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’s 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.
Like I said, you just can’t put so much stock in a single poll unless the basic trends are confirmed by other polls.
There’s one thing I would especially stress: as is often the case with the Times/Sienna poll, there’s this great urge people have to develop theories of the race based on this specific poll and its crosstabs. That’s a mistake. She needs to do more interviews. She needs to come out with new policy proposals. She needs to shift more to the center. She’s moving to the center on too many issues. You just can’t do that. Not on the basis of a single poll and not even necessarily on the basis of lots of polls.
In any case, wait to see more polls. That’s my suggestion — both as to pacing yourself and preserving your mental health as well as to having an accurate understanding of what’s happening.
