Kamala Harris is clearly surging. Why don't the polls reflect that?

Some thoughts

It isn’t as if this is a mirage. Or good-vibe hype.

Kamala Harris’ rip-roaring rallies are sold out to the rafters. Her campaign has an embarrassing lead over the Donald Trump camp in fund-raising. Tens of thousands of volunteers have signed up to help her cause.

And just last week an NBC poll recorded a 16-point leap in “favorability” for Harris, the largest jump since President George Bush after 9/11.

Meanwhile, videos of Trump rally-goers leaving early, while he is still pontificating, appear daily. There have been a steady stream of inappropriate, nutso comments and rants. Hard to believe “They’re eating the pets,” is part of a presidential election.

But there’s more than the usual Trump circus. Here’s Hugo Lowell’s podcast on the Harris-Trump debate. Lowell, a well-connected Guardian political reporter, says Trump’s people told him the debate was “a disaster.” And Lowell adds, the campaign’s “ground game,” the people who knock on doors and hand out fliers, is way behind schedule and understaffed.

It’s not just that Trump talks like a crazy person, his campaign is as slipshod and disorganized as his debate preparation, which Lowell says consisted of sitting around with Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard, riffing on topics.

And yet, the polls remain unmoved. Here’s a CNN story from Tuesday, with the headline “Harris and Trump locked in exceeding close presidential race.”

You hear some version of it every day. Too close to call. It’s all about the undecided voters. Could win the Electoral College by a single vote.

It has become exasperating in some quarters. (Including this one.)

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller had Amy Walter of the Cook Political report on his podcast last week. Miller nudged Walter more than once to acknowledge that Harris is surging and is likely in the lead.

But she stuck with the 50-50ism, comparing the two campaigns to football teams, each on the goal line, with an essentially equal chance to make it to the end zone. In subsequent podcasts, Miller admitted the commitment to the middle frustrated him.

Or here’s MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle with a clinical takedown of NYT’s Bret — I just need more information on Kamala — Stephens. (Click the image and it will take you to the video. Be sure to watch to the end to see’s Ruhle’s final zinger.

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In seems impossible, with clear and present evidence, that the polls would not reflect a Kamala-nado. So why don’t they?

Let me answer that.

I have no idea.

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However, I do have a theory. If you’d like to take a spin down Speculation Highway, jump on board.

First, let’s acknowledge that polling sites are predicting the future. They’ll say they are just offering a snapshot in time as to where things stand.

But the brutal truth is, when the election comes, your poll had better match what actually happened. You have to get it right.

And what you really, really don’t want it to get it wrong. If your firm swings and misses in, say, two election cycles, you may be finished. What’s the point of following an expert recommendation if it keeps turning out to be wrong?

And in 2016, that happened. Celebrity pollster Nate Silver, had Hillary Clinton at 71 percent probability to win and he’s been hearing about it ever since. His defense, at least part of it, is that other pollsters were even more wrong.

The result, called a “spectacular faceplant” in the above story, had to have repercussions. There were stories about the “death of data,” and questions if polling was even worth paying attention to.

So I don’t think it is out of the realm of possibility that the takeaway for pollsters from that shocking result was that it is better to stay in the squishy, comfy middle — Amy Waltering with two teams on the goal line — than it is to get over your skis and predict someone has a double digit lead.

Now, am I saying they are putting a thumb on the scale, intentionally undermining their results?

Absolutely not.

But let’s remember how these polls work. They don’t poll every voter in a state. There’s a name for doing that — an election.

Instead, they’re talking to, say, 1,000 people. But they don’t say “550 of those people say they are going to vote for Harris, therefore 55 percent of the electorate is for Harris.”

Instead, you’ve got to decide how to weigh the responses you get. In 2016, it was pretty clear Trump supporters were hard to reach and not likely to take a survey. So they were under-valued.

In subsequent elections, Trump backers have been given more weight. And that’s not all. Consider this grain of salt from a Vox story this summer.

“An open secret about all election models, from Nate Silver’s to that of the New York Times, is that they involve a hefty sprinkling of expert judgment. Yes, they make a lot of use of polling, but how to weight each poll, how much movement to build in, and how to weight the polls against economic fundamentals are all judgmental calls. I disagree with people who call election prediction more of an art than a science, but only because I think they’re mistaken about how many judgment calls go into science.”

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Or as Justin Grimmer, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution wrote in Politico, under the headline “Don’t trust the election forecasts:

“. . . how forecasters use “fundamentals” — factors like the state of the economy, the party currently in the White House or the president’s approval rating. Forecasters have to decide what factors to include in their model and which prior presidential elections are relevant for fitting their model.”

Which is a nerdy way of saying there’s a little of wiggle room for the numbers.

Also, this is less likely to move the polls, but I think it is still a factor — political media love to keep the horse race alive. A sense of suspense gives opinions, takes and columns spice.

It is kind of amazing how pundits do backbends to fit the narrative.

For instance, I’ll bet you’ve heard 100 pointy-headed experts say that, at the Republican National Convention, Trump was “cruising to victory.”

And yet, that’s not what I remember hearing then. It was that the race is too close to call. It was only after President Biden dropped out and the race changed that we heard that, apparently, Trump had it in the bag back then.

So, what do we conclude? That there’s no way to get a sense of when a political race stands? That the polling system is either broken, or too timid to tell us much?

Actually, there is an alternative.

Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern, nailed the 2020 election and says he can call 2024 too.

And he’s doing it by . . . tracking gambling.

With the explosion of legal betting, there are any number of sites where you can bet on political outcomes. Miller thinks that produces much more reliable information than a poll that talks to 800 people.

In a story in Newsweek, Miller says polls typically survey small samples of the population and they don't capture shifting voter sentiments accurately.

"I don't rely on polls. I rely on prediction markets," Miller said. "A political prediction market is a leading indicator of what will happen in an election. People are putting their money down, which means they believe something's going to happen in the future."

To say Miller is bullish on Harris is an understatement. He’s looking at specific moments, the debate, the Taylor Swift endorsement, and says he can see the markets tick up immediately.

Before Biden dropped out, Miller was seeing money going to Trump.

Not any more. He’s all Kamala, all the time.

It's a landslide," he said. "It's going to be a landslide."

I agree. Despite what the polls say, I think she wins and she wins big.

Wanna bet?

Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Twitter: @cwnevius Threads: @cwnevius