Morning Consult Tracking 2024: Trump's Ceiling in the Battleground States

What’s different in 2024

Late last month, I pointed out that the national trends suggested 2024 is shaping up similarly to 2020 on the Democratic side of the aisle, with Harris polling at a similar percentage as then-candidate Joe Biden did four years earlier. 

The main difference is that Trump appears to be in a stronger position, which has led some to conclude that a similarly sized polling error in his direction as in 2020 would put him back in the White House, and is in fact likely this cycle. 

So for this week’s email, I wanted to dig deeper into the battleground states and see whether/how those national trends translate to the Electoral College map. A comparison of our swing-state surveys conducted with Bloomberg News in the five days after last month's Democratic National Convention with our daily tracking surveys from the 10 days that followed DNC 2020 suggest the pattern is very much holding up.

While Harris leads Trump in almost every battleground state we tracked in 2020, in most cases she is running right around where Biden was at a similar point in his own campaign. But the biggest difference, as is the case with his national figures, is that Trump is running ahead of where he was four years ago in key states — especially in Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

So if polls are underestimating Trump’s support in these states to the same extent they did in 2020, then yes, he will win the election. 

But it’s worth considering that his latest percentages are also within a point or so of his support from 2020, when he lost each of those three states and the election with it. After all, it’s hard to win elections when your support ceiling in the most critical states is less than a majority. And, as I argued last week, there are strong reasons to believe that a larger share of “shy Trump” voters are already priced into these swing-state numbers than in 2020.

Given his electoral record, surveys showing Trump support in the high 40s look credible. That means we’re in for another very tight contest in November — but one that has Trump playing the role of underdog once again.