and we see that Harris has an advantage even a greater Advantage than Biden did on things like abortion protecting democracy Healthcare and one one area where we've seen sort of real tightening is on crime and safety it seems like she's improved notably over where Biden was compared to Trump is that just sort of information that gives us a little bit of a a sort of a why behind the broader National picture or does it tell us something about where this election is headed or where or sort of where we are yeah it's in a best case scenario it can tell you a why like I certainly wouldn't use it to tell you where the election is headed you can't just total people up and be like these are the people who are most interested in the economy and they prefer Trump therefore this many points to Trump and these are the people who prefer abortion and this many points to Harris like it doesn't work that way there we've seen examples of this in the past in 2022 I think being the most notable example polls agreed that the economy was the most important issue but in kind of targeted ways abortion obviously ended up carrying Democrats to to Big WIS in certain areas um I think that political science Studies have shown that voters don't think about it in terms of the issue scorecard way and often you look people are saying oh that's my most important issue because of the candidate they support and so like the the causality goes the other way so like yeah after the ction maybe if you're lucky they can be used to tell a coherent narrative about the election but as 2022 showed sometimes that doesn't even work all that well so I you know I think that again they're interesting color but I'm not looking at those polls to tell me who's gonna win yeah and I don't think that should be their goal right like I think they're not trying to do that right right right they're not trying to do that and I think the economy is a great example where exactly what you said is likely happening which is that it's some views of the candidate that are kind of seeping into that since we saw is starting to shrink Trump's Edge on the economy I think an interesting thing to follow when you're looking at these is less of what it means about who's going to win and more of what it means about the issues that might be discussed and debated in this election so the fact that things are narrowing on crime and things like that just tells me that's an issue that might become more important as a part of the discourse in this election that's partially because Harris is making it more of a centerpiece of her campaign and also that Trump wants to make it a centerpiece of some of his attacks on Harris so I think that's that's the kind of clue it's showing me is that as Harris is widening her gap on abortion for example over where Biden was and we're sort of simultaneously seeing abortion rise in some of the polls as the most important issue to voters that just tells me it's going to be more of a dynamic in this election not so much that it tells me that Harris is necessarily going to do better because of it it's just going to be more of a conversation and we're obviously seeing that with Trump who over the last several days spent a lot of of time talking about his views of abortion and kind of like bringing that back into the public discourse scan this QR code to go to the apple and Spotify podcast apps to download the full 538 politics podcast