Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump found some surprising strength in post-Democratic National Convention polling from key Rust Belt states Saturday.
A series of The Trafalgar Group polls released Saturday show Trump leading in Pennsylvania (47%-45%) and Wisconsin (47%-46%), while working toward a dead-heat tie in Michigan (47%-47%) against Vice President Kamala Harris.
All of the likely general election voter results are within the margins of error, making this an ultra-tight race, but the Trump campaign had predicted a slight post-DNC boost for Harris that apparently has not netted her an advantage in the biggest of the Democrat-controlled battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The other battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina have traditionally been far more Republican-leaning in presidential elections.
Trafalgar has historically been more of a GOP-leaning pollster, but its ability to accurately call past presidential election cycles has been based on being able to get to Republican respondents other mainstream media polls do not reach.
Saturday's battleground polls had more than 1,000 likely general election respondents in each of the three states:
- Pennsylvania: 1,082 respondents
- Michigan: 1,089 respondents
- Wisconsin: 1083 respondents
Each of the polls had margins of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.
The RealClear Politics polling average now includes those polls by state, making the average of the polls in the races:
While the composite of the polls give Harris an apparent edge, the polls are skewed by the Bloomberg/Morning Consult results. The contrast is most stark in the key battleground of Wisconsin, where all of the polls in the average have it a 1-point race to either side, but Bloomberg/Morning Consult has Harris up by 8 points.
The skew is repeated in each of the other two battlegrounds, too. Bloomberg/Morning Consult and The Hill have Harris up by 3 points in Michigan. And Bloomberg/Morning Consult has her up by 4 points in Pennsylvania.
Without that skew of the data in the average, Trump would lead all three states and show polling in line with The Trafalgar Group's comprehensive findings Saturday.