"Harris is up by one right now," Enten said. "Four years ago, Joe Biden was well ahead of Donald Trump, up by 9. Even Hillary Clinton in 2016, was up by six points. So now Donald Trump is in a position he has never been in before where the popular vote is too close to call."
"Donald Trump winning the popular vote could absolutely happen. You might as well wrap your minds around it now, folks, if you don’t like Donald Trump," he said.
HARRY ENTEN, CNN: Trump may finally get his great white whale. Harris versus Trump national margin. You mentioned that New York Times poll, a tie. That's actually right in the middle of the spectrum when we're talking about recent polling data. You don't have to look very far to find Donald Trump ahead nationally. He was up by two points in the CNBC poll, up by three in the Wall Street Journal poll. Very close races within the margin of error. But then the same thing on the other side, right? You have Harris up by three points according to Ipsos; the Say24 YouGov poll, a bunch of academics, also has Harris up by three.
But the bottom line is with the popular vote, which we really haven't focused on, a very, very tight race. In fact, Donald Trump is very much in a position where he could win the popular vote, which of course is something he would absolutely love to do.
So I went back through the time machine to see where the past two races were at this point in the campaign. Harris, in the average poll right now, is up by one, well within the margin of error. You go back four years ago, Joe Biden was well ahead of Donald Trump in the national popular vote polls. He was up by nine, and even Hillary Clinton was up by six points. Now Donald Trump is in a position he really hasn't been before at this point in the campaign, where he could truly compete, and we can truly say that the popular vote at this point is way too close to call.
Of course, this is only going back eight years. I wanted to jump even further back in my time machine, understanding, "Hey, I haven't heard about a Republican potentially winning the popular vote in a while," and it turns out a Republican winning the popular vote hasn’t happened since 2004, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry. And that’s only one time it has happened. In fact, you have to go all the way back to 1988 to find another one when it was George H.W. Bush winning the popular vote over Michael Dukakis.
So the fact that the polls right now are so close, the fact that Donald Trump has a legitimate shot of winning the popular vote, is something I think a lot of folks, including in my line of work, really didn’t think could possibly happen when Donald Trump was running last time around. He could make history, not just for Donald Trump, but for a Republican candidate as well.
JOHN BERMAN, CNN: Now, there are some reasons for this, and I think Democrats' heads are all exploding out there watching this right now. There are some reasons for this, which you're going to explain, but also they begin to raise the possibility that we could see the reverse. We could see the reverse of things we've seen, where a Republican wins the popular vote but there’s a chance for the Democrat to win the electoral.
HARRY ENTEN: Yeah, part of my job is to warn our viewers on either side of the aisle of an event that may occur that they don't necessarily like. And Donald Trump winning the popular vote could absolutely happen. You might as well wrap your minds around it now, folks, if you don’t like Donald Trump. But on the flip side of that, a potentially good sign for Democrats is why is Donald Trump doing so well in the popular vote polls? You can dig down into the state-level polling and see that Donald Trump is doing particularly well in California, Florida, New York, and Texas. Of course, none of these states are really on the board at this point, so Donald Trump may end up gaining in the national popular vote polls, but actually, he's wasting votes, which could in fact lead to a case where Kamala Harris could sneak by in the Electoral College by sweeping those Great Lakes battleground states, which at this point are way too close to call.
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