(Source: MIRS.news, Published 11/052024) Between Tuesday of last week and Saturday, pollster Steve Mitchell of Mitchell Research said ongoing interviews found surging voter sentiment toward Vice President Kamala Harris – with the biggest surge seen in completed surveys from Saturday. 

"What we saw in the polling that we conducted between Tuesday and Saturday is that in the two-way race, we have Kamala Harris taking the lead over Donald Trump by 2%," he said. "And in the eight-way ballot (with all names appearing on the ballot), she's up by 1%. So, it remains a very, very close race."

He did note, however, that if you just looked at the surveys collected Saturday, they suggest an even stronger move toward Harris. 

"In the polling we did on Saturday, if you just take those about 300 [surveys] . . . Harris was up by about 7%. So, Harris was showing some real momentum," he added. He did note that there's no way to know if that was a one-day surge or part of an ongoing surge. 

The new Oct. 29-Nov. 2 survey of 585 registered voters also found U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Holly) up 2 percentage points over Republican U.S. Senate nominee Mike Rogers. 

Mitchell On Latest Results/Poll Methodology

MIRS: Is this the final momentum shift, or do you think it could actually change overnight?

Steve Mitchell: Well, it seems to change overnight the way this race is going, but it's hard to say whether or not it is a permanent shift or whether we just picked up a one-day shift on Saturday where they were strongly in support of Kamala Harris. That I don't know. The only thing we know is that there was a shift. 

MIRS: Okay. In our initial breaking news alert last night, we used a quote, and then we also included a statement that you reweighted the weekend's poll. It was a misstatement that was quickly corrected. You've since told us you never reweight polls in this election cycle. Explain why you don't do that.

Steve Mitchell: Every pollster has their own way of determining how they're going to weight or not weight. What I do personally, is look at the previous couple of elections and the exit polls and see if we're seeing any consistency in the demographics of who is voting. 

If we see a lot of consistency, then we can presume that the next election will be fairly consistent with the last two elections. And so that's how I tend to weight our data. 

MIRS: To be clear, you made all these calculations early on before you started polling this cycle?

Steve Mitchell: Yeah. I made this determination back in January. Back in January or February.

MIRS: We've worked with you on a number of cycles over the years; how is your work viewed nationally?

Steve Mitchell: RealClear Politics.com rated us as one of the top ten regional and state pollsters and accuracy in 2020. 

Probably the most important rating agency is ABC News, which has fivethirtyeight.com. It was run by Nate Silver for years, but ABC News took that over, and they rate 3 or 400 different pollsters. And they rate them on accuracy, and they rate them on transparency. And let me say something about transparency. Sometimes I, as a pollster, want to know how this pollster or that pollster arrives at the conclusion that they're arriving at. 

If you take a look at the pollsters who have done 80 or more polls, we are the 17th best pollster in America. We're right behind Gallup, which is a pretty well-known name.

We also are one of the few pollsters in the country, I don't think there's more than 25 or 30, who participate with the Cornell University Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. And in order to do that, you have to send them all of your information. You have to send them your press releases. You have to send them your crosstabs. You have to send them your methodology. You have to send them the field copy, which is the aggregate percentage that each person won by. And then they will grade you on transparency, or they'll tell you, 'well, we need more of this information,' so you supply it. 

It's a lot of extra work. It's a lot of extra work to put the crosstabs in. But we believe in full and complete transparency.