 "People watch the presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 10, 2024, at the Gipsy Las Vegas in Las Vegas. (Photo: AP)")
The US presidential election is just over two weeks away.
The race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump looks too close to call.
The opinion polls show a close race between Harris and Trump even as early voting is underway ahead of Election Day on November 5.
While the vice president has an edge in the national polling, the two candidates are running neck-and-neck in the all-important swing states.
Trump, 78, is making his third consecutive White House bid after losing to Joe Biden in 2020 and beating Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Harris, 60, is a former San Francisco prosecutor, state attorney general and US senator seeking to rebuild the party’s diverse coalition of young voters, women and people of colour as well as pick up some Republicans disillusioned with Trump.
But who is ahead? And do opinion polls really matter?
Let’s take a closer look:
Who is ahead?
Harris is ahead with voters across the country.
According to BBC, Harris leads Trump 48 per cent to 46 per cent in the national polling averages.
Harris, who entered the race in July, built up a four point lead over Trump by August end.
The vice president made her entrance after Biden ended his re-election effort following a poor debate performance against Trump in June. Trump at the time was widely seen as the front-runner, partly based on his perceived strength on the economy after several years of high inflation under the Biden administration, which has eased in recent months.
Impact Shorts
View AllSince September – when the two candidates had their debate – the numbers have somewhat tightened but remained stable.
A Reuters survey poll released last week showed Harris leading Trump 45 to 42 per cent. It also showed that Democrats are more enthusiastic about this year’s election than the one in 2020.
Some 78 per cent of registered voters in the three-day poll including 86 per cent of Democrats and 81 per cent of Republicans said they were “completely certain” they would cast a ballot in the presidential election.
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That number was up from 74 per cent in a Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted in October when 74 per cent of Democrats and 79 per cent of Republicans said they were certain to cast ballots.
The poll had a margin of error of around 4 percentage points.
While the national polls are a good barometer of a candidate’s relative popularity, they in no way reflect their chances at winning the Oval Office.
This is because the United States chooses its president via the Electoral College and not by popular vote.
The Electoral College comprises 538 Electoral Votes (EVs) – with each state being assigned a certain weightage based on its population.
The candidate that gets the most votes in the state usually wins all of its EVs.
However, there are exceptions like Nebraska and Maine, who assign their delegates on a proportional basis.
The winning candidate must cross the magic mark of 270 Electoral Votes.
The last two Republicans to win the popular vote were George Bush in 2004 and his father George HW Bush in 1988.
Critics of the Electoral College have thus argued that it favours the Republicans and should to be done away with
Like in the past few decades, a few key states – Michigan (15 EVs), Wisconsin (10 EVs), Pennsylvania (19 EVs), Georgia (16 EVs), North Carolina (16 EVs), Nevada (6 EVs) and Arizona (11 EVs)– hold the key to the election.
It is the winner of a plurality of these states, who will likely be the next president.
A piece in The Conversation noted how the previous two elections in 2020 and 2016, the margin of victory between the winning and losing candidate in these states was under 1 per cent.
So what does polling in the swing state show?
Harris-Trump tied
Polls have shown Harris and Trump are neck and neck in these battleground states, with many results within the margins of error.
A new Washington Post/Schar School poll, which has a margin of 4.5 percentage points, on Monday showed Harris and Trump are essentially tied in these crucial states.
The poll, conducted from September 30 to October 15, surveyed 5,016 registered voters in these states.
As per Washington Post, the survey was laser focussed on voters who remain undecided and whose voting record shows that they have voted for both Democrats and Republicans.
It showed Harris leading Trump Georgia 51 per cent to 47 per cent, while in Arizona Trump was slightly ahead of Harris 49 per cent to 46 per cent.
Harris led Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – known as the Democrats’ ‘Blue firewall’ – while Trump was ahead and North Carolina and in a dead heat with Harris in in Nevada 48 per cent to 48 per cent according to the poll.
Monday’s findings from the Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government echoed other recent polls that found a neck and neck race in the seven battleground states
According to Vox, most polls show Trump inching Harris in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.
Overall, 49 per cent of likely voters said they support Harris and 48% backed Trump, the Post poll showed.
The piece quote_d The New York Times_’ polling averages as showing that Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina are essentially tied.
Trump, meanwhile, is up by a point in Georgia and two points in Arizona.
Nate Silver’s polling averages show similar results.
Washington Post’s polling averages_,_ on the other hand, gives Harris the edge.
Harris is ahead by two points in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
However, RealClearPolitics averages have Trump beating Harris by a margin of two points and under in all swing states.
Forbes quoted to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages as giving Harris the edge in Michigan, Wisconsin, while Trump is ahead in Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia.
Do opinion polls really matter?
That’s up for debate.
A piece in Vox noted that the differences between the two candidates in the key states amounted to “hair-splitting”.
“None of these results are lopsided enough to instill any real confidence about which way the outcome will go,” the piece argued.
It also noted how polls in 2016 and in 2020 undercounted the ‘silent’ Trump voters particularly in the swing states.
It also argued that pollsters may have reacted by overcorrecting for Trump in 2024 – thus possibly getting it wrong this time.
A piece in The Conversation quoted the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) as saying that pollsters in 2016 undercounted Republican voters in the previous two elections and undecided voters, while over sampling college-educated voters who seem to go for the Democrats.
Though the pollsters attempted to adjust in 2020, their jobs were made more difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic.
AAPOR noted that states which had a higher proportion of COVID-19 cases also had the biggest polling errors.
Pollsters thus undercounted Trump’s vote share in key swing states and also overcounted Biden’s national edge.
The Conversation piece also noted the slew of challenges pollsters face simply getting people on the phone due to caller ID and call screening.
It noted that polls with under 1,000 respondents are less reliable than those with larger sample sizes.
It said pollsters are now employing e-mail, online surveys, and robocalls – which come with their own sets of issues.
Biden ultimately prevailed in six swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin
He won the popular vote by four per cent and netted 306 EVs compared to Trump’s 232 EVs.
The 2020 polls, despite predicting Biden’s victory, were thus the least accurate in 40 years, as per The Conversation.
This after pollsters got it completely wrong in 2016.
As to the accuracy of the polls, Justin Grimmer, a professor of public policy at Stanford University, told Politico they are “far less precise and far more punditry than forecasters admit.”
Experts “certainly do not know if small fluctuations in the probability of a candidate winning represent anything other than modeling error or meaningless random variation.”
As the Vox piece concluded, “We simply won’t know until the votes are counted.”
With inputs from agencies