Rasmussen Reports has emerged once again as one of the most accurate pollsters of the presidential race — but the Republican Party needs to study why it struggled to win more downticket races, pollster Mark Mitchell says.
Rasmussen’s final election poll showed that Donald Trump was ahead of Kamala Harris nationwide by 3 points. In the end, he won the popular vote by just over two points. Rasmussen’s polls also suggested that Trump was ahead slightly in all seven of the “battleground” states; Trump ended up sweeping all seven en route to victory on Nov. 5.
“I think he’s going to surprise people in the swing states by being to the right of the polls,” Mitchell said on Nov. 2.
Mitchell spoke to Breitbart News on Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM Patriot 125 on Sunday evening. He noted that while Trump had performed as expected, Republicans had failed to make the kinds of gains in the Senate, House, and state-level races that would have been expected given the size of Trump’s win in the national popular vote.
“The biggest surprise to me, and something I think Republicans should be asking themselves every day for the next four years, is if the entire country moved seven points to the right, as it seems like it has, why did it only move one or two points to the right in the battlegrounds? That’s the problem,” Mitchell said.
“This was a massive repudiation of Biden regime leftism, and yet [these are] still very, very meager down-ballot gains.”
Republicans won four Senate seats, but Democrats appeared to have held off challenges in Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona. In addition, Republicans won only a handful of House seats, protecting their majority but failing to expand it to a more comfortable margin. On the state level, Republicans won only about 50 legislative seats nationwide, a shift of less than one percent.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
