President Donald Trump now leads former Vice President Joe Biden nationally by a single point in the Rasmussen tracking poll.
Compared to other national polls, this is an outlier. Nevertheless, just two weeks ago, Biden held a 12 point lead in this same poll.
“The latest national telephone and online survey finds Trump edging Democrat Joe Biden 48% to 47% among Likely U.S. Voters. Three percent prefer some other candidate, while two percent remain undecided,” reports the pollster.
Last week, Biden was up three points, 49 to 46 percent.
The week prior, Biden was up eight points.
The week prior to that, he was up a whopping 12 points.
In the RealClearPolitics poll of polls, Biden leads by eight points nationally. The poll closest to Rasmussen is the Hill/Harris X poll, which has Biden up by only four, 46 to 42 percent.
What we have in this race, as far as polling, is a battle of the models. Media pollsters, and pollsters who seek media attention, appear to be using one model to guess who will turn out to vote, while pollsters like Rasmussen and Trafalgar see a very different turnout model.
Media pollsters tell us Trump is doomed to defeat.
Rasmussen and Trafalgar tell us this is a one or two point race, and it is Trump who is usually up by those one or two points, especially in the states that will decide who our next president is.
Rasmussen has Trump up in Florida 49 to 46 percent; up in North Carolina, 48 to 47 percent; and only down two in Arizona, 48 to 46 percent.
Trafalgar has Trump up in North Carolina, 49 to 46 percent; up in Michigan, 49 to 47 percent; up in Florida 49 to 47 percent; and up in Arizona, 50 to 47 percent.
According to the media and media-approved pollsters, Trump is losing Florida by 1.5 points, losing Arizona by 2.4, losing Michigan by a whopping eight points, and down 1.2 in North Carolina.
Early vote counts can be useful, but also deceiving. So take the following with a grain of salt…
In Michigan, Republicans have returned 41 percent of the two million early votes to the Democrats’ 39 percent. That’s a two point lead for the GOP in Michigan.
In Arizona, of the 1.5 million early votes in, 42 percent come from, Democrats, while 34 percent come from Republicans. But in 2016, at around this same time, Democrats were leading 44 to 31 percent.
In Wisconsin, of the 1.3 million early vote, Republicans are up over Democrats 42 to 36 percent. The polling in Wisconsin tells us Trump is down by five.
According to Sean Trende, who also warns not to look too much into early voting, Republican are doing better in North Carolina than they did in 2016, and Trump won that state by five points that year:
Democrats have a 10.5-percentage-point lead over Republicans in early voting. That seems great for Democrats.
But we could also contextualize this by noting that at a similar point in 2016, Democrats had a 13.1-percentage-point lead there in early voting. In other words, Democrats are doing worse than they were at this point four years ago (and much worse than they were in 2012). Actually, with a week to go early voting is looking about the same as it did at the end of 2016 (when Democrats had a 9.8-percentage-point lead at the end), and that wasn’t a great year for them. For that matter, African American voters were 22% of the early electorate in 2016; at this point they are 20.5% of the electorate. That’s probably not what we would expect in a Democratic wave year when Republicans are being encouraged to vote on Election Day and Democrats are supposedly avoiding it.
The far-left Politico is already sounding the alarm about early voting not looking good for Democrats in Florida.
“Florida Republicans are pouring out of the trenches,” an alarmed Politico writes. “After weeks of Democrats outvoting them by mail, Republican voters stormed early voting precincts in person this week, taking large bites out of their opponents’ historic lead in pre-Election Day ballots.”
One key metric that should very much worry Team Biden: “According to TargetSmart’s analysis, Black voters aged 18 to 29 have cast 15.8 percent of the total ballots so far in Florida. That’s half a percentage point down from the same period in 2016.”
One demographic that capsized Hillary Clinton in 2016 was her inability to bring out the black vote.
What we do know, is that we just don’t know. The media believe they know. They are certain Trump will lose in a humiliating defeat; but the truth is that we just don’t know.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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