With days remaining until Election Day, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are in a tight race to win over undecided voters.
According to the polls, few United States presidential elections have been as tightly contested as this one.
Harris and Trump are in a dead heat and the outcome could be decided by voter turnout in seven key swing states.
Who is in the lead?
As of Thursday, FiveThirtyEight’s daily election poll tracker shows that Harris maintains a narrow national lead of about 1.2 points. However, this lead has gradually decreased and falls within the margin of error, indicating that either could potentially be in the lead.
Recent polls from AtlasIntel, released on Thursday, show Trump holding a slight lead of one to two percentage points over his opponent. However, a separate poll from TIPP Insights indicates that the candidates are currently tied.
While most polls indicate Harris is ahead in the national vote, the two candidates are closely matched in swing states.
It’s important to note that while national surveys offer insights into voter sentiment, the Electoral College will ultimately determine the winner, not the nationwide popular vote. Many states tend to strongly favour either Republicans or Democrats.
What are the polls saying about the swing states?
The seven key swing states are Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), North Carolina (16), Georgia (16), Michigan (15), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10), and Nevada (6), which together hold 93 Electoral College votes.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s daily poll tracker, Harris’s lead in Michigan remains slight, at approximately 0.8 points. However, she has lost her lead in Nevada, where Trump now leads by 0.3 points.
In Wisconsin, her lead has dropped to 0.6 points, down from 0.8 points on Wednesday.
Continuing last week’s trend, if the narrow margins reflected in the poll averages hold on election night, Trump is favoured to win. However, even a small shift away from him in these critical states – or an underestimation of Harris’s support – could result in a victory for the vice president.
Notably, in the 2020 presidential election, Georgia, where Trump is currently leading, shifted from Republican to Democratic after nearly 30 years of voting Republican. Similarly, Arizona, where Trump also has a lead, was won by Democrats by just 0.3 percentage points.
How trustworthy are polls?
Election polls predict how the population might vote by surveying a sample of voters. Surveys are most commonly conducted by phone or online. In some cases, it is via post or in person.
Poll trackers, which aggregate a number of polls together, are weighted based on a number of factors, such as the sample size of the poll, the pollster quality, how recently the poll was conducted and the particular methodologies employed.
Polls are never 100 percent accurate. Both the 2016 and 2020 US elections saw opinion polls underestimate the popularity of Republican candidates.
Pollsters got it wrong again in the 2022 midterm elections. That time, they undercounted the support for Democrats and predicted a win for Republicans, only to be proven wrong.
Experts note that while pollster services are sophisticated, they have a limited shelf life.
“The problem is that, as the cliche goes, they’re snapshots in time, so as soon as you see them, they’re already out of date. The big question [this year is] with the undecided voters,” Steven Erlanger, the European diplomatic correspondent at The New York Times, told Al Jazeera’s Inside Story programme.
Many of the polls conducted before this year’s presidential election have shown the difference in support between Harris and Trump within the margin of error.
