Last week, Fox News released a poll that found former President Donald Trump up by 2 points nationally, 50% to 48%, a mirror image reversal of results from a September iteration of this poll. Lest any Trump supporters get too excited about this shift, an underreported finding in the latest poll shows Vice President Kamala Harris up by a whopping 6 points in the battleground states that will decide the election. The stated margin of error for this survey is 6.5%. That alone should render this outcome suspect.
This datapoint flies in the face of all public surveys of the battleground states, including those from Democratic-leaning pollsters. As of Tuesday, Trump is leading in the RealClearPolitics average of polls in each of the seven battleground states, and leads by 1.2% overall in these crucial states. Trump’s current leads are as follows: Arizona, Trump +1.8; Georgia, +2.5; Michigan, +1.2; Nevada, +0.7; North Carolina, +0.5; Pennsylvania, +0.8; and Wisconsin, +0.4. Admittedly, these margins are small, but Trump is nevertheless ahead.
JUST IN: President Trump has officially FLIPPED Wisconsin in the newly released RealClearPolitics No Toss Ups Map.
Trump is now leading in all battleground states.
This is HUGE! 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/wD0u3fmA5h
— Proud Elephant 🇺🇸🦅 (@ProudElephantUS) October 17, 2024
A glance at the individual polls included in the state averages shows only a few polls with results even approaching 6 points. And the few that do, favor Trump. For example, Quinnipiac, a left-leaning pollster, released a poll of 1,328 likely Georgia voters last week that showed Trump up by 6 points. Two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal, whose news division leans a little left these days, found Trump up by 6 points in Nevada. And right-leaning pollster Rasmussen showed Trump up 5 points in North Carolina one week ago.
Since Oct. 6, coincidentally or not the day after Trump made his triumphant return to the site of the first assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, Harris has been on a steady downward trajectory in the seven-state average. Her support has fallen from a high of 48.3 to 47.2, a new low. If her two-week trend line were a stock chart, traders would be running for the exits.
Harris’s latest swoon would be far less worrisome and easier to reverse if she had more time. But two weeks out from the election, it is a troubling development at best for her campaign.
This begs the question: Just how did Fox News pollsters arrive at this inexplicable result?
Well, Fox attributes Harris’s 6-point lead to a concept called “inefficient vote.” According to Fox, Trump is banking extra votes in counties where he doesn’t really need them. The article says:
In other words, while the former president is performing better nationally than he was four years ago, the gains are concentrated in places he is already winning, like Florida, or rural counties.
While Harris may have lost some ground in safe Democratic states like New York, she remains competitive in the battlegrounds that decide the presidential election.
The writers look to the relationship between the Republicans’ strength in the popular vote in the 2022 midterms to their lackluster gains in the House. In the 2022 House races, the GOP received over three million more votes than Democrats (54,506,136 vs. 51,477,313), but won back control of the chamber by only a slim margin (222 to 213).
The article notes, “The GOP banked a lot of votes in areas where it didn’t need them, and just enough in the battleground House races that would give them victory.”
At the risk of being accused of not believing polls that tell me what I don’t want to hear, I looked at Fox’s record for accuracy in the RealClearPolitics pollster rankings. In 2020, Fox had an average error rate of 3.5% in their national polling which favored Democrats 100% of the time.
In state polling, the network’s record for accuracy was even worse. In 2020, Fox had an average error rate of 5.4% in state polls, which favored Democratic candidates 100% of the time.
Their latest poll showing Harris with a 6-point lead in the battleground states looks to be an outlier. It is completely out of line with data released by even the most partisan left-leaning polling firms. All current polling shows the presidential race to be either a dead heat or else shows Trump with a slight advantage.
The problem with outliers is that some people believe them.
Thank you I thought I heard it wrong , she did say that !
— Terry Oaks (@TerryOaks3) October 16, 2024
A previous version of this article appeared on Legal Insurrection.
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