Swing votes and Undecided voters hold the key to success of Trump or Harris in the US presidential elections of 2024 - Harris is still ahead by 49% to 48% of Trump - But voters have the tendency to change their minds on election day
Countdown to US 2024 Presidential elections – Day 5th - US election polls: Who is ahead - Harris or Trump? Harris still ahead by a slim margin – Anything can happen on election day
By TN Ashok Washington, November 01
Hardly five days to go ahead for the US Presidential elections this year and the picture is a virtual toss up for any of the candidates – Democratic nominee Kamala Harris & Republican nominee Donald Trump.
But national poll averages shows that Harris has had her startling debut ratings steadily coming down from 5 % points to just about 1% point over her arch rival ex-President Trump who is thirsting to grab the White House for a 2nd term to avenge his defeat of 2020 which he called stolen but proved otherwise by the courts.
It's a different picture in all the seven battleground states, seven of them, where the winner has to take at least three tilting slightly towards them to win the election. Biden took all seven to win the popular vote by 81% and the electoral college by 306 to Trumps 232.
Who is leading national polls?
Harris has had a small lead over Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July and she remains ahead - as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.
But that's not going to happen with either Trump or Harris this time as they both hold very narrow leads. If it's a tie, then the house of representatives gets to choose the new president and the senate the vice president. The thing is that polls predict that democrts are losing the majority in the senate and the narrow lead they have now in the house is going to widen further in favor of the republicans.
It's also important to remember that the individual polls used to create these averages have a margin of error of around three to four percentage points, so either candidate could be doing better or worse than the numbers currently suggest.
If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, it does highlight some differences between the states.
And that will make a big difference in the electoral college or if the house or the senate has to vote in the new president and vice president. Voters in the US go to the polls on 5 November to elect their next president.
The election started essentially as a rematch of 2020 but it was upended in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris. People were generally disenchanted by both the old candidates Biden (81) Trump (78) , they wanted a yoiung president in the fifties to lead the nation for generation Z. And when they got Kamala Harris, then 59, the people were mighty excited especially the democratc voters and also the undecided voters and the republican voters not so happy with the ajutocratic style of Trump.
She quickly erased the gap that Biden had trailing Trump. And even emerged or surged ahead of rump by as high as 5% points. Trump lost the debate and his cool in the 1st presidential debate with Harris where she baited him and he flew of the handle.
Rest is history. Trump is good at what he does best. Bashing people, speaking over them and peddling half truths as truth and lies as the absolute truth. His advisor aasked him to focus on the economy, which again was the bigh lie, reiterating that the economy had tanked , but that was in 2022 , but by December 2023 the economy had shown a turn around with inflation being rein in at 2.5% , close the feds’ target of 2%, employment was the peak at 22.1 million creating 60,000 jobs a month , again a record by Biden compared to Obamas 30,000 and Trumps 40,000 in a four year term. These are official figures released by the ministry of labor and statistics and not fudged ones.
Pennsylvania polling average:
Biden / Harris v Trump
Donald Trump has a lead of 0.7 percentage points over Kamala Harris in the polling average. Joe Biden had been trailing Donald Trump by 4.4 percentage points when he dropped out of the race on 21 July.
Harris has not effectively spoken about the economy turning around – though grocery prices may be a tad too little high, fuel prices have slumped from a record $5 a gallon during the pandemic to now $2.5 to $2.9 per gallon.
What Trump says sticks in the mind of the voters – even if its the Big Lie – because he has the ability to articulate it well and convince others he is saying the truth which is absolute.
And this could be reason why the lead that Harris established in the beginning has got erased and Trump has caught up with her. But the polls are no indication of an outcome as Biden has been reiterating until the voters go out there and vote for their candidates.
In 2016 all polls billed Hilary Clinton, though she won the popular vote, she lost the electoral college. Trump became president. His mishandling of the pandemic and the economy pushed him out of presidency in 2020 and Biden won, albeit by as low margins as 11,000 votes in Georgia and 100,000 votes in Pennsylvania.
