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With just two days until the presidential election, fresh polling shows six of the seven battleground states so close they are within the margin of error — with the only one showing a clear leader being Arizona, where former President Donald Trump is up by four points.
Trump captured a 49% to 45% advantage in the Grand Canyon State, while two others show him tying with Vice President Kamala Harris — with each getting 48% in Pennsylvania and 47% in Michigan, according to the final batch of swing state polling from the New York Times and Siena College.
Harris eked out narrow leads within the margin of error among likely voters in Nevada (49% to 46%), North Carolina (48% to 46%), Wisconsin (49% to 47%) and Georgia (48% to 47%).
If those findings held true on Election Day, Harris would clinch 264 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.
All of those figures were based on head-to-head matchups between Trump, 78, and Harris, 60.
When third-party candidates get added to the mix, Arizona favors Trump 48% to 44%, Georgia is a tie at 46%, Michigan is even at 45%, Nevada goes toward Harris 48% to 46%, North Carolina favors Harris 48% to 45%, Pennsylvania goes to Trump 47% to 46% and Wisconsin backs Harris 48% to 45% — all among likely voters.
The results in Georgia and North Carolina are particularly noteworthy because they are Trump’s second and third-best performing battleground states in the RealClearPolitics (RCP) aggregate after Arizona.
RCP favors Trump in its no-tossup battleground state map, showing him with a slight advantage in all of the battleground states except Wisconsin and Michigan.
In a potential warning sign for Trump, however, the New York Times/Siena College poll found evidence that voters who made their decision recently appear to be swaying toward Harris.
Roughly 8% of voters claimed to have made their decision recently. Of that bloc, 55% broke for Harirs, compared to 44% for Trump. This is significant because of the remarkably tight nature of the presidential contest gauged by a litany of polls.
Still, about 11% of voters, according to the poll, either remain undecided or can be moved.
The poll surveyed a grand total of 7,879 likely voters, including 1,025 in Arizona, 1,004 in Georgia, 1,010 in Nevada, 998 in Michigan, 1,010 in North Carolina, 1,305 in Wisconsin and 1,527 in Pennsylvania.
The survey was conducted between Oct. 24 to Nov. 2 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Several prominent analysts such as polling data guru Nate Silver have begun raising questions about polls in recent days, alleging that some pollsters could be “herding” their results with decisions aimed at showing a close race to avoid being an outlier.
Experts like Silver contend that there is far less variability in the polling results than should be statistically expected.
Pollsters are keen on avoiding a repeat of the 2016 and 2020 elections in which they were widely accused of underestimating Trump’s support.
Of course, in the 2022 midterm elections, pollsters were hit with accusations that they generally overestimated Republican support.
On Saturday, the Des Moines Register newspaper shocked the beltway with its findings from famed pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co, that showed Harris beating Trump in Iowa 47% to 44%.
Iowa is generally regarded as a red state in the presidential contest. Trump won it by about eight points in 2020.
Selz is widely renowned for the accuracy of her polls, with some pundits dubbing her poll a “gold standard” for its track record of matching the final results.
She has had misses, however, including in the 2024 Republican primary.
A recent poll from AtlasIntel, which had been one of the closest polls to the 2020 election final results, found Trump favored in Arizona Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In four of those states, Trump was outside the margin of error.
Over 70 million Americans have already cast their ballots already, per the University of Florida Election Lab. For context, about 252 million turned out in the 2020 election.