Remember how pollsters underestimated Donald Trump’s strength in his last two campaigns? Will they miss again?
RCP gives us a running comparison of his current aggregated polling average and the same data on the same date four and eight years earlier. To take Pennsylvania as the best example, Trump currently leads Kamala Harris by a razor-thin 0.3 points as of yesterday afternoon. Eight years ago on Nov. 3, Hillary Clinton led by 2.8 points and lost the state by 0.7, a miss by 3.5 points. Four years ago, the miss was nearly the same, as Joe Biden led the RCP average by 4.3 points and ended up winning by only 1.2 points.
The big question this cycle has been whether pollsters have corrected for that issue and improved their reach among lower-propensity respondents. Until now, we haven’t seem much data on that question, which has more or less frozen the…
