How much trouble is Donald Trump in? They’re already polling what the race would look like without him.

| 9:09 am EDT August 5, 2024
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One of the odd caveats about political analysis is that people who are experts at one thing tend to be bad at everything else. For instance the people who are the best at looking at the data and rating the competitive races are generally pretty bad at trying to explain why the data says what it says; they just excel at knowing what to do with the data.

Then there are the political betting sites, who somehow always manage to have betting odds that are nonsensical. As much as sports betting lines are based in reality, political betting lines always sound like they come from someone who started following politics yesterday.
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Then there are the polls themselves, which have a hard time being particularly accurate even when they’re being done honestly, and now we’re besieged with partisan polls that don’t even seem to be trying to get it right. It’s all one big mess, and it’s why you have to run all political polling and prognostication through a BS filter in order to make any useful sense out of it.

All that said, there is an interesting phenomenon going on right now. Some major pollsters aren’t just polling Kamala Harris against Donald Trump. They’re also polling Kamala Harris against JD Vance. That’s not a typo. This isn’t some kind of running mate thing. They’re polling to see what the race will look like if Vance, and not Trump, ends up being the Republican nominee for President.

This doesn’t mean that pollsters know anything that you don’t. In fact pollsters often seem to know less than you do about what’s really going on in politics – and that’s scary. Do they really think Trump is going to drop out with ninety days to go, given that he’s going to prison if he loses? Do they not understand how difficult it would be for Trump to replace Vance after the convention, and the legal challenges it would invite?

If anything, these Harris vs Vance polls are borne out of gossip. Awhile back pollsters heard that President Biden was in trouble, so they started polling Donald Trump against Kamala Harris. Even though Biden did end up exiting the race, those Trump vs. Kamala polls still ended up being silly, as the numbers looked totally different once Kamala actually entered the race.

So no, I don’t think it’s a big deal that Kamala Harris is polling even better against JD Vance than she’s polling against Donald Trump. At this point an old boot would probably poll better than JD Vance (which is another reason why Republicans won’t be eager to push Trump out no matter how far he falls behind Harris).

But I do think it’s a big deal that we’ve reached the point where pollsters are now latching onto the narrative that Donald Trump is in so much trouble, he might not even necessarily be the candidate. To say that the tables have turned is to put it mildly.

Remember, we don’t just want to win. We want to win by a big enough margin to make any Republican cheating antics irrelevant. And we want to win by a big enough margin to give President Kamala Harris a House and Senate majority. So let’s keep working at it, no matter what the numbers say. But yeah, when they’re already polling what the race might look like without Trump, he’s in serious trouble.