luhoplay A Florida Poll That Should Change the Way You Look at the Election

ImageA recent Trump rally via golf cart at The Villages, Fla.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

We have three new New York Times/Siena College polls this morning. Only two look “normal.”luhoplay

The national poll is one of the normal-looking results: It finds Kamala Harris ahead by four percentage points nationwide, 49 percent to 46 percent (these are rounded figures), compared with her three-point lead in The New York Times’s polling average. It’s her best national Times/Siena poll of the cycle.

Our first Texas poll of the cycle also looks “normal.” Donald J. Trump leads by six points, 50 percent to 44 percent, another tally that’s right in line with the polling average and close to the 2020 result.

And then there’s Florida.

Our first poll of the state this cycle finds Mr. Trump ahead by a staggering 13 points, 55 percent to 41 percent (again, rounded figures). This looks nothing like the other polls of the state. Heading into today, Mr. Trump led Florida in the Times average of all polls by just four points. None of the 11 polls fielded in September or October put him ahead by more than six points.

If you’re a longtime reader of this newsletter, you might be expecting me to hem and haw about whether this Florida result might be an outlier — a statistical fluke. Often, the smartest thing to do with the result of any one poll is simply to add it to the average and move on.

I’m not going to do that this time.

We’ve interviewed nearly 1,000 Floridians as part of our national polls over the last year, and Mr. Trump has had a considerable lead among Florida’s voters all along. As we’ve noted before, our national polling shows Mr. Trump excelling in states where Republicans performed well in the 2022 midterm elections — as they did in Florida (and New York, too).

As a result, this poll is not the usual outlier. It’s certainly an outlier compared with other polls, but it probably isn’t a fluke simply attributable to random chance. If we polled Florida again tomorrow, it’s certainly possible that Mr. Trump wouldn’t lead by 13 points (the accumulated national poll subsamples, for instance, have a larger sample and show him up by nine). But it’s hard to imagine his lead would finish at a mere four points, like yesterday’s polling average.

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