The 2024 presidential election cycle is the primary time in not less than 60 years {that a} single candidate hasn’t been forward 5 factors or extra within the polls for three-plus weeks, in keeping with an analysis by Harry Enten, host of CNN’s Margins of Error. That margin has existed in each marketing campaign since 1964, Enten defined, besides this one—together with when President Joe Biden was nonetheless operating.
“The race has been constantly shut in a manner I’ve by no means seen,” Enten wrote on X. “The underside line is that this election is up for grabs with 2 months to go.”
A number of nationwide and battleground state polls show Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump both tied or inside just a few proportion factors of each other—the outcomes seeming to hover squarely inside margins of error.
Pollsters on this election have had a uniquely tumultuous marketing campaign to trace. From Biden’s fraught debate efficiency in June to the failed assassination try on Trump in July, adopted by Biden bowing out of the race and Harris’s energized and expedited summer season marketing campaign, it’s felt like every week has introduced one other unprecedented occasion for People to weigh in on.
Plus, in keeping with a Pew Analysis Heart report, the mere presence of Trump on the poll can negatively impression the reliability of polling. “In contrast with different elections up to now 20 years, polls have been much less correct when Donald Trump is on the poll,” Pew’s vice chairman Courtney Kennedy and senior survey advisor Scott Keeter wrote.
This discrepancy, they discovered, is probably going as a result of two issues. First, pollsters typically use previous election turnout to foretell who will vote within the upcoming race, and “analysis has discovered that Trump is standard amongst individuals who have a tendency to take a seat out midterms however end up for him in presidential election years.” Second, Kennedy and Keeter word, “Republicans within the Trump period have change into rather less doubtless than Democrats to take part in polls.”
Along with documenting a traditionally shut race, pollsters have been monitoring what points are driving voters to the poll field this 12 months.
An August Economist/YouGov poll of 1,567 American adults discovered that “Inflation/costs” was the highest difficulty on voters’ minds, at 24%, adopted by “Jobs and the economic system” at 13%, and “Immigration” at 12%.
A set of New York Instances/Siena Faculty polls of registered voters in seven battleground states carried out from August 6 to fifteen discovered that “For girls youthful than 45, abortion has overtaken the economic system as the only most necessary difficulty to their vote.”
All through the 2024 marketing campaign cycle, one factor has remained notably clear: this election might be determined by just some key battleground states.
Democratic voters in Omaha, Nebraska, have been placing indicators of their yards with a singular blue dot, a logo of Harris’s potential stronghold in a crimson state. Nebraska is one among solely two states that awards electoral votes by congressional district, slightly than by statewide winner.
“For all the pathways for Harris and Trump to achieve the White Home,” CNN’s Jeff Zeleny writes, “the race for 270 electoral votes might come all the way down to Nebraska’s sprawling 2nd District masking Omaha and components of two close by counties, which maintain many similarities to suburban areas throughout the nation.”
On high of Omaha’s blue dot, the ultimate tallies in seven states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada—could grant both Trump or Harris the 270 wanted to win.
Within the case of an Electoral Faculty tie, a centuries-old constitutional mechanism could find yourself deciding the election. If each Harris and Trump take residence 269 Electoral Faculty votes, the Home would determine the election, per the twelfth Modification—that hasn’t occurred since 1824.
Ought to it’s tossed to the Home, every state delegation can be allotted one vote. At present, Republicans management 26 Home delegations; Democrats management 22, and two others are tied. That means, Trump might lose the favored vote—as he has the final two instances he’s run for government workplace—tie within the basic election, and nonetheless find yourself within the White Home.
A detailed election might exacerbate already percolating right-wing theories of voter fraud—and threat a revival of Trump’s 2020 Large Lie, the unfounded declare that the election was stolen from him by Biden.
