With less than 500 hours remaining in the 2024 race for the White House and early voting underway through much of the country, polling shows the candidates will head into their final weeks of campaigning still stuck in a statistical split.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, according to polling aggregators 538 and RealClearPolitics, are running with less than three points between them in an average of recent polls, and that within-the-margins split is seen across a raft of polls out this week.
Case in point: Trump wins among those surveyed for a Fox News poll of likely voters released on Thursday, 50% – 48%, but a two point spread in a poll of just 870 likely voters with a three-point margin of error is, for all intents and purposes, a tie.
That’s about the same result seen in a Harvard/Harris poll of more than 2,500 likely voters which found the Vice President ahead, 51% – 49%, in an about two-point margin survey. Mark Penn, Co-Director of the Harvard Center for American Political Studies, said in a release that “there is no definitive answer” on who might come out on top on Nov. 5.
“It’s about as close a race as you can possibly get, well within the confidence interval of any poll,” he said. “Harris has lost some momentum from when she was first nominated but is still driving strong messages around her personality and some of her economic measures, while Trump leads on immigration, crime, and foreign policy but has been less effective on economic messaging.”
A Marquette University poll showed — essentially — that exact same thing. That small survey found Trump and Harris in a 50/50 tie, with a 4.7-point margin.
A Marist College poll showed Harris up by five points among likely voters, 52% to 47%, and a “tighter” contest among registered voters, 51% to 48%, but both of those results are within the polls’ 3.9-point margins and could just as well be predicting a Trump win.
The pair are also running neck-and-neck across several of the key swing states that will likely decide this election, with neither candidate showing a clear margin of victory in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada or Arizona.
A UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion and YouGov poll of Pennsylvania voters released Thursday shows Harris up by just one point, and UMass Lowell political science Assistant Professor Rodrigo Castro Cornejo says the poll demonstrates that the “race in Pennsylvania is essentially tied.”
“It is increasingly clear the election will be decided by the candidate who is able to successfully mobilize their voters on Nov. 5 and during the early voting period,” he said.
According to University of New Hampshire political scientist and elections expert Dante Scala, with fewer states for candidates to choose between on their path toward 270 electoral college votes — he said Florida is practically off the table this year, for example — there is every chance that the race hinges on Pennsylvania and just a few other up-for-grab territories.
“If anything, I think the number of swing states has shrunk since 2020,” Scala told the Herald, but one way or the other, whoever grabs Pennsylvania, he said, “has a much easier path to victory.”
“It’s math and if you look at these three midwestern states — and how tightly correlated they are with each other — you have to think whoever gets the upper hand in Pennsylvania, might well do so in Wisconsin and Michigan,” he said. “The winner of Pennsylvania is in the driver’s seat.”
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