by The US presidential election campaign will begin its final weekend with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in a seemingly permanent deadlock with few clues as to which of them will prevail on Tuesday.
In another odd weekend that began with Trump’s racist rally in New York’s Madison Square Guardian and was punctuated by celebrity endorsements, misogynistic comments and “trash” insults being leveled left and right, an average poll tracker showed 10- Guardian’s day. little changed from seven days earlier, with voters’ loyalty to their chosen candidate seemingly impervious to campaign events, however seismic.
Nationally, Harris, the Democratic nominee, has a one-point advantage, 48% to 47%, over his Republican opponent, almost identical to last week. Such an advantage is well within the margin of error in most polls.
The battleground states, too, remain in dead heat. The candidates are tied at 48% in Pennsylvania, often seen as the most important swing state because it has the most electoral votes (19). Harris has one-point leads in the other two blue wall states, Michigan and Wisconsin, while Trump is slightly ahead in the Sun Belt: up 1% in North Carolina and 2% in Georgia and Arizona. In Nevada, his average advantage in the polls is less than a percentage point.
The latest poll came against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of early voting in multiple states where some 65 million Americans had already cast their ballots on Friday.
It is extremely difficult to predict anything about future early voting results, although about 58% of early voters in Pennsylvania age 65 or older are registered Democrats, Politico reported, compared to 35% of the same cohort who were registered Republicans; both major parties have the same number of registered voters in the state among older adults. About 53% of the demographic voted for Trump in Pennsylvania in 2020, even when he lost the state to Joe Biden.
In contrast to four years ago, Trump encouraged his supporters to cast ballots early. A larger number of Democrats turning out may be a positive indicator for them in a close-knit state where commentators predict turnout is critical to the outcome. Democratic strategists have claimed that they have a 10%-20% lead in the number of senior voters across the three blue wall states.
But in a fractured political landscape with threats of reparations from Trump, accusations of fascism and racism from Harris, and warnings that democracy itself is on the ballot, the bigger picture – that uniformity, over a long period of time – has left observers flowing tears. heads.
The polling-analysis site simulator FiveThirtyEight – based on a collection of national and state data – on Friday morning forecast that Trump would win 53 times out of 100 compared to 47 times for Harris, again, like a week before.
In one late burst of positive news for Harris, a Marist poll on Friday showed the possibility that she could break the deadlock: it showed her leading Trump by 3% in Michigan and Wisconsin and 2% in Pennsylvania. Winning the three states probably represents Harris’ clearest path to the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the White House. But the results remained within the survey’s margins of error.
This near-monolithic picture, which emerged from the multiple polls, has fueled suspicions among some analysts about “boyfriending” around state polling averages by pollsters wary of being wrong for the third time in a row after Trump’s support underestimated in 2016 and 2020.
Writing on NBC’s website, Josh Clinton, a professor of politics at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, the network’s director of elections, pondered whether the tied race did not reflect voter sentiment, but risk-averse decision-making by publicists. Some, they believe, may be wary of results showing unusually large trends for one candidate and introducing corrective weighting.
Of the last 321 battleground polls, 124 — nearly 40% — showed margins of one point or less, the pair wrote. Pennsylvania was the most “troublesome” case, with 20 out of 59 polls showing an exact tie, and another 26 showing margins of less than 1%.
This indicated “not only an extremely tight race, but also an improbable one”, according to Clinton and Lapinski.
A large number of surveys would be expected to show a wider variety of opinions, even in a close election, because of the randomness of the voting. The lack of such variation suggests adjusting for “strange” margins of 5% or more, Clinton and Lapinski argued – or the following second possibility, which they considered more likely.
“Some of the tools that pollsters are using in 2024 to tackle 2020 polling problems, such as weighting by partisanship, past voting or other factors, could reduce the differences and the diversity in reporting the poll results,” they write.
Either explanation “raises the possibility that the election results could be unexpectedly different than the razor-close story suggested by the state polling cluster and the polling media”, they said.
Amidst the uncertainty, one thing is certain: but polls have shown the contest to be close over the past several weeks, with Harris and Trump going head-to-head in the final days of the most consequential US election in recent years. give some
