With less than four weeks until Election Day and early voting underway in some states, Vice President Kamala Harris‘ polling lead is trailing that of President Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton at the same point in 2020 and 2016 respectively.
RealClearPolling’s average of polls shows Harris has a 1.8 point lead over former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, as of Friday. Biden was leading Trump by 10.3 points on October 11, 2020, according to RealClearPolling’s average. Clinton, the Democratic Party‘s nominee in 2016, was ahead of Trump by six points on the same date in 2020.
Trump’s victory in 2016 came as a surprise to the nation’s pollsters, as most polls has shown Clinton ahead of Trump throughout the 2016 campaign, though her advantage narrowed in many surveys in the final weeks before the election.
In 2016, Clinton garnered almost three million more votes than Trump, but he won the Electoral College and the presidency.
Biden won the popular vote and Electoral College in 2020, but Trump received more votes in 2020 than polls suggested he would. Trump’s campaign has repeatedly said that public polls undercount his base of support.
Many pollsters have since adjusted their methods “to correct for the Trump undercount,” Cliff Young, the president of Ipsos polling, said in September. Because some groups are harder to reach or less inclined to take surveys, pollsters make adjustments to make sure they are reflecting the population as a whole, a process known as “weighting.”
Experts say these changes in polling methodologies since the 2016 election could be why Harris’ lead is smaller.
“Weighting—which needs to be done heavily in these polls and requires judgment calls—is constantly evolving, and is a moving target,” Grant Davis Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University, told Newsweek.
“So the discrepancy could be due to a difference in weighting, in order to reflect the fact that polls since 2016 have tended to underreport Trump’s support (due to a variety of reasons).”
But Reeher added that “if the difference is not due solely to weighting (and there’s no way to know this for sure, as we haven’t had the vote yet), then it could signal a concern for the Harris campaign.”
Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University, told Newsweek: “It’s tempting to overinterpret observations like these, but they are not necessarily apples-to-apples comparisons. Many things differed across cycles, including the candidates, poll methodologies, and political climate.”
Harris has erased Trump’s lead in the polls since she entered the presidential race in July, after Biden stepped aside less than a month after a disastrous debate performance against Trump.
Most recent national surveys give her a narrow lead over Trump, but they are usually within the margin of error. The contest remains tight, and the outcome could be determined by small margins in the battleground states.
Some polls show Trump gaining ground in the swing states. If Harris is unable to carry the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, it will make her path to the presidency much harder.
Harris is “is performing better in the national polls versus the battleground states, which tells me she is racking up more support in states where she is already likely to win,” Reeher said. “That makes sense given the nature of the campaign’s central messages and appeals.”
Panagopoulos said the 2024 election cycle is “unfolding during a period of intensified political polarization, with historically few undecided voters and uncertainty about voter turnout.”
He added: “Is this race closer than 2016 and 2020? Most likely, by all accounts. The national margin is not irrelevant, but it will all come down to how votes are distributed in key battlegrounds.”
The Trump and Harris campaigns have been contacted for comment via email.
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