The US presidential campaign enters its final weekend, with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in a permanent deadlock, with few clues as to who will win on Tuesday.
It’s yet another wave of events that began with President Trump’s racist rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden and was punctuated with celebrity endorsements, misogynistic comments, and insults about “trash” being leveled on the left and right. At the end of a difficult week, the Guardian’s 10-day poll average tracker shows. Little changed over the past seven days, voters’ loyalty to their chosen candidate appears to be relatively unaffected by campaign events, even large ones.
Nationally, Democratic candidate Harris has a one-point advantage over Republican candidate, 48% to 47%, about the same as last week. Such an advantage is within the margin of error for most polls.
Even in the battleground states, fierce competition continues. Pennsylvania is considered the most important battleground state, as the candidates are tied at 48% of the vote and have the most electoral votes (19). Harris has a one-point lead in the other two blue wall states, Michigan and Wisconsin, but Trump has a narrow lead in the Sun Belt, with a 1% lead in North Carolina and Georgia and Arizona. It has increased by 2%. In Nevada, his average lead in the polls is less than 1 percentage point.
The latest polls were taken against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of early voting in multiple states, with nearly 65 million Americans already voting as of Friday.
Although it is notoriously difficult to predict anything about the future results of early voting, approximately 58% of early voters in Pennsylvania over the age of 65 are registered Democrats, compared with 35% of their peers. Politico reported that he was a registered Republican. The two major parties have roughly the same number of registered voters in the state who are elderly. Approximately 53% of Pennsylvania’s population voted for Trump in 2020, even though he lost the state to Joe Biden.
In contrast to four years ago, President Trump is encouraging his supporters to vote early. The increase in Democratic voters could be a positive indicator for Democrats in lead states where commentators expect turnout to be key to the outcome. Democratic strategists say Democrats have a 10-20 percentage point lead in elderly voter turnout across the three blue wall states.
But in a fractured political landscape marked by Trump’s threats of retaliation, Harris’ accusations of fascism and racism, and warnings that democracy itself is on the ballot, the larger picture When it comes to images, or uniformity over time, veteran observers are harsh. head.
Polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight’s simulator (based on a collection of national and state data) predicted on Friday morning that Mr. Trump would win 53 times out of 100, compared to 47 times for Ms. Harris, also the same as a week ago. Ta.
In a recent flurry of positive news for Harris, Friday’s Marist poll showed she could break the deadlock. The poll showed Harris leading Trump by 3 percentage points in Michigan and Wisconsin, and by 2 percentage points in Pennsylvania. Winning all three states would probably give Harris the clearest path to winning the 270 electoral votes she needs to win the White House. However, the results remained within the study’s margin of error.
This nearly monolithic picture that has emerged from multiple polls has left the public wary of being proven wrong a third time in a row after significantly underestimating President Trump’s support in 2016 and 2020. This has raised suspicions among some analysts that the survey firm is “guiding” the state poll averages.
Josh Clinton, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, the bureau’s director of elections, wrote in an article on NBC’s website that tied races reflect pollsters’ risk-averse decision-making, not voter sentiment. I considered that this might be the case. They were alarmed by findings showing an unusually large lead for one candidate and suggested that some might introduce corrective weighting.
Of the 321 recent polls conducted in battleground states, 124, or nearly 40%, had a difference of one point or less, the authors wrote. The most “troubling” case was Pennsylvania, where 20 of the 59 polls showed a perfect tie, but another 26 had a difference of less than 1 percentage point.
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According to Clinton and Lapinski, this shows “not only a shockingly close race, but an impossibly close race.”
Because of the random nature of public opinion polls, even in close elections, the more polls are conducted, the more diverse opinions can be expected. Clinton and Lapinski said the lack of such fluctuations means the pollsters are adjusting for a “weird” margin of 5% or more, or that the second possibility is more likely. He argued that this suggests that the company considers it to be high.
“Some of the tools pollsters are using in 2024 to address the problems in the 2020 polls, such as weighting by partisanship, past voting, and other factors, will flatten the gap and “This may reduce the variability in reported poll results,” the researchers wrote.
Either explanation “could mean that the election results differ unexpectedly from the very close story told by a range of state polls and poll averages,” they added.
Amidst all the uncertainty, one thing is certain. No matter how close pollsters have painted the race over the past few weeks, something should be given as Harris and Trump go head-to-head in the final days of the most consequential US presidential election in decades. .
