CNN's Final Garbage Poll
Few Original Insights, But A Few Key Confirmations
Of the major public polls, there is no doubt that CNN’s is pretty much a garbage poll. Their final national poll for the 2024 Presidential Election absolutely lives down to that expectation.
CNN polling has found a tight race throughout the short campaign between Harris and Trump. In September, likely voters split 48% for Harris and 47% for Trump, nearly identical to the new poll, and a poll just after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race over the summer and threw his support behind Harris found 49% of registered voters behind Trump, with 46% backing Harris.
In other news, CNN found that water was wet and the sun actually does rise in the east.
While the poll overall conveys little original information, it does offer up a few tantalizing confirmations of other polls, and as such may reinforce a message of momentum for Donald Trump that it did not intend.
As CNN’s presser about their own poll highlighted, their survey shows the election knotted up, with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump tied with each other. However, what CNN neglects to point out is the near certain influence of the third party candidates such as the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the Libertarian Party’s Chase Oliver.
We can be certain that the third party candidates are highly likely to play a spoiler role, because CNN’s margin of error in the poll is 3.1pp.
The study was conducted for CNN via web and telephone on the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel of U.S. adults ages 18 or older recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. SSRS is an independent research company. Surveys were obtained October 20-23, 2024, with a representative sample of n=1,704 registered voters. The margin of sampling error for registered voters is +/- 3.18 at the 95% confidence level (design effect: 1.79). The margin of sampling error for likely voters is +/- 3.10 at the 95% confidence level (design effect: 1.71).
With cumulative 3rd party poll support at 4pp, there is a very good chance third party votes will be the difference between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris winning in multiple states.
As I discussed previously in my comparison of AtlasIntel’s Wisconsin and Pennsylvania state polls, we already see an outsized potential for a third-party “spoiler” effect.
Although CNN does not spend any time exploring the ramifications of this fringe support for third party candidates, their poll numbers nevertheless align with what we see in the AtlasIntel poll. Confluence of this sort may be fairly taken as a measure of confirmation.
Perhaps the most interesting result reported by the CNN poll is its measure of voter negativity—i.e., the degree to which voters are voting against a candidate rather than for the other candidate.
Almost half of Kamala Harris supporters say they are not so much voting for Kamala Harris as against Donald Trump.
Among Donald Trump supporters, nearly three-quarters of them are voting for Donald Trump, rather than against Kamala Harris.
This poll data probably explains why Kamala Harris continues to pile on with direct attacks on Donald Trump, such as repeating again and again that he is a fascist.
“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” host Anderson Cooper asked Harris.
“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” she replied.
Later, she used the word herself to refer to Trump for the first time in public, saying voters care about “not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
With half of her supporters in her camp simply because they dislike Donald Trump, it is pretty certain that she has largely failed to generate any significant enthusiasm for her campaign. This late in the race, going negative may seem to her the only option she has left.
By comparison, although Donald Trump has not been shy about about leveling his own bombastic broadsides against Kamala Harris, he is the clear beneficiary of a much greater level of voter enthusiasm for his campain. Just that level of positive energy emanating from his campaign is enough to establish a firm narrative of momentum for his candidacy but not for hers.
CNN rounds out its ballyhooing of the blatant by affirming yet again that most Americans think the state of the Union is pretty bad.
Equally unsurprisingly, only 16% of those polled by CNN felt their economic situation had improved under the (Biden-)Harris Administration.
With nearly half of those surveyed saying their finanancial situation has deteriorated, it does not take a data scientist to understand why nearly 70% of respondents feel things are heading off the rails in this country.
None of this is, of course, new insight or information. AtlasIntel reported in its latest nationwide poll that voters are not at all happy about the state of the economy at the very least.
Moreover, the RCP polling aggregates have been reporting all year that more than 60% of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track and that a change is needed.
Remember, when we looked at the AtlasIntel nationwide poll, those results show Kamala Harris is being percieved as Joe Biden 2.0.
Unlike polls such as the AtlasIntel polls, which take care to present the data in a format which invites scrutiny and analysis, CNN scatters its poll results through a hodgepodge of historical polling data that is completely irrelevant to the current election cycle. Once this election is over, almost all of the current crop of polls will be strictly of historical interest only, just as is the case with every election cycle’s polling data. It makes zero sense to include over a decade of historical data in the various poll metrics—if one wishes to invite scrutiny and analysis.
Burying the poll responses under pages and pages of such meangless data is an excellent way to encourage people to simply focus on the headline numbers and not bother with the poll’s internals. This is exactly what CNN does.
That is a shame. Even this CNN poll, when placed alongside the other independently conducted polls, confirms some meaningful elements about this election. We can see that the third party candidates are likely to play a significant role in the election, potentiall tilting one or more of the battleground states to either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. We can see that this is an election cycle may be characterized by an electorate that has a fairly high level of anger—the phrase “seething with rage” might be something of an exaggeration, but probably by less than many would be comfortable admitting.
By confirming the degree to which Kamala Harris has focused her campaign around negative attacks on Donald Trump, we can also see the degree to which momentum and voter enthusiasm are tilting steadily towards Trump and away from Harris.
While CNN counts the race as dead even between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, that Harris’ campaign looks to be sinking while Trump’s campaign is rising still means the advantage in this race goes towards Trump, even with the headline poll results showing just a tie.
It's unfortunate that our country is so divided on such important issues.
“In other news, CNN found that water was wet and the sun actually does rise in the east.” Hee hee. Peter, if I were the kind of person who sat swilling martinis in a swank bar all night, you’d be the wry commentator I’d want to swill with. We’d laugh ourselves stupid.
And I’m already thinking about how I want to celebrate on Nov 6. Maybe I’ll just walk around town and smile smugly at all the Woke idiots who are tearing their hair out at how our nation has just been taken over by Hitler. Fools - watch how things improve!
But we can’t get complacent, and it ain’t over until the last disputed ballot is counted. So vote! As the Democrats say, “vote early, and vote often!”