Swing State Polls Create False Sense Of Security In 2024

We are down to the final two months before the presidential election, and the race is still up for grabs. Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are planning a mad dash to the finish line, but the real race only comes down to just a handful of swing states. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

We're down to the final two months before the presidential election and the race is up for grabs. Both the Harris and the Trump campaigns are planning a mad dash to the finish line, but the real race only comes down to just a handful of swing states. I've got Farron Cousins with me to talk about that. Farron, it is a mad dash. Your seeing, God, the money, the money for both parties, we're gonna talk about that today, but I've never seen this amount of money being pumped in an election like this. I guess I have, but it's been a while.

Oh yeah.

I think it was Bush where you saw this huge surge in the last eight or nine weeks. Anyway, so what's up with the swing states right now?

Well, we don't know, to be perfectly honest.

That's what I thought.

It depends on which poll you look at because we've got some polls that show that, oh, Harris has pulled ahead in six of the seven. Other polls showed, nope, she's only ahead in three. Trump is winning in the other four.

You can't make any sense out of it, can you?

No poll is giving us the same result as the other polls. And look, we talked about this in the runup to 2020. Remember we were covering the polls every week, mostly due to the fact that none of this is consistent. None of this seems to be reliable.

No, it doesn't. It's not. It's like, doesn't it remind you of the Hillary cycle?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. Hillary, oh, she's gonna win. The polls are showing she's gonna win. She's ahead in the swing states, everything's good. And then Donald Trump, of course, Hillary wins popular vote by 3 million votes. Swing states kill her. This has that feel right now. I'm telling you, it really does have that feel.

I think the only difference, and I think the Harris campaign's aware of this is what Hillary did was nothing. She didn't go to Wisconsin. She didn't go to Michigan. She's ignoring, oh, oh, I've got this in the bag.

Right.

Just this overall horrible arrogance from that campaign.

Oh, it was terrible.

And I think, I think, Harris's campaign understands, listen, we can't make these mistakes that she made. She destroyed her campaign by taking the voters for granted, by acting like they don't matter. And this guy was out there at some points doing two and three rallies per day.

The energy was amazing.

Now he doesn't have it this time.

Yeah. But I gotta tell you something, I feel the same kind of things I'm seeing with the polls. The Democrats obviously, their Democrat folks want everybody to believe everything's okay, which I think is a mistake. I think they ought to do just the opposite. They shouldn't be saying, your candidate is ahead. They should be saying, your candidate is in trouble. Your candidate needs your help. Go out there and do something about it. Same way with Trump. They feel like, oh my God, if we put a poll up there and it shows you're ahead, then you've won the election. It's just ridiculous kind of thinking. But you see it every time. These pollsters, I've never even heard of most of them, Farron. They're popping up like little weasels all over the place and they're a name you've never heard. Well, I did a poll. And the poll shows that my person Harris is ahead, or my person Trump is ahead. I don't think it helps to say you're ahead. I think you want to say, this is a tough race. We're not ahead and we gotta do something about it.

Right. And you're absolutely right about these really random groups popping up like, hey, look at our poll, because I've read so many of those and say, well, who did this? Who the hell is this?

Exactly.

You've got these random universities that are not known for doing polls putting out these polls and survey. Monmouth, they've been doing it for decades. They get it. Reuters and AP, I trust them. Everybody else is a little off.