Almost every major poll has the 2024 presidential race as a toss-up with just over a week until Election Day — and that appears to be good news for former President Donald Trump’s chances of returning to the White House.
There are three major reasons:
- Trump has obliterated Harris’ polling lead.
- National polls have never shown him so close ahead of Election Day.
- He’s polling ahead by the slimmest margins in every swing state.
Of course, dead-heat polling suggests that the election could still go either way. But these factors point to Trump regaining momentum as Americans turn out in record numbers for early voting, fill out their mail-in ballots and prepare to line up at the polls on Election Day.
Even in the polls where Trump is lagging behind Vice President Kamala Harris, there appears to be a clear trend of him gaining steam in the election homestretch while Harris’ numbers are falling.
Head-to-head, Harris slightly currently edges Trump out 50% to 49% among likely voters. They split evenly in battleground states at 50% apiece, according to a Sunday CBS News/YouGov poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
But critically, that marks a 1-point gain for Trump in the battleground states from two weeks ago, or an erosion of Harris’ advantage over Trump.
Harris led by up to 4 percentage points in national polls after the candidates’ only debate Sept. 10.
At the start of October, Harris had a two-point edge over Trump in the RealClearPolitics aggregate of multi-candidate national polling. Now Trump is in the lead with 0.1 percentage points — well within the margin of error.
The mere fact that Trump is leading even in the aggregate of national polling is remarkable given that Republicans haven’t won the popular vote in two decades.
Trump had been trailing President Biden by 7.4 percentage points in RCP’s 2020 aggregate at this point, and Hillary Clinton by 5.6 percentage points in 2016.
The actual results in both those races were much closer than the polls: Trump won in 2016 and trailed Clinton in the popular vote by just 2.1%. In 2020, he trailed Biden by 4.5 points.
“Trump may finally get his great white whale,” CNN political data guru Harry Enten explained on a recent broadcast. “The bottom line is with the popular vote, which we haven’t focused upon, [it’s] a very, very tight race.”
Polls still vary a bit. One from ABC News/Ipsos gave Harris a larger edge of 51% to 47% among likely voters, and it had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 points.
Among the most highly regarded surveys, the New York Times/Siena College poll found Trump dispatching Harris 47% to 46% among likely voters.
Battleground states swing toward Trump
Of course the popular vote won’t put either Harris on Trump in the Oval Office — it’s the seven major battleground states that will.
And here, too, Trump has the slimmest advantage.
Presently, Trump is up on RCP’s map of the Electoral College — which makes a call based on the most accurate polling on every battleground state. Right now, he’s on track to win the Electoral College 312 to 226. For context, he won by 304 to Clinton’s 227 in 2016. Biden won 306 to Trump’s 232.
Trump is ahead in RCP’s aggregate of of polls in all seven battleground states — although barely in some cases. In Pennsylvania, he is up 0.6, Wisconsin 0.2, Michigan 0.2, Arizona 1.5, Nevada 0.7, Georgia 2.2 and North Carolina 0.8.
Many of those swing states have seen their key Senate races tighten over recent weeks as well. For example, the Cook Political Report recently moved the Senate race to toss-up, despite incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.) having long been favored to win.
With those battleground-state figures, it’s still very much anyone’s game. But Harris also faces other obstacles.
In Michigan, for instance, she’s grappling with backlash over the Israel-Hamas war. Michigan has the largest population of Arab-Americans in the country, and Trump has begun seizing upon this potential weakness, attacking her for campaigning with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), whom he described as a “Muslim-hating warmonger.”
She also has to overcome voters in Pennsylvania who are skeptical about her reversal on supporting a ban on fracking.
Why is Trump so formidable?
Just like Biden and Clinton, Harris has massively outraised and outspent Trump. Her ground game is also widely believed to be far more robust than his.
Still, Trump appears to benefiting from a certain degree of nostalgia among voters, who are generally giving his former presidential administration higher marks now than they did at the time.
Looking back on his economic performance, 62% of registered voters felt the Trump years were “good,” compared to 32% who described them as “bad,” according to the CBS News poll.
When it comes to the Biden years, 32% marked them as “good,” relative to 61% “bad.”
Polls have long shown voter dissatisfaction that the country endured during the post-pandemic years under Biden as well as the border crisis that unfolded.
Biden’s approval rating sits at 40.8%, while 56.6% disapprove, according to RCP.
Harris has begun working to drive home a message to voters that she won’t be a carbon copy of Biden if she wins Nov. 5, but the Trump-Vance campaign has been quick to counter with ads tying her to him.
Beyond critical issues such as the economy, Trump has seemingly managed to mobilize a subset of Americans who do not vote frequently. One risk with that is there’s a chance not enough of them will show up on Election Day.
Harris has fashioned herself as the “underdog” in the race and, internally, her campaign views the final stretch of the election season as critical to her prospects of winning.
“My internal polling is my instinct. I let the campaign people deal with all that other stuff. I am responding to what I’m seeing,” Harris told reporters Sunday when asked about what her internal polling numbers are saying about the state of the race.
No one knows for show how Election Day will turn out. Polls are widely believed to have underestimated Trump in both 2016 and 2020.
Yet at the same time, many Democrats have taken solace in their belief that they outperformed polls in the 2022 midterm and 2023 off-year elections. There’s still hope on the left that polls could be systematically underestimating Harris this time around.