I keep saying, stay away from Nate the Slimer and 538. They're garbage and don't know what the hell they're doing. If you would like I will break down how garbage their rating system is, but really all I have to point out for you to understand is that they give NYT/Sienna College their highest rating. The same pollster that had Biden +11 in Wisconsin, Biden +6 in PA, and Biden +6 in AZ.
They're a joke. Their methodology is a joke. The only reason the site exists and even sniffs of legitimacy is because Nate got internal polls from David Frum to run his 2008 model from, and that happened to be correct. He's not a pollster or a data analyzer. The people that were on his team, and the people that replaced him aren't pollsters either. They know next to nothing about psephology.
Also, these national polls are terrible, as to be expected. The real story is Harris only +5 in Minnesota, and the slew of bad polling for her coming out of other battlegrounds. Several congressional races are starting to flag in ME, OH, WI that don't bode well for her as well. Leaky camps also let in a few well-connected people on some top line numbers in PA. Trump's camp is internally showing it as +3 for him, Kamala's is worse for her, +4.
Pretty sure that's why they're trying to pivot to NC. If their numbers are that bad in PA, then they have to shift to try to pick off an R state, and NC looks deceptively like the best target. Problem is it's home to mostly ancestral democrats, who are now republicans, who didn't bother to re-register. The state has also seen an influx of conservatives in the last 4 years through migration patterns. It was also horrifically under-counted in the census so her team will have a difficult time finding the edge there.
Looks like low 90s for PDX tomorrow. 12+ hours of daylight ends tomorrow and it wants to go out with a bang We won’t see 12+ hours daylight again until March 17 of next year.
Doing a deep dive on Pennsylvania. Some really interesting trends and things to watch for. There are eight counties I am going to be focusing on.
2016: Trump +1.2%
2020: Biden +1.2%
There were some rural counties where Trump did better in 2020 than he did in 2016, but generally he was 2-4% worse in most counties, even ones he won. Here is the raw vote difference between 2016 and 2020 by county. What's interesting is he actually did 3.4% better in Philadelphia, but lost by 16,000 more votes in 2020 because of higher turnout.
Counties won by Democrats in both elections are bold. The number is the difference in raw vote margin between 16' and 20' for the DEMOCRAT candidate. The non-bolded counties are counties won by Trump and the raw vote difference between 16' and 20'. () is total margin in 2020
Philadelphia 15,926 (471,050)
Dauphin 8,908 (12,575)
Bucks 15,337 (17,345)
Allegheny 42,317 (147,846)
Lancaster -2,717 (44,362)
York -916 (58,589)
Berks -1,084 (16,841)
Westmoreland +1,168 (58,089)
So looking ahead to this election, Trump is going to have to improve on these margins. Doesn't have to be significant, but he has to drive turnout in rural areas and try not to keep bleeding out in places like Allegheny and Philadelphia. If he can get to 20% or at least hold serve in Philadelphia and get into the 40-42% range in Allegheny county, that would be a good sign. He has to at least hold serve in the four counties above that he won and probably needs to pick up 1-2% in each one. Look at 58% in Lancaster as a magic number, 64% in Westmoreland, 54% in Berks.
Erie is another county to watch. In 2016 Trump won by 2%, Biden won by 1% in 2020.