You never know what events in the immediate future might affect a presidential contest as close as this one is, but the odds are good that the two campaigns are settling into a rock fight in which late appeals to swing voters and above all voter-mobilization strategies will determine the winner. More than likely the one presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is all we’ll get, and the one vice-presidential debate is past as well, with no signs either affected the state of the race in any enduring way.
Yes, Hurricane Helene cut a horrible path through multiple states, including two battleground states, and now Hurricane Milton is arriving on Helene’s heels in Florida. Bad as it has been, the storms are probably happening far enough out from Election Day that voting infrastructure should largely recover along with previous voting preferences. Yes, a wider war may be emerging in the Middle East, but the two candidates aren’t reacting to a potential Israel-Iran conflict in a way likely to move votes from one to the other.
While individual polls vary as they always do, both nationally and in the battleground states there’s what can only be described as gridlock between Harris and Trump. In the FiveThirtyEight national polling averages, Harris currently leads by 2.7 percent (48.6 to 45.9 percent). She led by 3.0 percent a month ago. Her largest lead since becoming the Democratic nominee was 3.7 percent, the day after the Democratic convention ended. Her small convention bounce soon faded and there’s now no sign she got any significant bounce at all from her strong performance (or if you’d prefer, her opponent’s meltdown) in the debate with Trump on September 10. Given perceptions that the Vance-Walz debate was basically a draw, and in light of the sparse evidence veep debates ever matter, there’s no reason to think that event will have any effect either.
Trend lines in national polls don’t show a lot of movement. The latest polls from Quinnipiac and CNN/SSRS show the race tied. Polls giving one candidate a small advantage are showing the same advantage over time: You Gov–Economist gave Harris a three-point lead (49 to 46 percent) among likely voters on September 24 and an identical lead a week later.
There is an interesting bit of data in the latest gold-standard New York Times-Siena national poll that could represent good news for Harris down the stretch. It shows her now leading Trump narrowly (46 to 44 percent) as the candidate who “represents change,” a significant shift from Times-Siena’s September poll.
Polls in the battleground states remain close and stable. Trump has established a small but steady lead in the Sun Belt states of Arizona (currently leading by 1.3 percent, at 48.1 to 46.8 percent) and Georgia (leading by 1.0 percent, at 48.3 to 47.3 percent), and a smaller and shakier lead of 0.8 percent (48.2 to 47.4 percent) in North Carolina. Harris seems to have opened up her own small but steady lead in that other Sun Belt state, Nevada, leading by 1.1 percent (47.9 to 46.8 percent), and notably leading in a recent poll from the high-quality but Republican-leaning Atlas Intel firm. In the Rust Belt “Blue Wall” states, Harris has steady if not comfortable leads of 1.8 percent (48.1 to 46.3 percent) in Michigan and 1.6 percent (48.5 to 46.9 percent) in Wisconsin. She also has a smaller lead in Pennsylvania of 0.8 percent (48.0 to 47.2 percent).
All in all, if the current polling-average leaders in the battleground states hold on to win (and as expected Harris wins NE-02 and Trump wins ME-02 in the states that allocate electoral votes by congressional district), Harris would have a 276-262 majority in the Electoral College. While that’s good news for Democrats, that would also be the third-smallest electoral-vote margin in U.S. history, reinforcing how fragile any lead is this year.
A lot will depend on whether the polling error that underestimated Trump’s vote in the battleground states in 2016 and 2020 and nationally in 2020 recurs, and how big it is. That in turn depends on demographic patterns in each candidate’s base of support, as Nate Silver recently noted:
[T]e main storyline in the polling is that there’s some degree of racial depolarization. Harris is polling slightly better with white voters than Biden’s finish four years ago, but worse with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters. That’s why polls narrowly project Trump to win Georgia, for instance, but Harris to expand on Biden’s margins in places with lots of white voters like Wisconsin or the 2nd Congressional District of Nebraska.
It adds up to very close races in all the battleground states, and a race that’s close enough nationally to make it hard to say either candidate has an advantage. At this point you’d probably like Harris’s odds a bit more (she currently has a 55 percent probability of winning in Silver’s complex forecasting model), mostly because she’s invested a lot in traditional voter mobilization efforts while Trump has diverted resources into poll-watching and other efforts to build a post-election case for reversing the outcome. It’s also notable that while the Harris campaign is focusing on classic swing voters, particularly Republicans hostile to Trump, the former president’s campaign is taking the more controversial approach of identifying and appealing to low-propensity voters of the sort that earlier back Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But while anything could happen, there’s no reason to expect a shake-up in the polls before Election Day.
