The 2024 presidential election continues to be one of the closest in history, with Donald Trump and Kamala Harris running neck-and-neck nationally and in the swing states. Who has the advantage going into the final few weeks of the race? New county-level polling out of Pennsylvania suggests it’s the former president.
According to a survey conducted by Cygnal and sponsored by The Daily Wire, Trump leads in the bellwether counties of Erie and Northampton. Those were won by the overall winner of the 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections, making them crucial battlegrounds in what is already the most important swing state.
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The two counties, Erie and Northampton, have voted with the winning side in every election since 2008 — they sided with President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Donald Trump in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020. Pennsylvania is considered one of the most important battleground states in the 2024 election with most polls showing a statistical tie between Trump and Harris.
Trump is ahead in the swing districts by just one percent, 49 to 48, according to the Cygnal survey.
“In a reversal from 2020, Pennsylvania’s ‘Bellwether Counties’ have narrowly swung back to Donald Trump,” the pollster wrote, determining that the former president is winning over traditional Democrat voters that view Harris as too radical. “As Democrats have a 4-point party registration advantage in these counties, this is further evidence of these ancestral Democrats increasingly leaving the party of their forefathers.”
I’ve laid out the case before, but I’ll reiterate it again. Whoever wins Pennsylvania is almost certainly going to win the election. Yes, analysts can play with the map, shuffling out this state for that state, but if a nominee doesn’t win The Keystone State, they probably lost Michigan and Wisconsin as well. That is why the Trump campaign and its surrounding PACs have spent far more in Pennsylvania than any other state.
For Trump to be leading in these counties, albeit by a slim margin, less than four weeks out from election day is a very good sign for him. Back in early August, there was some thought that Harris would pull away and create an environment more akin to 2020, where Biden consistently led Trump nationally and in the swing states by sometimes sizable margins. Instead, the race has gone the other way, with Trump regaining the lead in several election-making states and keeping it extremely tight at the national level, where Republicans enjoy an electoral college advantage.
That’s pretty remarkable when you think about it. Trump has been criminally convicted in New York at the hands of a partisan prosecutor who pushed a never-before-tried legal theory to one of the most biased judges in the country. He’s been nearly assassinated once and dodged a second attempt a month later. He’s got a federal indictment in which the special prosecutor fought to release the “evidence” just before the election for political reasons. Yet, he’s in a race that’s so close one can only conclude he has the advantage.
Conventional wisdom would say that if Trump is only down a point or two nationally, he’s going to win. He doesn’t even need the same large polling errors we saw in 2016 and 2020 at this point. With that on the table, is there anything that could even happen at this point that could shift the race out of its current condition? I’m struggling to imagine it. Trump is the most known commodity on the planet, and the more people learn about Harris, the less they like her. One thing is for sure. This is going to be an exciting election night.
