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The vibes about who will win the 2024 presidential election may have shifted — but with barely more than two weeks until Election Day, the polls are as inconclusive as they’ve ever been.
Polling averages show a contest in which Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are almost tied in most key swing states. And while Trump’s polling has improved slightly in the past few weeks, it hasn’t been enough to give him a clear edge. At least not yet.
On average, Trump holds a small edge, generally between 1 and 2 points, in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. To win the presidency, though, he will need to breach the “blue wall” by winning one of Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. As of midday Monday, those states are still, on average, about tied.
There hasn’t been a ton of high-quality swing-state polling in recent weeks, and the best-regarded pollsters will likely all release new numbers closer to the end of the campaign. Once they do, we could get a better sense of where the race stands.
If polling averages continue to show an extremely close race after a final infusion of high-quality polls, it will only heighten the uncertainty about what will happen. Polling errors — where one candidate or party is systematically underestimated — of the magnitude of a few points are common.
The polls could be underestimating Trump again, as they did in swing states in 2016 and 2020. Alternatively, perhaps pollsters have corrected for their previous bias — or even overcorrected, risking an error that underestimates Harris. We simply won’t know until the votes are counted.
What the polls show in the swing states
To recap: There are seven swing states that will very likely determine the outcome of the election (with every other state expected to go solidly for either Trump or Harris). Listed in order of electoral votes, they are:
- Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes)
- North Carolina and Georgia (16 electoral votes each)
- Michigan (15 electoral votes)
- Arizona (11 electoral votes)
- Wisconsin (10 electoral votes)
- Nevada (6 electoral votes)
If Harris can pick up 44 electoral votes in these swing states, she’ll win the presidency. Trump would need 51 electoral votes from these same states to win. The polls say these swing states are — brace yourself — very close!
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina all are almost exactly tied in the New York Times’s polling averages, which show Trump up in Georgia by 1 and Arizona by 2. Nate Silver’s polling averages have similar results.
There’s a slightly more rosy story for Harris in the Washington Post’s averages, which show her up by 2 in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. On the other hand, the RealClearPolitics averages show Trump leading by 2 points or less in all the swing states.
But these differences are hair-splitting. None of these results are lopsided enough to instill any real confidence about which way the outcome will go.
Vibes aren’t worth much either
The vibes, on the other hand, point more clearly in one direction: Among Democrats, there’s been increasing trepidation about Harris’s chances, while Republicans sound quite confident in Trump’s.
But the pre-election vibes would have told you that the GOP was headed for a landslide victory in 2022, that Biden was going to win overwhelmingly (rather than very narrowly) in 2020, and that Trump had no chance of winning in 2016. These sorts of intangible hunches and guesses just aren’t worth much.
Some point to purported clues about the outcome in non-polling metrics, like early voting numbers or prediction markets. But early voting numbers are a notoriously bad indicator of what will happen on Election Day. Prediction markets generally reflect conventional wisdom — and this year in particular, they may be skewed by a few big-betting Trump fans.
Once we know the result, hindsight will be 20/20. We can all look back for the clues that were purportedly hidden in plain sight, as we tell ourselves stories about how the outcome was fated all along. For now, though, the race is simply too close to call.
