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Why Trump is polling better in Georgia than North Carolina: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.

In today’s edition, national political correspondent examines Donald Trump's standing in the polls in two key southern battlegrounds. Plus, national political reporter Ben Kamisar breaks down the growing number of voters who plan to cast their ballots early.

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Why Trump is polling better in Georgia than North Carolina

By Steve Kornacki

The latest round of New York Times/Siena College state polls is a continuation of what has become a pattern: Donald Trump seems to be faring slightly better in Georgia than in North Carolina.

In the Times/Siena surveys, Trump is ahead of Kamala Harris by 4 points among likely voters in Georgia, a state Joe Biden took by 0.3 points in 2020. And Trump is up by 2 points in North Carolina, where he prevailed by 1.3 points four years ago. (Both results are within the margin of error.) Other polls have found similar results, as reflected in the current averages from several aggregators. And Democrats are now making a push to link Trump to the GOP’s scandal-plagued nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, in hopes of damaging his standing in North Carolina.

The findings might seem counterintuitive. While the two battleground states are demographically similar, it’s Georgia where Democrats have made more substantial strides in the Trump era. From the 2016 to the 2020 elections, the Peach State had a net shift of 5.4 points away from the GOP. In North Carolina, that shift was 2.3 points.

That disparity seems logical enough. African Americans make up a higher share of Georgia’s electorate, and the rapidly growing and increasingly Democratic Atlanta metro area accounts for a larger share of the statewide vote than North Carolina’s two major metro areas (Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham). These are core ingredients for Democratic success.

And yet — at least in polling — it’s Georgia, not North Carolina, where Trump seems better positioned. So what’s going on?

Obviously, since we’re not talking about massive differences in the polls results, statistical noise and random sampling error could play a role. And it could be that the polls are spot-on and that Trump really has made recent gains in Georgia that he hasn’t matched in North Carolina.

An intriguing possibility, though, involves a version of the polling errors we’ve seen most dramatically in the northern battleground states the past two presidential elections. In 2016 and 2020, polling was off the most in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. These states are chock-full of Trump’s core demographic — white voters without four-year college degrees — and, for a variety of potential reasons, polls missed the full extent of their support for Trump.

The possibility looms that a similar demographic-specific polling miss could play out again this time. Now, consider the share of the adult population that white residents without four-year degrees account for in each of the key battleground states:

As you can see, North Carolina has the highest concentration of noncollege white residents outside of the three northern states — and 7 points higher than Georgia, which has the lowest concentration. According to exit polling, Trump won the noncollege white vote in each state by roughly the same margin in 2020: 59 points in Georgia and 57 points in North Carolina.

So if a similar polling miss is again playing out, it could mean the full level of Trump’s Tar Heel State support is being missed more than in Georgia.

In fact, we might have seen this happen in 2020. In the final FiveThirtyEight average back then, Trump trailed in North Carolina by 1.8 points, but ended up winning the state by 1.3 points — a polling miss of 3.1 points. By contrast, FiveThirtyEight’s final average had Trump down by 1.2 points in Georgia, which he then lost by 0.3 — a miss of just 0.9 points.

Of course, for all we know, polls this time around may not have the same problem when it comes to white voters without college degrees. For that matter, they may end up having an entirely different kind of demographic blind spot, one that only becomes apparent on Election Night. But since it has happened twice before, it’s worth keeping in mind that if the problem does persist, it could have implications not just in the northern battlegrounds, but in the Sun Belt, too.

Half of voters plan to cast ballots early, with a huge partisan split

By Ben Kamisar

Half of registered voters plan to vote early this fall, new figures from the September NBC News poll show, with Democrats running up the score among early voters and Republicans getting stronger backing from those who plan to vote in person on Election Day.

Fifty-one percent of voters say they’ll vote early, either by mail or in person, with Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump 61%-35% (a 26-point margin) among those voters.

By comparison, Trump leads by 20 points, 57%-37%, with the group of voters who plan to vote on Election Day, which accounts for 45% of the electorate in the poll. It’s a smaller lead among a slightly smaller share of the electorate than Harris has over those early voters.

“Either the margin has to close among [those] voting early, or Republican margins on Election Day have to be bigger than this to win,” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the NBC News poll with Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates.

The massive political difference of early and Election Day voters is the latest evidence of a dramatic and enduring shift in the Trump years.

In the final NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls of the 2012 and 2016 cycles, majorities said they planned to vote on Election Day, not early.

The surveys showed Democrats holding smaller leads with early voters both election cycles (then-President Barack Obama led by 8 points in 2012 and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by 14 points in 2016), while the Election Day vote was virtually tied in both instances.

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