So, who’s going to win? — What we know going into the final weekend of the presidential race
The presidential election is coming down to the wire with polls showing a historically close race.
Never before have so many states been so close in the polls.
As of Friday evening, neither candidate had a margin greater than two points in any of the seven battleground states, according to the polling averages maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ).
In three of those states — the so-called ‘Blue Wall’ of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the margin was under one point.
Political obsessives are scouring the early vote numbers for clues as to the final outcome. Over 60 million votes have already been cast.
Extrapolating any election’s final outcome from early vote numbers is a notoriously unreliable exercise, however, simply because there are so many unknowns.
Aides to each candidate are trying to bolster their supporters’ confidence.
“The early voting numbers continue to look amazing. Kamala is collapsing," Trump adviser Stephen Miller enthused on social media on Friday.
Harris adviser David Plouffe, also writing on X, contended that “late deciding voters [are] breaking by double digits” in Harris’s favor.
Here’s what we can tell about where the race stands.
Trump has a tiny edge
The polling suggests that the race is close to a dead heat. But to the extent that either candidate has even the merest hint of an edge, it’s Trump.
The former president is ahead in more battleground states than Harris in the polling averages maintained by DDHQ, FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s “Silver Bulletin” and The New York Times.
In the DDHQ averages, Trump leads in six states. On the other sites, he leads in five. The disparity springs from Wisconsin, where the other three sites have Harris ahead and DDHQ has Trump up.
Harris is clinging to a narrow edge in national polling.
In the DDHQ average, her lead is just three-tenths of a percentage point. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by more than two points while losing the election.
Still, the Trump advantage is not remotely close to conclusive. Forecasts from DDHQ and FiveThirtyEight give Trump a 54 percent and 51 percent chance of prevailing, respectively — barely different from a coin flip.
There’s now a clear split between the Sun Belt and the Blue Wall
A key schism has become deeper in recent weeks. It’s the divide between the battleground states in the Sun Belt and the South on one hand, and the Blue Wall states on the other.
Broadly, Trump does better in the former while Harris is more competitive in the latter.
Trump has his largest lead of any battleground in Arizona, where he is up by two points in the DDHQ average. Not far behind are Georgia, where he leads by 1.9 points and North Carolina, where he leads by 1.4 points.
The DDHQ forecasting models give Trump a 65 percent chance of winning in Georgia, whereas he is given no greater than a 53 percent chance of prevailing in any of the three Blue Wall states.
It’s important to underscore the Electoral College math here.
If Harris wins the three Blue Wall states she would take the White House, even if Trump wins the other four battlegrounds — so long as everything else remained the same from the 2020 election.
In that scenario, Harris would win by the narrowest possible margin: 270 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 268.
Two key unknowns
There were two October Surprises in the past six days — the racist joke told by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at Trump’s big Madison Square Garden rally last Sunday and President Biden’s apparent description of Trump supporters as “garbage” on Tuesday.
The Hinchcliffe gibe was electorally important because it targeted Puerto Rico. There are significant populations of Puerto Ricans in several swing states — including more than 400,000 in Pennsylvania alone.
The Harris campaign sought to make the most of the controversy, cutting a new ad on the furor and highlighting her backing from figures like Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez.
Trump, meanwhile, tried to amp up his backers by focusing on Biden’s “garbage” comment — a remark which also overshadowed Harris’s big speech at the Ellipse, adjacent to the White House, on Tuesday evening,
Trump kept Biden’s stumble in the news by appearing in the cab of a garbage truck on Wednesday before a rally in Wisconsin.
Don’t underestimate the chances of a rout — for either candidate
One key question haunts every reputable pollster: whether their models for who will show up to vote could be off.
This part of polling inherently involves an educated guess. And it also creates the possibility of a systematic error.
One plausible scenario this year — the first presidential election since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade — is an increased turnout for Harris from voters animated by a desire to protect reproductive rights.
If such a surge materialized — and Harris outperformed her poll numbers by just two points — she would win every battleground.
But those scenarios are not by any stretch a one-way street. Trump has outperformed his polls in the past — sometimes by big margins. In Wisconsin in 2020, for example, Trump outperformed his final number in the RealClearPolitics polling average by almost five points.
Biden still eked out a victory in the state. But Harris has no margin for error this year.
Even the slightest outperformance by Trump across the battlegrounds would see him back in the White House with comparative ease.
Trump’s final travel raises eyebrows
In these final days, every move the candidates make is parsed for some deeper meaning.
That’s especially true of Harris and Trump’s final campaign stops.
Eyebrows are being raised about one detail in particular.
Trump is scheduled to do four North Carolina events over the course of Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
On its face, that’s an odd decision, given the Tar Heel State is supposed to be one of Trump’s stronger battlegrounds.
Does it mean the Trump team are more concerned about their standing there than they are publicly admitting?