It’s finally happened

| 10:55 pm EDT August 7, 2024
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Polls are only one indicator of who’s winning an election, and an increasingly unreliable one. It’s always less wise to rely on any one poll, and more wise to look at the overall polling averages. In that regard, we’ve just hit a milestone.

As one individual poll after another has trended in the direction of Kamala Harris, we’ve already seen her take the lead in the weighted polling averages at FiveThirtyEight (now owned by ABC) and Nate Silver’s new outfit. But Donald Trump was still stubbornly clinging to an increasingly narrow lead in the RealClearPolitics flat average of recent major polls. Not anymore.

Kamala Harris has now taken a 0.5 point lead over Trump in the RCP polling average. This is notable because RCP includes silly right wing polls like Rasmussen, which other major polling averages tend to de-weight or omit. But even with Rasmussen hilariously claiming that Trump is five points ahead, the other new polls showing Harris ahead are enough to finally push Harris into the RCP lead. If you remove Rasmussen from the RCP average, Harris’ lead becomes bigger than 0.5 points.

As always, this is just one indicator. But it’s worth noting that Trump had been ahead of Biden in the RCP average all year, and yet now Harris is ahead of Trump in the RCP average. This is increasingly looking like a sea change.