Democratic pollsters have a warning about Kamala Harris’ lead

CHICAGO — The Democratic Party’s pollsters have spent the past three and a half years preparing for the next 75 days.

The last presidential election was an “Oh, shit” moment for them: Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by a closer margin than a lot of the polling suggested, and Democrats were projected to expand their House majority but instead saw it shrink.

It prompted five of the party’s top polling firms — who typically compete for business — to collaborate on an autopsy aimed at fixing what went wrong.

So now that Kamala Harris has caught Trump in the polls in her first month as a candidate, it’s left Democrats wondering: How real is her surge ?

Here at the Democratic convention this week, some in the party’s professional class are trying to tamp down the exuberance. Officials with the top pro-Harris super PAC said their polling “is much less rosy” than public surveys. Other Democratic pollsters noted that — even if their polling is right — Trump still maintains a lot of advantages.

“It’s still a very tough race, and that feels consistent with everything we know,” said Margie Omero, a partner at the Democratic polling firm GBAO Strategies.

There are plenty of warning signs hidden in the data: A poll commissioned by the Democratic messaging firm Navigator Research and unveiled during the convention showed Harris and Trump essentially tied across the swing-state map. And the candidate characteristics that are best correlated with voters’ preferences — whether a candidate is up to the job, has the right vision and is a strong leader — generally favored Trump in the survey.

And then there’s the prospect of another polling error.

Polls underestimated Trump in both 2020 and 2016. Back in 2021, when the Democratic pollsters announced their joint effort, some had hoped that the former president’s hard-to-measure appeal would be negated if he wasn’t on the ballot in 2024.

But he is, of course, and pollsters across the spectrum are still grappling with making sure polls are correctly measuring his support.

“I spent a ton of time and analysis trying to dig into those problems. And I feel much better educated about those problems,” said Nick Gourevitch, a partner at Global Strategy Group and a driving force behind the post-2020 Democratic polling autopsy. “I don’t think there’s any pollster in America who can sit here and say … that they’re 100 percent sure that they fixed any issues in polling. I think that would be silly.”

One major part of the effort was a lengthy experiment in the swing state of Wisconsin. The goal wasn’t to predict the result of an election; it was to see which voters could be captured by a monthslong survey using multiple ways of finding people, including a door-to-door component — and how that group differs from the voters reached in the typical phone or web surveys conducted over the course of a few days.

The main finding: Standard polls capture voters who are more engaged with politics and consider it more important to their identity. That kind of bias wouldn’t necessarily cause problems in a low-turnout election, like an off year or midterm, because those are exactly the kind of voters who show up.

But in a presidential race, when lower-propensity voters also turn out, that could be an issue. And the kind of time, effort and expense that went into getting those voters to participate isn’t scalable in a fast-changing election.

“You can’t recreate the Wisconsin project” in the heat of the campaign, Omero said. “Polling is still a challenge.”

Harris’ candidacy has significantly changed some of the campaign dynamics, but Democratic pollsters interviewed here are cautious about upending all of their assumptions about the race, like turnout models, after only a few weeks.

“We very carefully discuss when we’re going to change our assumptions due to events, and we look at lots of lots of data, rather than letting a single poll dictate how we’re going to change things,” said Gourevitch. “We need to see things shift across many polls before we’re going to change some of those things.”

So for now, despite the palpable sense of renewed hope throughout the convention, most elected and professional Democrats are trying to temper their enthusiasm.

Like the polling firms, House Democrats launched their own autopsy following a disappointing election cycle in 2020. Though the party retained control, its majority shrunk — a narrowing that set the stage for Republicans to flip control of the chamber two years later.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s post-2020 report found larger-than-expected numbers of low-propensity GOP voters turned out, giving Republican candidates an unforeseen boost.

Asked during a roundtable discussion with reporters this week whether she trusts the internal polling this year, the current DCCC chair, Rep. Suzan DelBene of Washington state, demurred.

“Is it a piece of information that can be helpful? Absolutely,” she said, downplaying the role of polling in the committee’s strategy decisions. “It’s just another input we have and that campaigns have.”

Democratic pollsters have spent nearly four years trying to fix what went wrong last time. But, they warn, there might still be some other issues. The polls could again underestimate Trump this year — though it might be for some other, unknown reasons.

“Every year, we’ve had different curveballs. This is a difficult industry,” said John Anzalone, who was the lead pollster on Biden’s 2020 campaign. “Something’s gonna happen in 2024. You and I, right now, don’t know what that is.”