Donald Trump and Kamala Harris remain virtually tied in seven important swing states in the latest survey data from Emerson College Polling, which will be released on Thursday. The poll, released in coordination with The Hill, includes results from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Emerson Polling, which started in 2012 as a classroom exercise, began covering national elections in 2016 and is now cited by many prominent news organizations including The New York Times.
“I’d say [we’re] better well-known sometimes among the national media than [we are] among Emerson even,” Camille Mumford, the director of communications at Emerson Polling, said in an interview with The Beacon.
Compared to the last national election poll from the group, the latest poll shows Trump has lost one point in Arizona and North Carolina while gaining two points in Georgia, wrote Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling in a poll report. Trump retained his same numbers in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada where the candidates are tied. Harris lost a point in Michigan and Nevada while remaining the same in Wisconsin, the report continued. Per the latest report, neither Trump nor Harris has a lead of more than three points in any of the major swing states.
“All of these states are within the poll’s margin of error,” Mumford said. “The [candidates] are within a few points and they haven’t shifted too dramatically post-debate. They are a little different than some of the other polls that are out there who have maybe Harris winning by more.”
Mumford explained that each poll was conducted from 1,000 respondents and has a margin of error of a plus or minus three points, meaning polling numbers like the ones in this week’s swing state poll are too close to call and do not indicate major discrepancies between candidates.
Some other prominent polls this week, like one from Quinnipiac University Polling, put Harris ahead of Trump by a few more points in various states.
Mumford said that she doesn’t give a lot of credence to inconsistencies between Emerson Polling’s results and other polls. The election results provide the ultimate report card on polling methodology, she continued.
“You never really know until the election comes, which is part of the thrill, but also the scary part of it all,” Mumford said. “If a poll doesn’t look like all the rest, it’s an outlier. And I think it’s important still to put those out because you don’t know if it’s right or wrong, maybe everybody else is wrong.”
Emerson Polling is busiest during the election cycle but manages to stay busy year-round with market research and non-political polling.
“We’re still trying to do at least a monthly national poll because it is kind of a 24/7 presidential cycle, at least for the last six years or so,” Mumford said.
Emerson Polling’s national election polls for 2024 use the same questions, which they have used in previous elections too, across their surveys to maintain consistency in the results.
Mumford, who also teaches undergraduate survey research methods as an affiliated faculty member at the college, is responsible for writing the questionnaires that are used in the surveys, as well as making the written releases that Emerson Polling publishes.
Emerson polling uses a mixed-mode methodology of phone calls, emails, text messages, and online panels, Mumford said, but has moved away from the call center model of polling in favor of text and online, which she called “the future of data collection.”
“People don’t communicate on the phone necessarily anymore … So I think that’s what we really emphasize here specifically is evolving as communication evolves,” Mumford said.
The process of creating a poll, which takes about a week, includes weighing the data, where Mumford uses voter registration and census data to ensure the population sample in the survey reflects the overall population of the country or state.
Emerson Polling partners with Nexstar Media Group, who sponsors some of their polls and helps them publish their results as widely as possible, allowing them to disseminate polls through over 200 local news organizations like NewsNation and The Hill, which published ECP’s latest swing state poll.
“If you talk about trust in media in general, which we’ve been tracking [while it is] struggling to some degree, people do still generally trust their local news a little bit more than national news,” Mumford said.
In terms of the bigger picture for the upcoming election, Mumford said that voter turnout is expected to be similar to the 2020 election but that demographic shifts in blue and red states in the latest 10 year census redistricting.
“It’s interesting that if the election was the exact same results as 2020, even with the same exact results in each state, the electoral college would be closer [in 2024],” Mumford said.
Every three weeks Emerson Polling releases a new poll on prominent swing states, and a national poll every month. They plan to release two more national polls before the election on Nov. 5, and a “post-mortem” poll on public opinion after the election.
