Trump is depending on low propensity voters—those who do not vote in every election. If you drill down in nearly every poll, you see the same dynamic. Kamala Harris is usually leading among likely voters, but once you add every potential voter to the poll, Trump has started to pull even or ahead. This presents a really difficult dynamic for political scientists to analyze. Typically, you give more weight to likely voters and assume that low propensity voters will drop off to some degree, but Trump is making an aggressive play for them and they have never been more important to a presidential election.

Just showing an endless array of transphobic ads saying, “she’s for they/them, he’s for you,” is not enough to ensure low propensity voters get to the polls. Get-out-the-vote operations are vital to any campaign, but especially for Trump when he is depending on so many folks who may not show up to vote on Election Day on their own volition.

And Trump’s get-out-the-vote operation is not looking so great. The Republican National Committee planned to unveil an extensive network of canvassers for the 2024 election, but after the Trump campaign took over the RNC, those plans were scrapped. Reuters reported this week that America PAC, the Super PAC headed by Elon Musk that Trump has outsourced most of his ground game to, is struggling to meet its doorknocking goals and is investigating claims that some canvassers lied about how many voters they have contacted. Musk pays his canvassers $30 per door they knock on, a staggeringly large amount that surely incentivizes people to lie.

Turning Point USA, the right-wing group headed by Charlie Kirk, is also handling big chunks of Trump’s ground game and raising questions about their effectiveness. A GOP operative in Michigan told the Wall Street Journal that the Trump campaign is knocking on just one-tenth of the number of doors it knocked on in 2016. The Trump campaign itself is trying a different style of get-out-the-vote operation, eschewing the traditional door-to-door work in favor of online targeting. Only time will tell whether Trump yet again found a new dynamic to exploit in American politics, but one thing is for certain: this strategy flies in the face of what we know works to get people to vote.

A few weeks ago, Politico interviewed “more than a dozen Republican strategists and operatives in presidential battlegrounds” who all said that Trump’s get-out-the-vote effort was “paltry.” A Republican operative in Nevada said “There’s really no organization. He comes out, they scramble to do a rally…but after that, there’s just really nothing else.”

This is all good for Kamala Harris because per the polls, she is losing. The last NYT/Siena poll was released today, and it indicated a dead heat between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, both tied at 48 percent. A tie is a likely loss for Harris because of the electoral college, and she likely needs to win by at least a couple percentage points to overcome that inherent GOP advantage.

Polls have tightened because Trump has consolidated his support among low propensity voters, while Harris’s figures have remained steady through this liberal bedwetting period of the last few weeks. A poll may tell you that Trump has a lot of support, but if a big chunk of that support is unreliable, and Trump’s get-out-the-vote operation is unable to get them to the polls, then the polling is not going to properly identify the number of votes for Trump. That doesn’t mean the polls were wrong, they did approximate the people saying they were going to vote for Trump, but it’s on him to get a lot of these people who don’t typically vote to do so. According to a lot of GOP strategists, that’s a big concern for the Republican Party, and it is good news for Kamala Harris who has not pinned her entire hopes for the presidency on voters who may not vote.