Donald Trump’s polling numbers have improved this week. They still don’t match his election odds, but is it all GOP smoke and mirrors?
It’s Law 34 in Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power: Act like a king to be treated like one. The Republican Party has gone to great lengths to present Donald Trump as the candidate who’s winning the 2024 U.S. election race – and the 2020 race, for that matter.
It’s all about winning and never admitting defeat.
First, they came for the election odds. After Elon Musk joined Trump in Pennsylvania on October 5, Trump went from slight underdog to White House favorite at the online sportsbooks; as we go to press, Trump is priced at –170 on the politics odds board at Bovada (find out more with our Bovada Review), albeit down from –185 earlier this week. Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are +140 to win the presidency.
Those Trump odds moved despite the polls showing Harris enjoying roughly the same 3% edge that she has for much of this campaign. But now those polls are also moving towards Trump; the aggregators at FiveThirtyEight and The Economist have Harris ahead by 1.7% and 1.5% respectively.
On the face of things, it’s easy to explain why Harris would be losing steam at this point – maybe too easy, as it turns out. At least some of this narrowing gap in the polls has been manufactured by the Republicans; figuring out how much will help you make sharper choices with your 2024 election betting picks.
What’s Happening With the Polls?
Aggregation. When FiveThirtyEight and The Economist publish their numbers, they’re looking at a large selection of polls – hundreds of them – and taking a weighted average. Some of those polls are more reliable than others; this is taken into account with their weighting, but the noisier polls are still included.
Sure enough, Republican-leaning pollsters have been “flooding the zone” lately. While YouGov (No. 4 on the FiveThirtyEight rankings) and Ipsos (No. 19) still have Harris ahead 3% among likely voters, here are some of the other recent polls that are gumming up the works:
- OnMessage (No. 238): Trump +1
- Activote (unranked): Trump +2
- AtlasIntel (No. 22): Trump +3
- TIPP Insights (No. 120): Trump +2
- Redfield & Wilton Strategies (No. 118): Trump +2
- HarrisX (No. 170): Trump +2
That AtlasIntel poll is notable; insiders call this one of the least biased conservative-leaning pollsters out there, but conservative nonetheless. Everyone else on this list is sus. Factor in The Economist deciding to re-jig their counting to give recent polls more weight, and voila – they now have Trump’s chances of winning at 56%.
Is Trump Winning?
Maybe. Just because there are shenanigans afoot doesn’t mean that Harris isn’t losing steam. Her slippage in polls across the Blue Wall may be real; for example, there are hundreds of thousands of Arab-American voters in Michigan and Wisconsin, many of them unhappy over the recent killings of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders by Israel, which is backed by the U.S.
We’ve also seen the Harris campaign lose much of that “joyful warrior” vibe that had their poll numbers soaring this summer. The tone has grown apocalyptic again, just like it was when Joe Biden was still the Dem candidate – and Trump is more than happy to keep driving that narrative with his increasingly angry rhetoric.
Be that as it may, when it comes to the “winning” narrative Republicans are pushing, those efforts have skewed the polls by approximately 1% in Trump’s favor. The 2024 election is still a toss-up either way, at least as far as we can tell, and the polls in 2016 and 2020 both under-represented the level of support Trump saw at the voting booth. So yes, maybe Trump is ahead in 2024. But is he worth investing in at –170, which translates to an implied probability of 63%?
Bet accordingly.
