Voting intentions

It might have been the pollsters that lost it for Kamala. Her team probably believed them, and let them shape strategy too much. Her remarkable surge as Biden stepped aside in July suggested late entrance to the campaign was not a big problem. And her policy-lite 'joy' approach to speech-making kept her ahead, if only just, up until polling day. One big new-ish idea, controls on retailers to stop alleged 'food price gouging' came a matter of days after a rifle shot damaged Trump's ear. The Harris team must have picked up something of the real problems of the working-class. It moved Kamala up to 49% in the polling averages, which is more or less where she stayed until the end of the campaign. 

Her fundraising may, some think, have created a feeling of familiarity breeding contempt. The millions poured in, and were eventually shared with Democratic campaigns for the Senate and House. The impact on tv viewers in swing states was more than relentless.  

So how come, from the massed ranks of pollsters predicting Harris 48% and Trump 47%, did we get to an outcome of Harris 47.5% and Trump 50.8% ?   Remember, in 2020, Biden secured 51.3%, and Trump 46.9%; Kamala lost the support of 13.3m people who voted for Biden four years ago. 

The British pollsters JL Partners nudged Trump ahead on their polling from 1st October; they claim they got it righter than most through a number of techniques. They believe they reached more young working class voters by 'in-game' surveys, offering bonus points for completed surveys to those in love with online video consoles; they believe they stuck with surveys that showed young blacks and young Latinos happy with Trump, where old-school pollsters modelled them out as obvious blips. And they believe they included fewer old style online surveys, arguing that they favoured posh people working from home. 

Whatever really happened, the Kamala dream is over. You need more than the plot of a novella for a smiley, likeable, occasionally feisty black woman to move into the White House. She needed policies, and, maybe through loyalty or a misreading of polls, they didn't moved far enough from Biden's.