Jeffrey Blehar writes for National Review Online about the significance of a recent presidential election poll.
[T]he most recent New York Times/Siena national poll of the election is out, … and Donald Trump now leads Kamala Harris nationally among likely voters — not registered voters, likely voters — by a 48–47 margin. (Forty-eight percent, incidentally, would if true represent a higher share of the vote than Trump received at the ballot box in either 2016 or 2020.) To rehearse a series of presumptions that I assume most readers have long internalized, this is a terrible place for Harris to be in a nationwide poll; the margins are expected to be so close in so many swing states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, etc.) that she is thought to need something more like a 3 percent lead in the polls heading into election day for her to triumph.
Maybe this one poll is a blip. But there have been multiple ominous signs in the polling recently for Harris, and I’ve not been alone in noticing and gesturing at them in one endless column after another over the last few weeks. The inexplicably controversial Nate Silver is taking an admirably dignified victory lap on X on X this morning, running a gentle circle around everyone once again accusing him of pro-Republican (?) hackery by having a model that has persistently suggested a narrow advantage for Trump. That’s nice enough for him, but since relative to Nate I’m a grimy hustler forever on the make, I just want to point out — while this bright fresh breeze of vindication blows — that this has more or less forever been my theory of the case, from July 21 onward. Could media hype sell Kamala Harris forever? Could she truly “hide” her way to the White House? A lot of Democrats sure seemed pleased to try and find out.
