In Reply to: Wake me up, when August ends* posted by mh on August 30, 2026 at 09:00:03
According to the new poll, only about five in six Trump voters say they’d support him in a redo election (so 1/6 defect). The defectors are unequally split between switching to Harris, a third-party candidate, or not voting at all — but the full results are due out on Monday, so I can’t share the full topline yet.
And this is no outlier. As mentioned, the Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll found the same level of defection in May 2025. The UMass results also broadly align with the numbers in a poll my company, Wave Polling and Research, conducted for a client in February 2026 — and also in a new survey we put out today.
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And Harry Enten remains a bad "data guru".
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CNN’s Harry Enten cherry-picked results of a UMass Amherst poll to claim Trump would win a redo election. Enten erred in that (a) the particular UMass poll he cited at the time was an outlier and (b) he only looked at the Trump -> Harris switchers, and not at Trump voters who might pick a third-party option or not vote at all, and he ignored what non-voters would do. Quoting his TV segment here:
“So if there was a repeat, if folks got to be able to redo their vote that they had back in 2024, would the result be any different? I doubt it would be. I doubt it would be or it would still be extremely close. The bottom line is for all this talk of Trump voters regretting their vote, in the numbers, it really just doesn’t show up.”
This was wrong at the time, and is one of the many clips of pundits covering polls early in the second Trump administration that have aged very badly.