Morning Consult Tracking 2024 is a biweekly newsletter analyzing our high-frequency data on the key trends, candidates, voter groups and issues that will decide who controls the White House and Congress in 2025 and beyond.
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Comparing 2024 to 2020
My latest monthly Election Watch report, which publishes tomorrow, focuses on Kamala Harris’ lead against Trump among registered voters, and how that compares to Joe Biden’s lead over Trump at the same point in the 2020 cycle.
As of our latest tracking update, Harris leads Trump by 4 percentage points (48%-44%), compared with an 8-point lead for Biden (49%-41%) during the exact same time frame four years ago.
So Harris is running 1 point behind where Biden was at this time 4 years ago. You’ll need to read tomorrow’s report to understand which voter groups she needs to make up ground with, with a focus on age, race and ideology. But for today’s newsletter, I want to focus on Trump’s number, which is up 3 points from where it was at this time four years ago.
How you interpret this shift says a lot about how you view the race.
Are there still shy Trump voters?
Trump has consistently outperformed his polling margins since he came onto the political scene, but this was especially the case in 2020, when both the 538 average and our own final national survey had him trailing by 8 points, just as he was at this point in our polling four years ago.
He ultimately lost the popular vote by 4 points, and that’s reasonably caused quite a few political observers to scrutinize his margin against Harris now: If Trump is once again outperforming his polling margin by roughly the same amount, then he’s actually tied with Harris right now nationwide — and he’s ahead in the swing states.
But while polling error has broken Trump’s way to date, that doesn’t mean it always will, especially if a heavily studied group — the voters who support Trump but are too shy to say so in surveys — are now actually being captured in public sentiment. There are two big reasons to think we’re now capturing those voters better than we used to.
The first is that we and many other survey research firms are weighting surveys on recalled 2020 vote choice, so the sample reflects Trump’s level of popular-vote support from four years ago.
The second is that, as our own tracking and the broader polling averages have shown, Trump has become more popular during the past year, especially as the Republican presidential primary heated up. He’s more popular than he was during the vast majority of his presidency, and he’s much more popular than he was at this time four years ago.
All of which is to say that maybe there aren’t that many shy Trump voters anymore, portending a more accurate polling cycle.
Since polls were accurately capturing the Democratic share of support in 2020, there’s plenty of reason to believe they’re doing so now. If polls are doing a better job capturing Trump’s actual level of support this time around, we’re looking at another popular-vote margin in the region of 4 percentage points.
Whether that translates into a Harris victory in the Electoral College is a related but distinct question. I’ll have more on that in my next edition of this newsletter.
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Cameron Easley is Morning Consult’s lead analyst for U.S. politics. Prior to moving into his current role, he led Morning Consult's editorial coverage of U.S. politics and elections from 2016 through 2022. Cameron joined Morning Consult from Roll Call, where he was managing editor. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Follow him on Twitter @cameron_easley. Interested in connecting with Cameron to discuss his analysis or for a media engagement or speaking opportunity? Email [email protected].
