Donald Trump is currently leading Kamala Harris in Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona, according to the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll. These three states are among the seven battleground states (the others being Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) seen as key to victory for either candidate. Joe Biden won both Arizona and Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, while North Carolina has not gone for a Democrat since Barack Obama carried the state in 2008. The Times called these “Trump’s best poll results in weeks.”
The polls, conducted between September 17th and September 21st, found Trump leading 50% to 45% in Arizona, 49% to 45% in Georgia, and 49% to 47% in North Carolina. Looking back to previous results in these same polls, Trump improved from a slight Harris lead in North Carolina and consolidated an already-winning position in Georgia. Most striking, though, is Arizona, where Trump turned around a 5-point deficit in last month’s pool to a lead by the same margin today. These results go against other results that show Harris holding steady slight leads in other battleground states and nationally.
Harris also appears to be benefiting less than her predecessors when it comes to a post-debate victory bump. As Nate Cohn notes in the Times, all presidential candidates in this century have enjoyed a roughly 2% boost to their numbers after a consensus victory in a debate, including Donald Trump earlier this year against Joe Biden, before the President dropped out of the race. Harris, however, according to 34 different polls that measured support for the candidates before and after the debate, has only managed a 1% gain, despite broad agreement that she won against Trump.
While some Trump supporters will surely take the good news for their candidate at face value and Harris supporters will be concerned, it remains to be seen how justified either reaction turns out to be, as doubts continue to be raised regarding polling accuracy. Both the 2016 presidential election and 2022 midterm forecasts were off by significant margins, as Trump shocked the world with his presidential victory, and the fabled “Red Wave” everyone was expecting turned out to be more of a ripple.
The main issue with these Sun Belt numbers is sample size: Arizona’s figures come from 713 respondents, while North Carolina’s and Georgia’s both came from 682 respondents. In the world of polling this is not unacceptably small, but it is on the low end, with many polls gathering information from 1,000+ respondents. This might contribute to the high margin of error for these results, between 5% and 6%, and to his credit, Cohn admits that this could lead the possibility of “meaningful random sampling error.” One way to make sense of the most recent Times/Siena results is to look more broadly at polling averages which, going by the Times, show the Georgia poll in line with others, while Trump’s lead in North Carolina and Arizona cut against the grain of recent results.
In a recent poll related to but not directly concerning the race to the White House, Quinnipiac University found that 64% of Americans want to see another presidential debate before the election, another indication that perhaps Americans’ minds are not yet made up.
