The US presidential election campaign enters its final weekend with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in a seemingly permanent stalemate and few clues as to which of them will prevail on Tuesday.
At the end of another unruly week that began with Trump's racially charged rally at New York's Madison Square Guardian and was peppered with celebrity endorsements, misogynistic comments and insults about the “garbage” being spewed left and right, the The Guardian's 10-day media poll tracker showed little change from seven days earlier, and voters' loyalty to their chosen candidate appears relatively immune to campaign events, however seismic.
Nationally, Harris, the Democratic candidate, has a one-point lead, 48% to 47%, over her Republican opponent, virtually identical to last week. This advantage matches the margin of error of most polls.
The battleground states also remain tied. 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 a single-point lead in the other two blue wall states, Michigan and Wisconsin, while Trump is slightly ahead in the photovoltaic belt: up 1% in North Carolina and 2% in Georgia and Arizona. . In Cellisca, his media lead in the polls is less than a percentage point.
The latest poll came against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of early voting in several states where, as of Friday, about 65 million Americans had already cast their ballots.
It's very difficult to predict anything about future early voting results, although about 58% of early voters in Pennsylvania age 65 and older were registered as Democrats. politician reported compared to 35% of the same group who were registered as Republicans; The two major parties have about the same number of registered voters in the state among seniors. About 53% of the population voted for Trump in Pennsylvania in 2020, even when he lost the state to Joe Biden.
Trump, unlike four years ago, has encouraged his supporters to vote early. The fact that Democrats are turning out in greater numbers may be a positive indicator for them in a battleground state where commentators have predicted turnout is key to the outcome. Democratic strategists have claimed they have a 10% to 20% lead in high-level voter turnout in the three blue wall states.
But in a fractured political landscape that has featured threats of retaliation 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 prolonged period – has made seasoned observers scratch their eyes. heads.
Poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight Simulator – based on a collection of national and state data – Friday morning's forecast that Trump would win 53 out of 100 times compared to Harris' 47 times was, again, comparable to a week before.
In a latest burst of positive news for Harris, a Marist poll on Friday offered the possibility that she could break the deadlock: It showed her leading Trump by 3% in Michigan and Wisconsin and 2% in Pennsylvania. Winning all three states likely 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, emerging from multiple polls, has raised suspicions among some “herd” analysts about state poll averages by pollsters wary of proving wrong for a third consecutive time after significantly underestimating support for Trump. 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, wondered whether the tie did not reflect voters' sentiments, but rather risk aversion in decision making by interviewers. Some, they suggested, may be wary of findings that indicate unusually large clues for a candidate and introduce corrective weighting.
Of the last 321 battleground polls, 124 – nearly 40% – showed margins of a single point or less, the two wrote. Pennsylvania was the most “concerning” case, with 20 of 59 polls showing an exact tie, while another 26 showed margins of less than 1%.
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This indicated “not only a surprisingly close race, but also an incredibly close race,” according to Clinton and Lapinski.
A larger number of polls would be expected to show a wider variety of opinions, even in a close election, due to the inherent randomness of polls. The absence of such variation suggests that pollsters are adjusting for “strange” margins of 5% or more, Clinton and Lapinski argued, or the next second possibility, which they considered more likely.
“Some of the tools that pollsters are using in 2024 to address 2020 election issues, such as weighting by partisanship, previous votes, or other factors, may be flattening differences and reducing variation in reported poll results,” they write.
Either explanation “raises the possibility that the election results could be unexpectedly different from the closed narrative suggested by the body of state polls and poll averages,” they added.
Amid the uncertainty, one thing is certain: As close as pollsters have described the race in recent weeks, as Harris and Trump face off in the final days of the most consequential U.S. election in decades, something has to give.