The recent Times/Siena College poll results released Sunday proved to be a good one for Republican candidate Donald Trump, said polling veteran Nate Silver. He also weighed in on the upcoming presidential debate scheduled for Sept. 10.
Poll Results: The survey found that Trump was leading Vice President Kamala Harris among likely voters by a point in a head-to-head matchup and by two points when other candidates are added to the ballot. Silver said the results are important as Times/Sienna is his second-highest-rated pollster and the poll has a large sample size of 1,695 likely voters.
Among the other reasons cited by Silver was the recentness of the poll, done fully post-Labor Day and having completed fieldwork on Friday, trendline comparisons presented by the poll and the poll’s tendency to singularly drive media conversation about the race.
Silver, the founder of polling analytics website FiveThirtyEight and is now no longer associated with it, said a series of YouGov polls found Trump and Harris tied in the key swing state of Pennsylvania and the latter leading by a point in Michigan and two points in Wisconsin.
“The NYT poll has reduced Harris's lead in our national polling average to 2.5 points,” Silver said.
The standing based on the polling averages as of Sept. 8 is 48.7%-46.2% in favor of Harris, according to Silver Bulletin. This marked a small decline for Harris from 49%-46% on Sep. 7.
Perils Of Being Progressive? In 2019, in one of the first major Democratic primary debates, every Democrat, including Harris and President Joe Biden, said they would support the provision of a health care plan for undocumented immigrants and this kickstarted conversations on Twitter, which has now been renamed X, said Silver.
The reason why every Democrat thought they had to run to the left was due to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) challenge to Hillary Clinton, who was the Democratic contender in 2016.
“But if you support policies that 60 percent of the country opposes — and anti-immigrant sentiment has only increased since 2019 — you're asking for trouble,” Silver said. He noted that Harris's articulation of highly progressive positions on immigration and health care has become a “talking point for the Trump campaign.” The vice president, though, has flip-flopped on some of these positions, like on Medicare for All and decriminalizing border crossings, he said, adding “The flip-flopping may explain why Harris has been weirdly reluctant to do media hits or articulate policy specifics.”
The Times/Siena poll contained a pair of questions on whether voters think Harris was too liberal/progressive and whether Trump was too conservative, Silver noted. The numbers were lopsided in Trump's favor, with only 32% of voters saying Trump was too conservative, while 47% said Harris was too liberal.
Harris, therefore, was faring poorly among white voters without college degrees, rural voters, and older voters: the types of voters who are plentiful in Blue Wall states like Pennsylvania, he said.
Silver said Harris’ convention speech, which was aggressively centrist and aimed at male voters, was smart. A relatively high percentage of voters in the Times poll said they didn't know what Harris stood for, which means there's room for these numbers to move, he said.
“But they could move in either direction as Team Trump circulates sound bites and video clips,” he added.
Silver said he thinks Harris is limited by her own past progressive policy positions. “So the strategic aim is probably to fight this liberal/conservative question to a draw, and then win on having considerably more favorable personal attributes than Trump,” he said.
Ahead of this week’s debate, the polling veteran said debates are typically judged relative to expectations as much as by the candidates' actual execution. He said the vice president would be better off avoiding the risk aversion she showed while picking Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
“She should campaign like she's two points behind — because if the Times poll is right, she is,” he added.
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