With just days left in the US election campaign, Donald Trump’s recent momentum is slowing, boosting Kamala Harris’s chances of stealing a knife-edge victory through the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
While the race remains absolutely deadlocked according to the polls, we have seen small shifts in recent days that challenge the growing narrative from commentators and the betting markets that Trump will win.
There are worrying signs for Trump that independent voters are tilting at the 11th hour towards Harris rather than him in the key blue wall states.
A new Marist poll now has Harris slightly ahead of Trump in each of the three states – by two points in Michigan and Pennsylvania and three in Wisconsin – in part because of the 11th-hour swing towards her from independent voters. If Harris wins all three of these states she wins the White House, just as Joe Biden did in 2020.
But more significant is the poll’s findings that her support among independent voters – that critical subset of potentially swinging voters – shows a big late shift towards her, with her lead over Trump among this group rising sharply to 15 points in Pennsylvania compared with just four points in September. In Michigan and Wisconsin her lead over Trump among independent voters rose more modestly from four to six points.
Of course the Marist poll is just one of a slew of polls, but the bellwether Real Clear Politics average of polls shows Harris up by 0.7 in Michigan and 0.2 in Wisconsin, and Trump up by 0.4 in Pennsylvania.
Momentum is critical in the final days of this election but these figures do not suggest that Trump has the same momentum he appeared to have a week ago. Rather they point to a race that has rebalanced itself to be a near dead-heat.
The “Trump wins” narrative has been fuelled by two factors, both of which make sense, but are far from guaranteed. The first is that he has steadily crept up on Harris in the polls over the past two weeks such that he now holds narrow leads over her in five of the seven swing states that will decide the result.
The second is that the polls underestimated the Trump vote in 2016 and again in 2020, so in a deadlocked race in 2024 it is natural to assume they will do so again, thereby giving victory to Trump.
Kamala Harris talks to Kamala Harris pic.twitter.com/AJuW7aO7VM
— Saturday Night Live - SNL (@nbcsnl) November 3, 2024
It is true that Trump has chased and passed Harris in five of the seven swing states, giving him a 1.1-percentage-point average lead across the battleground states, according to the RCP average.
But this average is distorted by his more solid advantage in Georgia (2.6), Arizona (2.3), North Carolina (1.5) and Nevada (1.5). Trump could win all of these states and still lose the election if he loses the three blue wall states.
It is also possible that the polls will once again – as in 2016 and 2020 – underestimate the Trump vote, meaning he would win. But the polls were way off the mark more recently in 2022 when they falsely predicted a Republican red wave would sweep congress in the midterm elections. Those polls underestimated the Democrat vote. Could these polls be similarly underestimating the Harris vote, which would mean she will win?
Of course, the polls may be very wrong in either direction and we will soon find out. Trump is boasting to his supporters at rallies that he will win in a landslide. He even made the absurd claim on Saturday during a rally in Virginia that he would win that state, which has not voted Republican since 2004. But even Trump knows how close it could be, telling his supporters at rallies to “just pretend” it is close and go and vote anyhow.
These next few days on the campaign trail will be critical because if – and it’s a very big “if” – the polls are actually correct this time, we are looking at the closest election since the “hanging chads” drama of 2000.
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