Pacing Yourself with Polls

I wanted to share a few thoughts about the Times/Siena poll which has sent more than a few people reeling today. If you haven’t seen it the new Times/Siena poll shows Donald Trump with a one point lead over Harris nationally. That’s the first major poll to show Trump in the lead in weeks. What do I make of it? Not a huge amount. And I would recommend the same to anyone else.

It’s certainly possible that this is a leading indicator of a shift in support away from Harris after a month and a half of generally positive news and poll numbers. But you simply can’t change your whole theory of the race around a single poll. I’m not going to get into picking apart all the details of the poll. And I’m definitely not going to try to unskew it. It’s a quality poll. But it does show a very different race than other polls we’re seeing – ones taken over the same time period, ones with which we’re able to make pretty straightforward apples to apples comparisons. It’ not just the top line number that’s different. It shows a more popular Trump, a less popular Harris, key demographics much closer to how they were when Joe Biden was still the nominee.