Donald Trump Goes Longest Stretch Without Leading National Poll

Former President Donald Trump has gone 12 days without leading a national poll, marking his longest stretch without being in the lead.
The former president last lead his opponent Kamala Harris in a national poll on September 22, according to FiveThirtyEight. Before September 22, the longest stretch Trump had gone without leading a national poll was 11 days, between August 14 and August 25.
Newsweek has contacted the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment via email.
The last national poll to give Trump a lead was a survey conducted by Quinnipiac University between September 19 and 22, in which he lead the vice president by 1 point when third party candidates were included, on 48 percent to Harris’ 47 percent. In a head to head matchup, the poll showed that the two candidates were tied on 48 percent each. The poll surveyed 1,728 likely voters and had a margin of error of +/- 2.4 percentage points.
Since September 22, polls have shown Harris leading Trump by up to 7 points.
Following Harris’ entrance into the race on July 21, the majority of polls conducted have shown her in the lead, with only a handful giving Trump the lead. His biggest lead so far in a poll conducted after July 21 was in a survey conducted by the Harvard University Center for American Political Studies and HarrisX between July 26 and 28 which put him 4 points ahead among 2,196 registered voters—a lead just outside of the poll’s margin of error of +/- 2.1 percentage points.
Polls conducted since then by the Harvard University Center for American Political Studies and HarrisX have shown Trump and Harris tied. Meanwhile, surveys conducted since by other pollsters have shown Trump with a narrow lead of between 1 and 3 points.
Altogether, 27 polls have shown Trump leading Harris since July 21, with the majority of those being published in the final week of July. Since the beginning of August, only 11 polls have given Trump a lead, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Overall, FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker shows that Harris is 2.7 points ahead of Trump, on 48.5 percent to his 45.8 percent as of Friday.
Pollster Nate Silver’s survey also puts Harris in the lead by 3.4 points, while RealClearPolitics gives Harris a 2.2 point lead. At this time in 2020, RealClearPolitics put Biden 8 points ahead of Trump.
But although the vice president may be on track to win the popular vote, it is less certain that she will win the Electoral College.
In his newsletter, Silver last week wrote that his model showed the Electoral College is a toss up.
“As of Thursday, our forecast is that Kamala Harris is a 3:1 favorite in the popular vote—but the Electoral College is basically still a toss-up. That’s because the model figures there’s a 20 percent chance that Harris wins the popular but loses the Electoral College, but only a 0.3 percent chance of the same thing happening to Donald Trump,” he wrote.
In early September, Silver’s model had predicted that Trump had more than 60 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.
FiveThirtyEight’s model currently shows Harris is predicted to win the popular vote and the Electoral College with 282 votes to Trump’s 256.
But the election will ultimately come down to what happens in the seven swing states, which are currently very close.
FiveThirtyEight’s model as well as Nate Silver’s model show that Harris is predicted to win in four swing states—Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin—while Trump is predicted to win in Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona. Both candidates are leading by very slim margins of between 1 and 3 points in the swing states.
“Slim margins in the swing states make this cycle’s presidential race the closest in decades—the outcome could be closer than in any election in nearly 150 years,” FiveThirtyEight wrote on its website.