Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally at Michigan State University’s Jenison Field House in East Lansing, Michigan, on November 3, 2024. | Source: JEFF KOWALSKY / Getty
If the final presidential polls before the election are any indication, the tight race that political pundits have been describing may not end up being as tight as they think.
That is particularly true for the so-called swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in which Vice President Kamala Harris is battling Donald Trump and whose Electoral College votes are expected to decide the election’s results.
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Most of the national polling released on Sunday either found that the race was a statistical tie or gave a slight edge to Harris, according to data compiled by the Real Clear Polling website. Out of seven national polls that surveyed likely voters about their preferred presidential candidate, three were deadlocked at 49% each. Three had Harris beating Trump, and one — produced by a data organization that was found to “favor a conservative=libertarian perspective” — had Trump beating Harris by a single percentage point.
While all of the survey results were well within the margin of error, the findings bode well for Harris’ campaign.
On a more granular level, polling results in the states that experts agree could swing the election in favor of one candidate over the other add some nuance to the story being told by the above national polling.
A woman casts her ballot during early voting for the general election at a polling station at Ottawa Hills High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 3, 2024. | Source: KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI / Getty
According to the latest New York Times/Siena College polls — among the most trusted political polling — Harris is beating Trump in three swing states: Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin. The polling also found that Harris and Trump are tied in Pennsylvania and Michigan, two states where the candidates have been focusing the lion’s share of their time in the past couple of weeks. The only swing state that the polls have Trump beating Harris is in Arizona.
More from the New York Times report:
Both candidates have multiple pathways available to capture the 270 Electoral College votes required to claim victory, assuming that polls are not dramatically underestimating the support for one or the other. In such a close race, even a small systemic polling error could tip the contest decisively in either direction.
But there are signs that late deciders are breaking for Ms. Harris: Among the 8 percent of voters who said they had only recently decided on their vote, she wins the group by 55 percent to 44 percent. (With Election Day nearing, 11 percent of voters remained undecided or persuadable, down from 16 percent about a month ago.)
The polling comes as more than 70 million Americans have already voted, according to the University of Florida Election Lab.
Roughly 40 percent of those surveyed by the Times/Siena poll across the seven states said they had voted. Ms. Harris wins those voters by a margin of eight percentage points, the polls found. Mr. Trump has an edge among voters who say they are highly likely to vote but have not yet cast a ballot.
Those latest polls, coupled with stunning polling results out of Iowa, suggest that Harris may have a more viable path to winning the election-deciding 270 Electoral College votes than previously indicated.
And while experts may not truly expect Harris to win Iowa over Trump, the surprise shift in attitudes from the traditionally “red state” suggests that the same could be true for other red, Republican-leaning states.
Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have been courting Black voters at a breakneck pace, with much of the national news narrative parroting claims of Trump’s gains with Black male voters.
But polling released last month found that Black voters in the aforementioned swing states found that Harris has put a dent in those alleged gains while also fortifying her position as the preferred candidate of Black America.
The Howard University poll found that just 8% of Black voters in swing states planned to vote for Trump, compared to 84% prepared to cast their ballots for Harris.
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