(DCNF)—CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten said on Monday that Republican nominee Donald Trump is faring better in swing states in comparison to the 2020 election.
Trump is leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 5 points in Arizona and holding a 4-point and 3-point lead in Georgia and North Carolina, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll from Monday. Enten said these averages are “significantly better” than how he performed in polling from 2020, spelling good news for the former president.
“You’ve got a lot of red on this screen, this is pretty good news for Donald Trump … You take it all together in these three key battleground states, two of which [President] Joe Biden carried 4 years ago, we see that Donald Trump is ahead and by an average of 4 points, significantly better than he did back in 2020 across all of these states,” Enten said.
Enten further pointed to Harris’ 2-point lead in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, stating there is a “great divide” between the Sun Belt and Great Lake states. He credited Trump’s coalition being more racially “diverse” for the former president’s higher polling averages in Sun Belt states, with the former president’s support among non-white voters increasing from 16% in 2020 to 20% in 2024.
“If you know anything about those Sun Belt battleground states, it’s that they are more diverse than those Great Lake battleground states,” Enten said. “In the Southwest, they’re more Hispanic than they are nationwide, in the South, Southeast, North Carolina and Georgia, they are more African American than they are nationwide. And I think the real question here is, what does this mean for the electoral map because that’s what we’re all interested in and look folks, it’s just as tight as it can possibly be.”
Enten presented a sampled electoral map showing Harris winning 276 to 262 if the polling in the Great Lakes states are completely accurate. Trump underperformed in swing state polling in the 2016 and 2020 election, indicating he will likely perform better in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan than the polls suggest.