The 2024 presidential election cycle is the first time in at least 60 years that a single candidate hasn’t been ahead 5 points or more in the polls for three-plus weeks, according to an analysis by Harry Enten, host of CNN’s Margins of Error. That margin has existed in every campaign since 1964, Enten explained, except this one—including when President Joe Biden was still running.
“The race has been consistently close in a way I’ve never seen,” Enten wrote on X. “The bottom line is this election is up for grabs with 2 months to go.”
Several national and battleground state polls show Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump either tied or within a few percentage points of one another—the results seeming to hover squarely within margins of error.
Pollsters in this election have had a uniquely tumultuous campaign to track. From Biden’s fraught debate performance in June to the failed assassination attempt on Trump in July, followed by Biden bowing out of the race and Harris’s energized and expedited summer campaign, it’s felt like each week has brought another unprecedented event for Americans to weigh in on.
Plus, according to a Pew Research Center report, the mere presence of Trump on the ballot can negatively impact the reliability of polling. “Compared with other elections in the past 20 years, polls have been less accurate when Donald Trump is on the ballot,” Pew’s vice president Courtney Kennedy and senior survey advisor Scott Keeter wrote.
This discrepancy, they found, is likely due to two things. First, pollsters often use past election turnout to predict who will vote in the upcoming race, and “research has found that Trump is popular among people who tend to sit out midterms but turn out for him in presidential election years.” Second, Kennedy and Keeter note, “Republicans in the Trump era have become a little less likely than Democrats to participate in polls.”
In addition to documenting a historically close race, pollsters have been tracking what issues are driving voters to the ballot box this year.
An August Economist/YouGov poll of 1,567 American adults found that “Inflation/prices” was the top issue on voters’ minds, at 24%, followed by “Jobs and the economy” at 13%, and “Immigration” at 12%.
A set of New York Times/Siena College polls of registered voters in seven battleground states conducted from August 6 to 15 found that “For women younger than 45, abortion has overtaken the economy as the single most important issue to their vote.”
Throughout the 2024 campaign cycle, one thing has remained notably clear: this election could be decided by just a few key battleground states.
Democratic voters in Omaha, Nebraska, have been putting signs in their yards with a singular blue dot, a symbol of Harris’s potential stronghold in a red state. Nebraska is one of only two states that awards electoral votes by congressional district, rather than by statewide winner.
“For all of the pathways for Harris and Trump to reach the White House,” CNN’s Jeff Zeleny writes, “the race for 270 electoral votes could come down to Nebraska’s sprawling 2nd District covering Omaha and parts of two nearby counties, which hold many similarities to suburban areas across the country.”
On top of Omaha’s blue dot, the final tallies in seven states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada—may grant either Trump or Harris the 270 needed to win.
In the case of an Electoral College tie, a centuries-old constitutional mechanism could end up deciding the election. If both Harris and Trump take home 269 Electoral College votes, the House would decide the election, per the 12th Amendment—that hasn’t happened since 1824.
Should it be tossed to the House, each state delegation would be allotted one vote. Currently, Republicans control 26 House delegations; Democrats control 22, and two others are tied. Meaning, Trump could lose the popular vote—as he has the last two times he’s run for executive office—tie in the general election, and still end up in the White House.
A close election could exacerbate already percolating right-wing theories of voter fraud—and risk a revival of Trump’s 2020 Big Lie, the unfounded claim that the election was stolen from him by Biden.
