The time has officially come to pump the brakes on Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential hype train.
On Thursday, Rasmussen released a poll showing former President Donald Trump with a 7-point lead over Harris (50 percent to 43 percent) in a head-to-head contest nationwide.
Since President Joe Biden’s strangely abrupt withdrawal from the presidential race on Sunday, the establishment media has worked overtime to manufacture enthusiasm for the unimpressive vice president.
With the help of their latest hoax, those efforts at times have appeared to give Republicans some reasons for concern.
Without creating complacency, however, the new Rasmussen poll should provide some reassurance that the presidential race has not fundamentally changed.
Despite the establishment’s fawning pro-Harris narrative, and despite a slew of polls this week that appeared to suggest a tightening race, the Rasmussen poll deserves special attention.
To understand why, readers should know two things.
First, Rasmussen has a recent history of accuracy far superior to that of nearly all other pollsters.
In fact, from a list of 25 pollsters who conducted polling late in the 2020 presidential election cycle, Rasmussen ranked as the third most accurate, according to Nate Silver of ABC News’ FiveThirtyEight.
Should the GOP handicap Trump’s projected lead because Democrats will cheat?
Furthermore, Silver’s list became relevant again in late June when AtlasIntel, the low-volume pollster that topped the list, released a poll showing Trump leading Biden by 5.2-points nationally.
(Trafalgar Group, the second most accurate pollster from 2020, has not released a poll since March. But that poll showed Trump leading Biden, 43.1 percent – 39.8 percent.)
In other words, within the last month, 2020’s most accurate pollster showed Trump holding a 5.2-point lead. And now, 2020’s third most accurate pollster has shown Trump with a 7-point lead.
Second, Trump’s lead over Harris mirrors results Rasmussen polling has produced for the last five months.
For instance, in early April Rasmussen showed Trump with an 8-point lead over Biden. That was up from a 6-point lead in February.
In May, Rasmussen gave Trump a whopping 10-point lead in a three-way race that included Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
More importantly, Trump’s 7-point lead over Harris actually reflects a July bump for the former president.
On July 12, Rasmussen showed Trump with a 6-point head-to-head lead over Biden. One week later, on July 19, the pollster reported a 3-point Trump lead.
Individual polls, of course, mean little on their own. But patterns and histories tell us a great deal.
In this case, they tell us that the third most accurate pollster from the 2020 presidential election cycle has consistently returned polling results showing Trump with a significant lead nationwide, that the most recent poll conducted by 2020’s most accurate pollster showed the same result, and that Harris’ entrance into the presidential race has changed nothing.
Still yet, conservatives and Republicans would do well to ensure complacency doesn’t set in.
Kamala’s momentum may be a mirage right now, but leftists and Democrats were saying the same thing about Trump in 2016.
