AtlasIntel, which was known for having correct national polls in 2020, just put out new numbers for the 2024 race. And boy, are they a mouthful.
The study shows that Donald Trump is ahead of Kamala Harris by three points across the country. Trump has 50.7% of the vote, while Harris has 47.6%.
If you compare Trump to Kamala, he has 50.8% of the vote to her 48.1%.
It looks like this is very good news for Donald Trump in the last few weeks of the campaign. A big lead like this in the national general vote is thought to mean that he will win the Electoral College by a huge margin.
Nate Silver says that Trump has a 100% chance of winning if he has a 2-3 point lead across the country.
When you look more closely at the data by state, there are real concerns about how reliable these numbers are.
What’s really bothering people is that Trump’s national lead doesn’t match up with figures from battleground states. If Trump really does have a two- to three-point lead across the country, he should be doing much better in swing states than this poll shows.
Instead, the poll shows that Harris is still ahead by a small margin in a number of important swing states, such as North Carolina and Wisconsin. It’s not possible that a GOP candidate could have a strong lead across the country if they didn’t also sweep or dominate in these key states.
As you look more closely at the individual state results, things become even stranger. In head-to-head races, the poll finds that Trump is ahead by 2.5 points in Pennsylvania, 2.9 points in Michigan, and 1.7 points in Georgia. In states like Arizona and North Carolina, Harris is ahead by small margins. It doesn’t look like these numbers add up. This is one reason why it doesn’t seem likely that Georgia would run ahead of North Carolina and behind Michigan and Pennsylvania.
It’s also odd that Trump has the biggest leads in Michigan and Pennsylvania. If he had a big lead in these states, it makes sense that he would do better in Wisconsin, where AtlasIntel has Kamala slightly ahead.
