Welcome to the online edition of From the Politics Desk, a nightly newsletter where the NBC News politics team brings you the latest reporting and analysis from the campaign, the White House and Congress.
In today’s edition, our national political reporters examine where Donald Trump stands in the polls in two key battleground states in the South. Plus, national political reporter Ben Camisar analyzes the growing number of voters who plan to vote early.
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Why Trump’s approval rating is higher in Georgia than in North Carolina
Steve Kornacki
The latest state poll, conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, is a continuation of what has been a pattern: Donald Trump appears to be doing slightly better in Georgia than he is in North Carolina.
The Times/Siena poll gives Trump a 4-point lead over Kamala Harris among Georgia voters, a state Joe Biden won by 0.3 points in 2020. And Trump has a 2-point lead in North Carolina, a state he won by 1.3 points four years ago. (Both results are within the margin of error.) Other polls have shown similar results, and are reflected in the latest averages from multiple polling sites. And Democrats are now trying to damage Trump’s standing in North Carolina by linking him to scandal-plagued Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson.
The findings may seem counterintuitive: Though the two battleground states are demographically similar, Georgia saw the bigger Democratic gains under Trump. From the 2016 to 2020 elections, the Peach State saw a net gain of 5.4 percentage points from Republicans. In North Carolina, the difference was 2.3 points.
The difference seems reasonable enough: African Americans make up a large proportion of Georgia’s electorate, and the rapidly growing and increasingly Democratic metropolitan Atlanta area accounts for a larger share of the state’s vote than North Carolina’s two largest metropolitan areas (Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham) — factors that are core to Democratic success.
But it’s Georgia, not North Carolina, where Trump has an advantage, at least in the polls. So what’s going on?
Of course, the polls are not all that different, so it’s possible that statistical noise or random sampling error is at play. It’s also possible that the polls are accurate and Trump actually made some gains in Georgia recently, but lost out in North Carolina.
But an intriguing possibility has to do with a type of polling error that has been most pronounced in northern battleground states in the past two presidential elections: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where the biggest polling errors occurred in 2016 and 2020. These states are packed with Trump’s core base of supporters — white voters without a four-year college degree — and, for a variety of reasons, their support for Trump was poorly reflected in the polls.
The same mistakes could be repeated this time around in demographic surveys. Consider the share of white adults in each of the key battleground states who have not graduated from a four-year college.
As you can see, North Carolina has the highest concentration of non-college educated white residents outside the three northern states, 7 percentage points higher than Georgia, which has the lowest concentration. According to exit polls, Trump won roughly the same number of non-college educated white votes in each state in 2020, 59 percentage points in Georgia and 57 percentage points in North Carolina.
So if a similar polling outage were to occur again, it could mean Trump doesn’t have as much support in the Tar Heel State as he does in Georgia.
In fact, this may have happened in 2020. FiveThirtyEight’s final average then had Trump trailing in North Carolina by 1.8 points, but ultimately winning the state by 1.3 points, 3.1 points short of what the polls had predicted. In contrast, FiveThirtyEight’s final average had Trump losing Georgia by 1.2 points and then losing it by 0.3 points, a margin of just 0.9 points.
Of course, the poll may not show the same problems with white voters without college degrees — or, for that matter, they may have an entirely different kind of demographic blind spot that only becomes apparent on election night — but it’s happened twice before, so it’s worth keeping in mind that if the problems persist, they could affect not just northern battlegrounds but the Sun Belt as well.
Half of voters plan to vote early, with big partisan splits
Ben Camisar
New numbers from a September NBC News poll show half of registered voters plan to vote early this fall, with Democrats making gains among early voters and Republicans enjoying strong support from those who plan to vote in person on Election Day.
Fifty-one percent of voters say they will vote early, either by mail or in person, and among these voters, Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump 61% to 35%, a 26-point margin.
By comparison, Trump has a 20-point lead among voters who plan to vote on Election Day (which accounts for 45% of the poll’s electorate), 57% to 37%, a lead that’s slightly smaller among voters than Harris has among early voters.
“For Republicans to win, they need to either close the gap in vote share among early voters or have a larger gap in vote share on Election Day,” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the NBC News poll with Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates.
The stark political divide between early and Election Day voters is the latest evidence of dramatic and lasting changes under the Trump administration.
In final NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls for the 2012 and 2016 election cycles, majorities of people said they planned to vote on Election Day rather than early.
Polls have shown Democrats have held slight leads among early voters in both election cycles (then-President Barack Obama had an 8-point lead in 2012 and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a 14-point lead in 2016), but turnout on Election Day was roughly equal both times.
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ποΈ Today’s top news
π Biden’s farewell at the United Nations: In his final address as president to the UN General Assembly, Biden called for unity amid escalating conflicts in the Middle East, Russia’s continuing war in Ukraine and growing global concerns over Chinese influence. Read more βπ£οΈ Final words: Nebraska Republican Governor Jim Pillen announced he would not call a special legislative session to change how the state allocates its electoral votes, dashing President Trump’s hopes that changes would be made before November. Read more βπ« Focus on the filibuster: Harris said in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio that she supports abolishing the filibuster in the Senate to restore abortion rights protections nationwide. Sen. Joe Manchin of Iowa and Virginia said he would not support Harris after her remarks. Read more ββ« Damaged Democratic office: Police are investigating a suspected gunfire incident overnight at Harris’ Democratic-coordinated campaign office in Tempe, Arizona. Read more β π‘οΈ Stepped up security: The Secret Service is “on heightened alert” around Trump following “recent events,” officials said. Read more β π A look back: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested Trump’s health policy could include overhauling standards for chemicals and pesticides. But current and former Environmental Protection Agency officials said that stance is in stark contrast to how the agency has been run under the Trump administration. Read more β π₯ Ring of honor: Johnny Cash became the first musician to have a statue erected in the U.S. Capitol, according to The Tennessean. Read more β Follow our live campaign coverage β
That’s all from the Politics Department. If you have any comments (what you liked, what you didn’t like, etc.), please email us at politicsnewsletter@nbcuni.com.
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