On September 20, the Washington Post/ABC News presidential poll was released, and it was very good news for Trump.
Too good, in fact, with the Washington Post even trying to downplay the results.
The WaPo poll had Trump beating Biden 52-42, which had Donald Trump ecstatic.
The Washington Post even ignored its poll results while citing other portions of the poll, which is utterly ridiculous. If you are going to call your own poll an outlier, then every result in that poll must be an outlier, right?
The reaction was comical, and Trump surrogates pounced…
Washington Post dumps on headline news from its own poll. New survey finds Trump leading Biden by 9 pts among adults. Post says it's 'probably an outlier.' But pollster says result 'not statistically significant' difference from WP polls in Feb and May. https://t.co/lVS2dhjRLQ pic.twitter.com/D31MUW91wG
— Byron York (@ByronYork) September 24, 2023
When I broke this poll down the other day, I stated that we have to wait to see if there is a trend developing to see if it was real or not.
I also suggested that nobody get too excited about it just yet because we needed to see a steady rise in Trump's support in order to take that poll seriously.
Well, on September 24, Morning Consult came out with its poll that had Biden up 43-42, and the left was able to calm down a bit from the ABC News/WaPo poll.
I don't buy into the idea that Trump suddenly jumped 10 points. History has shown us that, in fact, polls like this are outliers in most cases.
Girdusky had the best analysis on this one, and hit the nail on the head in terms of the most important polling, which is state-by-state…
1) i don’t remember when WaPo openly discredited their own poll when Biden was winning by 15 last time
2) I’ll believe this poll when I start seeing state polls with corresponding results. Polls showing Trump winning the national numbers while losing most swing states is rough https://t.co/RUOgaUrV9A
— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) September 24, 2023
While 270toWin has not updated its state-by-state polling since August 6, those numbers were not good for Trump.
In terms of electoral votes, Trump is trailing Biden 303 to 235.
Polling this early is really senseless to get too excited or too upset about, even with the 270toWin poll.
The reality of the state-by-state poll is that in eight of the 10 key battleground states, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are virtually tied, with neither candidate having more than a 3% lead over the other, which is within the margin of error.
This race, right now, is about as even as it gets, so be careful about getting too comfy or believing the rhetoric that some of Trump's surrogates are spewing right now.
Everyone tries to say that polling was off in 2016 when it showed Hillary winning the election, but that was national polling, which means nothing in a presidential election.
If you want to get a real feel for what is happening, watch the state polls and electoral projections because that is what will ultimately decide this election. And when you look back to 2016, while state-by-state polls were not perfect, they had the election far closer than national polling did, so they were actually just about dead on.
