Donald Trump and Kamalah Harris are running neck and neck in swing states and nationally in 2024. Who is the favorite going into the final weeks of the race? According to new county-level Pennsylvania polling, the former president is leading.
According to a Cygnal survey sponsored by The Daily Wire and conducted by Cygnal, Trump is leading in the bellwether counties Erie and Northampton. These counties were won by the winner of the 2008 and 2012 elections. They also held the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Since 2008, Erie County and Northampton have always voted for the winning party. They voted for President Barack Obama in 2008, 2012, Donald Trump in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020. Pennsylvania is one of the key battleground states for the 2024 elections, with most polls showing that Trump and Harris are statistically tied.
According to the Cygnal poll, Trump leads in swing districts by only one percent, 49-48.
The pollster concluded that traditional Democrat voters who view Harris as radical are now turning to Trump. The pollster wrote that the Democrats had a 4-point advantage in party registrations. This is evidence that these ancestral Democrats are increasingly leaving their party of forefathers.
I’ve already laid out my case, but I will do so again. Whoever wins Pennsylvania will likely win the election. Analysts can play around with the map and swap out one state for another, but if an individual nominee does not win The Keystone State they will likely lose Michigan and Wisconsin. The Trump campaign, and its PACs, have spent more money in Pennsylvania than anywhere else.
It is a good sign that Trump leads in these counties less than four weeks before election day, even if it’s by a small margin. In early August, some believed that Harris would take the lead and create a situation more like 2020 when Biden consistently outpaced Trump in both swing states and nationally. The race went the other direction, with Trump regaining his lead in several key states, and the race remaining extremely tight on the national level where Republicans have an advantage.
It’s quite remarkable when you stop to think about it. Trump was criminally convicted of obstruction of justice in New York by a partisan prosecutor, who used a legal theory that had never been tried before to convince one of the nation’s most biased judges. He was almost assassinated twice and escaped a third attempt one month later. A federal indictment was filed against him, and the special prosecutor tried to have the “evidence released” right before the election. He’s still in a close race, and it’s hard to believe he doesn’t have the edge.
The conventional wisdom says that Trump will win if he is just a few points behind in the national polls. At this point, he doesn’t need to make the same huge polling mistakes that we saw in both 2016 and 2020. Is there any way, at this stage, to change the race’s current state? It’s hard to imagine. Trump is the world’s most well-known commodity, and as people learn more about Harris, they become less fond of her. There is no doubt about it. It’s going to be a thrilling election night.
