US election has been flipped upside down as Donald Trump takes swing state polling lead
With just 19 days to go until the US presidential election, the polls have shifted and Donald Trump now has his nose in front.
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Donald Trump is on track to win the 2024 US election, according to the latest polling.
The former US President has made a stunning comeback with just 19 days until election day.
His Democrat opponent Kamala Harris, who had been leading, has been losing ground in the key battleground states that will decide the election.
Recently, Ms Harris mantained a lead in the popular vote of about +2 points, but that has since slipped to +1.4.
However, the election is not determined by the popular vote. It is decided by the archaic US electoral college system.
Under the system, each US state is apportioned a number of presidential electors, to a total of 538, with a majority of 270 or more needed required to elect the president.
While most of the states lean either heavily blue or red, the swing states can be decided by razor-thin margins.
The latest RealClear Polling numbers bode well for Mr Trump, and are a worrying sign for Ms Harris. The site aggregates the results of numerous polls into averages.
Mr Trump holds a narrow lead +0.3 point lead in Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes.
He’s also ahead in North Carolina by +1.4 points.
Mr Trump is also poised to flip Georgia and is leading there by +0.7 points.
Ms Harris has maintained a slight lead of +0.3 in Wisconsin.
Mr Trump is leading by +1.0 in Michigan, a state with a second-largest Arab population in the country, and where the Israel-Hamas war could play a role.
Ms Harris looks set to win Minnesota and is leading by +4.7.
Mr Trump is likely to flip Arizona and is leading by +1.1.
He is also slightly in front in Nevada, with a +0.5 margin.
New Hampshire is set to stay blue, with Ms Harris up +7.4 as is Virginia where she leads by j+6.4.
Texas, which some thought may be competitive, is in fact not — as Mr Trump leads by +5.8.
If Mr Trump does indeed win every state that he’s currently ahead in, that would give him 302 electoral college votes.
However, Ms Harris is doing better according to the numbers published by polling site FiveThirtyEight, where she has a 54 per cent chance of being elected president.
The betting markets have also swung in favour of Mr Trump, with Sportsbet now paying $1.67 for a Trump win and $2.25 for a Harris victory.
The election remains incredibly close and even slight voting changes can have significant impacts on the final result.
Trump sways to music for 30 minutes, spars with Bloomberg editor
The election campaign took a bizarre turn as Mr Trump swayed to music for about 30 minutes on stage at a televised town hall event on Monday (local time).
Initially, the event in Oaks near Philadelphia was standard fare ahead of the November 5 election, as Mr Trump took friendly questions from supporters on the economy and cost of living.
With the session moderated by a loyal right-wing ally, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Mr Trump was on cruise control — although he got the election date wrong by two months, urging supporters to vote “on January 5.”
After the town hall paused for two audience members who required medical attention, Mr Trump then switched focus.
Jokingly asking whether “anybody else would like to faint,” Mr Trump declared: “Let’s not do any more questions.”
“Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” Mr Trump said.
And so they did: for more than half an hour, the Mr Trump playlist blasted while the candidate mostly stood on stage listening and slowly dancing.
Mr Trump has made a brief, jerky dance his signature at the end of rallies for years, nearly always to his exit song — the Village People’s 1978 disco anthem YMCA.
This time, he stayed on stage for nine songs, ranging from opera to a series of his favorites, including Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain, Rufus Wainwright’s rendition of Hallelujah, Elvis and of course YMCA.
And his dance routine expanded from the familiar jerky motion to a slow swaying. Often, however, he did not dance but stood in place and stared out into the crowd and sometimes pointed at people.
Later on Tuesday, Mr Trump later got into a heated exchange with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.
Discussing Mr Trump’s plan to enact tariffs, Mr Micklethwait repeatedly asked how Mr Trump would enact high tariffs on foreign companies without getting an economic blowback on the American consumer in exchange.
Mr Trump responded his policy would have a positive effect, and later slammed the journalist saying: “You’ve been wrong all your life”.
Playing the health card
Ms Harris, meanwhile, has tried to pivot the conversation to Mr Trump’s health after a medical report was published showing she is in “excellent health”.
She has since challenged Mr Trump to publish his own health records.
“Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”
Speaking to reporters on Saturday ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Ms Harris called Mr Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example of his lack of transparency.”
“It’s obvious that his team at least, does not want the American people to see everything about who he is … and whether or not he is actually fit to do the job of being president of the United States,” she said.
- with AFP
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