Kamala Harris’ lead in the polls has now disappeared, according to the latest data from a leading polling company.
According to the final New York Times/College of Siena According to a poll taken before the election between October 20 and 23, Harris and Trump are tied with 48% each out of 2,516 voters nationwide. Harris had a 3-point lead in the poll’s previous poll, conducted between September 29 and October 6, a lead just outside the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 points.
THE New York Times and Siena College are considered the most accurate pollsters by FiveThirtyEight. News week contacted the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment via email.
The latest poll is bad news for Harris’ campaign, which is struggling to gain an edge over Trump in what could be one of the closest elections in modern history.
Mike Stewart/AP
In recent elections, Democrats have often taken the lead in the popular vote, even in years when they ultimately lost the Electoral College and the presidency.
However, polls show that two weeks before Election Day, Harris and Trump remain effectively tied, with Harris only slightly ahead of her opponent in the FiveThirtyEight poll, which puts the lead at 1.7 points. nationally, within the margin of error.
In order to claim victory, Harris must win the Electoral College, which depends on whether some or all of the seven battleground states win, and the popular vote is not decisive.
Polls show Harris’ margins in battleground states have narrowed over the past month.
According to 538’s tracker, Harris leads by a slim margin of between 0.1 and 0.7 points in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. A month ago, she led in the three states by as much as 2.4 points. Meanwhile, Trump leads by between 1.2 and 1.8 points in North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia. He also leads by 0.2 points in Pennsylvania, where Harris had led since surging to the top of the Democratic ticket.
Amid tightening polls, over the past two weeks, electoral college predictions have reversed and show a greater likelihood of a Trump victory than a Harris victory. For example, Silver’s current forecast gives Trump a 53.1 percent chance of winning the Electoral College vote, compared to Harris’ 46.6 percent.
FiveThirtyEight’s forecast also shifted in Trump’s favor, showing he has a 51% chance of winning the election, compared to Harris’ 49%. RealClearPolitics forecasts currently show Trump expected to win in every battleground state, giving him 312 Electoral College votes to Harris’ 227.
But it’s not all bad news for Harris. Some recent polls, including those from YouGov and Morning Consult, give Harris a lead of as much as 4 points. The most recent TIPP Insights poll, conducted October 21-23, shows Harris leading by 3 points.
THE New York Times/The Siena College poll also showed encouraging signs for Harris. The vice president narrowed the gap with Trump on the economy, which remains voters’ priority. Trump had a 13-point advantage over Harris on the question of which candidate could better manage the economy in last month’s poll. This figure fell to 6 percentage points.
Harris also has a 16-point lead over Trump on the question of which candidate would do the best job protecting abortion access, a central theme of his campaign. And the poll also shows there is still room for Harris to gain more supporters, with 15 percent of voters still undecided, a group with which Harris leads by 10 points. Two weeks ago, Trump had a marginal advantage among undecided voters, with 36 percent to Harris’s 35 percent.
But polls have shown that Trump still maintains an advantage over Harris on immigration, the cornerstone of his campaign. Fifteen percent of respondents cited immigration as their top issue, up from 12 percent in the last poll, and 54 percent of voters said they trust Trump more than Harris on this issue, up from 43 percent who said the same about Harris.
However, the polls are so close that the race remains uncertain, said Jon Parker, a lecturer in American studies at Keele University in the United Kingdom. News week last week.
“The race has gone from just a coin toss to a real coin toss,” he said. However, he added that this “does not suggest that either campaign is a winner or a loser.”
