Polling experts see neck and neck 2024 race heading into Election Day

CV NEWS FEED // As American voters head into Election Day 2024, a chorus of polling experts agreed that the presidential race between Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is neck and neck with no clear favorite.

Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, statistician Nate Silver unveiled his Silver Bulletin’s final forecast model, showing each major party candidate essentially has a 50% shot of becoming the nation’s 47th president.

“We ran 80,000 simulations tonight,” Silver wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Harris won in 40,012.”

Harrris “did not win in 39,988 simulations (49.985%),” Silver and co-author Eli McKown-Dawson explained in their final Silver Bulletin post:

Of those, 39,718 were outright wins for Donald Trump and the remainder (270 simulations) were exact 269-269 Electoral College ties: these ties are likely to eventually result in Trump wins in the U.S. House of Representatives.

According to Silver’s polling averages, all of the battleground states except for Arizona (where Trump has a 2.4 point lead) are within one point. 

Trump is leading in five of the seven states – all except for Michigan and Wisconsin – enough to give him a 287-251 Electoral College victory, per Silver’s averages.  However, his lead in Pennsylvania is only 0.1%, and if this state is instead placed in Harris’ column, she wins the election.

The averages showed that in the past week, Harris had slightly gained in every swing state with the exception of North Carolina, which did not move in either direction. However, in the past month, Trump has conversely gained in every state except for Georgia (where Harris gained by 0.1%).

Per Silver’s averages, Harris is leading the national popular vote by one point with 48.6% to Trump’s 47.6%. 

As of late Monday night, FiveThirtyEight, the polling website which Silver founded and departed last year, also forecasted a virtual 50-50 split between the candidates.

When FiveThirtyEight’s simulations were run 1,000 times, Harris won 504 times, compared to 494 times for Trump, and twice when there was no electoral college winner – a breakdown eerily similar to the one produced by its founder.

>> Check out last week’s two-part State of Play on the Presidential Election: Part I & Part II <<

Also per FiveThirtyEight’s forecast, Trump had a 67% chance of winning Arizona, and a 59% chance of winning each of Georgia and North Carolina. In Nevada, both candidates had a 50-50 chance of winning. 

Harris meanwhile had a 51% chance of winning Pennsylvania, a 58% chance in Wisconsin, and 60% in Michigan.

CNN senior writer and political analyst Harry Enten on Monday morning showed that his final polling aggregates had Trump with leads in all four of the Sun Belt battleground states, while Harris was leading in the three Great Lakes battleground by less than a point each.

Enten showed Trump leading in Nevada and North Carolina by less than a point, Georgia by one point, and in Arizona by three points. Arizona was the only battleground state where a candidate was leading by more than one point per the analyst’s aggregates. 

Furthermore, Enten pointed out that if the candidates would win the respective swing states in which they are leading, Harris would finish with exactly 270 electoral votes, the minimum amount to win the presidency.

“That is as tight as it can possibly be,” Enten declared on a CNN broadcast. “That is the tightest the polls have ever been projected onto the electoral map, even tighter than 2000 when Al Gore was projected to get 281 electoral votes, since 1972.”

Gore lost that year’s election to George W. Bush by a tally of 271 to 266 electoral votes, due to coming up short in Florida by a razor-thin margin. However, Gore won a plurality of the popular vote.

However, Enten explained that even though the polls show a tight race, there is still a strong possibility that Trump or Harris would win the race by a comfortable electoral vote margin.

“Will the 2024 winner get 300+ electoral votes?” Enten asked. He answered that according to an aggregate of forecast models, there is a six and ten chance this, “a relative blowout in today’s day and age,” will happen.

“Essentially, if you look back at swing state polling averages since 1972, the average error in the swing states is 3.4 points,” he noted. “And of course all of the seven closest battleground states are within three points.”

“So, if you get an average error and it all goes in one direction,” he indicated, “lo and behold, you will in fact get a blowout in the electoral college of the winner getting at least 300 electoral votes.”

“The only takeaway at this point,” Enten summarized, “it’s historically tight but basically any scenario is on the table.”

Enten proceeded to agree with CNN host John Berman’s point that “Trump can do better than he did in 2016, but tilts the other way, Harris can do better than Joe Biden did.”

>> THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE: WHAT IT IS AND WHY WE NEED IT <<

However, other prognosticators indicated a race where Trump had a clear, yet still slight advantage over Harris. 

In its final pre-election forecast published Monday evening, Decision Desk HQ projected that Trump had a 53% chance of winning, compared to Harris’ 47%.

This forecast model also projected that Trump would win 275 electoral votes – five over the threshold required to win the White House – compared to Harris’ 263.

In another development that might bode well for Trump, AtlasIntel – widely considered to be the most accurate pollster of the last presidential cycle – released its final batch of polls, showing Trump with a lead in every battleground state.

In the firm’s head-to-head polls between Trump and Harris, the former president led by 5.1 points in Arizona, 3.1 points in Nevada, 2.1 in North Carolina, 1.6 in Georgia, 1.5 in Michigan, one point in Pennsylvania, and 0.9 in Wisconsin.

Leading prediction website Polymarket also gave Trump the edge as of 2:00 a.m. EST – where it showed the 45th president’s chance of winning at 61% compared to the sitting vice president’s 39%.

This is up from October 15 when Polymarket gave Trump a 58% chance of winning reelection to a second non-consecutive term, but still down from October 22 when it listed Trump’s chances of victory at 66%.

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Polymarket showed that Trump had a 78% chance of winning Arizona, 67% chance of winning Georgia, 66% chance of winning North Carolina, 59% chance of winning Pennsylvania, and 59% chance of winning Nevada.

Meanwhile, the website had Harris as the favorite in Michigan (61%) and Wisconsin (55%).

Cook Political Report Senior Editor and Elections Analyst Dave Wasserman noted that the outcome of the presidential election will ultimately come down to what groups of voters turn out to vote.

Wasserman wrote on X Monday afternoon that per an NBC News poll, while 80% of women rated their interest in the 2024 election as at least a 9 out of 10, only 74% of men said the same.

“If Harris wins tomorrow, this will be a big reason why,” he noted.

“On the other hand, Black voters (75%), Latino voters (64%) and 18-34 year olds (52%) lag behind the national average in election interest, w/ young voters especially trailing past years,” Wasserman added. “If Trump wins tomorrow, that will be a big part of the story.”