Vice President Kamala Harris maintains a clear lead in the swing state of Wisconsin, according to the latest poll from Marquette University Law School, although the survey’s director is cautioning against reading too much into the results.
The survey, released on Wednesday, found the vice president ahead by 4 points (52 percent to 48 percent) in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup against former President Donald Trump. The poll was conducted between September 18 to 26, and is based on the responses of 882 registered voters.
It’s a good sign for Harris, who held the same lead–52 percent to 48 percent–over Trump in a Marquette University Law School poll released on September 11. But the poll director, Charles Franklin, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the “results could change” between now and Election Day on November 5, noting that the pollster was off by several percentage points in the 2020 election.
“Remember–not that I really want to remind you–but we were off by four points last time in 2020,” Franklin told the paper in a report published Wednesday. “We were off by over six in 2016.”
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“So fair warning, these results could change,” he added. “We could be wrong, on the other hand, we could be right.”
Pollsters had adapted their methodologies since the 2016 and 2020 elections, where Trump underperformed in surveys nationwide. For example, while Trump was found trailing President Joe Biden by 8.4 percentage points on average in the final days of the 2020 election, the former president lost the race by a much slimmer overall margin (4.4 percent).
Similarly, in 2016, Trump was found behind then-Democratic nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by 3.9 percentage points on average on Election Day, per FiveThirtyEight’s tracking. Trump, however, went on to defeat Clinton despite losing the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points.
Marquette Law School’s last poll before election day in 2020 found Biden ahead by 5 percentage points on Trump (48 percent to 43 percent). But the president went on to win the state by roughly 20,000 votes, less than 1 percent of the total votes cast.
Many pollsters have been proactive about adapting their polling methods to better capture Trump’s support since. Ipsos President Cliff Young previously told Newsweek that his poll has adjusted its sample collection by drawing from voter registration databased instead of using randomized lists of telephone numbers, making it easier to ensure that rural voters are counted in the survey.
Today, Harris is up by 1.8 percentage points on average above Trump in Wisconsin, according to FiveThirtyEight. Experts have said that the former president’s better polling may not be a sign he is actually building momentum in the state, however, instead a reflection of pollsters utilizing better methods.
Franklin told Newsweek in an email Tuesday afternoon that the full scope of Wisconsin’s race will likely not take shape until November 5, given that the state also has same-day voter registration.
“It then takes several months before election clerks ‘purge’ the rolls of people who moved or reregistered in new places or become inactive due to failure to vote in several elections,” he added. “As a result, the number of registrants drops in the winter after the election. Registered voters will certainly rise by November. But how much? We don’t know.”
Newsweek reached out to Franklin over email for additional comment on Wednesday.