Untill the last voters have voted on November 05 by the deadline, we still don't have a clear idea of the winner. But early voting at 60 million, in my opinion, is a sure-fire indicator that democratic voters are fired up for Harris and dont want Trump to win. In 2020 we witnessed the similar trend for Biden who won.
Usually, Republicans are not early voters. But this time they could be as white supremacists prevent a 2nd black African Indian American from becoming the president.
The big question now is - will America get its first woman president or a second Donald Trump term? As election day approaches, we'll be keeping track of the polls and seeing what effect the campaign has on the race for the White House.
Who is leading national polls?
Harris has had a small lead over Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July and she remains ahead - as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number. Harris saw a bounce in her polling numbers in the first few weeks of her campaign, building a lead of nearly four percentage points towards the end of August.
The polls were relatively stable in September and early October but they have tightened in the last couple of weeks, as shown in the chart below, with trend lines showing the averages and dots for individual poll results for each candidate. While national polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the whole country, they're not the best way to predict the election result.
That's because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is given a number of votes roughly in line with the size of its population. A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win. There are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or swing states.
Right now, both Harris and Trump have an assured vote of 200 each in the electoral college from the Blue Wall states and the Red ones – the east coast and west coast and the mid-west and south west and north west of America. Taking into account the swing states , Harris seems to be assured of 226 eats and Trump of 219 seats. Whiel Harris needs 44 seats to take the presidency from Trump needs 51 votes to make a comeback for the presidency.
Thats means both candidates need to take at least three states where they have tight leads or are up by slim margins. Harris needs Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania to win at least two of them. Trump needs Nevada, North Carolina and Pnnsulvania. Penn offers the highest no of votes at over 19.
Who is winning in swing state polls?
Right now the leads in the swing states are so small that it's impossible to know who is really ahead from looking at the polling averages. Polls are designed to broadly explain how the public feels about a candidate or an issue, not predict the result of an election by less than a percentage point so it's important to keep that in mind when looking at the numbers below.
It's also important to remember that the individual polls used to create these averages have a margin of error of around three to four percentage points, so either candidate could be doing better or worse than the numbers currently suggest.
If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, it does highlight some differences between the states. In Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, the lead has changed hands a few times since the start of August but Trump has a small lead in all of them at the moment.
In the three other states - Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - Harris had led since the start of August, sometimes by two or three points, but the polls have tightened significantly and Trump now has a very small lead in Pennsylvania. All three of those states had been Democratic strongholds before Trump turned them red on his path to winning the presidency in 2016. Biden retook them in 2020 and if Harris can do the same then she will be on course to win the election.
In a sign of how the race has changed since Harris became the Democratic nominee, on the day that Biden quit the race he was trailing Trump by nearly five percentage points on average in the seven swing states. In Pennsylvania, Biden was behind by nearly 4.5 percentage points when he dropped out, as the chart below shows. It is a key state for both campaigns as it has the highest number of electoral votes of the seven and therefore winning it makes it easier to reach the 270 votes needed.
How are these averages created?
The figures we have used in the graphics above are averages created by polling analysis website 538, which is part of American news network ABC News. To create them, 538 collects the data from individual polls carried out both nationally and in battleground states by lots of polling companies. As part of its quality control, 538 only includes polls from companies that meet certain criteria, like being transparent about how many people they polled, when the poll was carried out and how the poll was conducted (telephone calls, text message, online, etc).
Can we trust the polls?
The polls have underestimated support for Trump in the last two elections and the national polling error in 2020 was the highest in 40 years according to a post-mortem by polling experts - so there’s good reason to be cautious about them going into this year’s election. The polling miss in 2016 was put down to voters changing their minds in the final days of the campaign and because college-educated voters - who were more likely to support Hillary Clinton - had been over-represented in polling samples.
In 2020, the experts pointed to problems with getting Trump supporters to take part in polls, but said it was “impossible” to know exactly what had caused the polling error, especially as the election was held during a pandemic and had a record turnout. Pollsters have made lots of changes since then and the polling industry “had one of its most successful election cycles in US history” in the 2022 midterm elections, according to analysts at 538.
But Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot in the midterms and we won’t know until after election day whether these changes can deal with the influx of irregular voters he tends to attract.
Source; Inputs from BBC and US media networks.
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