As of Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern, our average of national polls says Harris has the support of 45.0 percent of voters, while Trump garners 43.5 percent.
That 1.5-percentage-point lead is within our average’s uncertainty interval, which you can think of as a sort of margin of error for our polling averages.
It’s a little weird that they say Harris is “tied” with trump, even though she’s ahead by 1.5%. That seems like a big deal. Margin of error is important, but it’s just factually true that Vice President Harris is up by an average of 1.5%.
I looked back at how 538 treated polls when trump was up by a similar amount:
https://abcnews.go.com/538/polls-after-presidential-debate/story?id=111610497
In 538’s national polling average, Trump now leads by 1.4 percentage points over Biden, while the two candidates were just about tied on June 27, the day of the debate.
So Harris up by 1.5% is actually “tied”, but trump up on Biden by 1.4% is “leads” (and explicitly different from “tied”!). No mention of margin of error in that paragraph.
🤔🤔🤔
Yeah, I didn’t check that. It makes sense but they still have editors. I’m not saying there’s some conspiracy to keep Kamala down, but watch for this to coincidentally happen again.
Being up by 1.5% is huge. Biden being down by 1.4% caused him to drop out.
It’s in the right direction, but Democrats need to overperform nationally to be in good shape in the electoral college. Big movement from where Biden was, but it needs to keep going. A Democrat down 1.4% is almost a sure loss, but a Democrat up 1.5% isn’t a sure win.
And covid and not being able to string a sentence together and most of his advisors becoming doomers immediately after the debate.