MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough warned Thursday on “Morning Joe” that Democrats shouldn’t be overly confident about their electoral prospects in key swing states this November.
Scarborough pointed to polling indicating that there is no clear leader in the key swing states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan, leaving these states up in the air for either Vice President Kamala Harris or Republican nominee Donald Trump to win. The MSNBC host said support for the former president in these states was dramatically understated in both 2016 and 2020.
“And one thing people need to remember, if any Democrat is getting confident, they need to remember in these upper Midwest states, Donald Trump’s support was understated in polls dramatically in 2016 and especially in 2020,” Scarborough said.
The panel showed results from a CNN/SSRS poll indicating that Harris is leading Trump in Wisconsin 50% to 44% and in Michigan 48% to 43%. Meanwhile, Harris and Trump are tied 47% to 47% in Pennsylvania, while the former president is leading 49% to 44% in Arizona.
The poll surveyed a total of 4,398 respondents in six separate swing states from Aug. 23-29 with a 4.9% margin of error.
Scarborough warns Democrats should not get too confident about winning swing states pic.twitter.com/D7MYDE3hMV
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Scarborough said history indicates that Trump is virtually tied with Harris in these swing states as support for him is likely not accurately presented in the CNN/SSRS poll. (RELATED: ‘Don’t Cover The Man’: ‘Morning Joe’ Panel Accuses ‘Mainstream Media’ Of Giving Trump An Unfair ‘Advantage’)
“There were polls that showed Joe Biden up by 12, 13 [or] 14 [points] I think in an ABC poll a week before the [2020] election in Wisconsin, it ended up being less than a percentage point. Michigan, the same. RealClearPolitics averaged it on Election Day, was about 9% in Joe Biden’s favor, it ended up being basically a tie. Same thing with Pennsylvania, so those upper Midwest states understates Donald Trump’s support. So any Democrat that thinks, ‘oh, Kamala Harris has got that,’ needs to look at history. This is a close battle,” Scarborough said.
A FiveThirtyEight poll from 2020 found Biden leading Trump by 8.4 points in Wisconsin on Nov. 3, 2020, though Biden won the state 49.6% to 48.9% on election night. Another FiveThirtyEight poll indicated Biden led Trump by nearly 8 points in Michigan, though Biden ended up winning the state by three points in 2020.
Biden also won Pennsylvania in 2020 50% to 48.8%, though a RealClearPolitics poll indicated he led the then-president by nearly 5 points. Harris is currently leading Trump in Pennsylvania by 0.8%, 46% to 45.3%, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Harris is leading Trump by just under 2 points on a national scale, according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average.
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