On the last Sunday before the presidential election, pollsters are making their final or penultimate predictions on who will win on Tuesday. The general consensus among non-partisan voices is that the election is too close to call.
Former President Donald Trump has closed in on Vice President Kamala Harris in the race’s final stretch. Non-partisan polling aggregators, such as FiveThirtyEight, now show Harris up by a mere one percentage point or less in the popular vote.
Battleground States Are Key
However, the race for the White House will go down to the Electoral College. Seven battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — will likely determine who becomes the next president.
The final New York Times/Siena College poll has Harris on top in four of these states, Trump in two, and both tied in Pennsylvania, which holds 19 electoral votes. In most of these states, the gap between the two candidates is within the margin of error, suggesting that the actual vote could go either way.
FiveThirtyEight currently has Trump with a 262-226 Electoral College lead, with Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania too close to call. Trump would have to win just one of the latter three to become president for the second time, according to the FiveThirtyEight model.
Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight founder who left the site in 2023 and now runs the Silver Report Substack, wrote this morning that the polls indicate that the race is “really and truly close to 50/50.”
In an op-ed for The New York Times last month, Silver said that his “gut” pointed toward a Trump victory — but clarified that neither his intuition nor anyone else’s has predictive value.
Silver, like most analysts and pollsters, was wrong in 2016. The FiveThirtyEight site he ran at the time only gave Trump a 29 percent chance of victory then. In 2020, Silver and FiveThirtyEight accurately predicted President Joe Biden‘s victory, giving him an 88 percent chance of winning.
Women May Be the Most Decisive Voting Bloc
Pollster Frank Luntz said on Saturday that the race is “impossible” to predict, instead pointing to voter turnout among young women as an indicator of how the election will turn out. Luntz noted, “If they make a bigger percentage of the overall voter pool, then that is great news for Harris that may propel her [to victory].”
One defining feature of the 2024 race is the stark gender gap. In battleground states, according to the latest NYT/Siena poll, Harris is supported by 56 percent of women while Trump is supported by 55 percent of men. Women have turned out for presidential elections at a higher rate than men since 1980. Male alienation as well as Trump’s attacks on women and fears of rollbacks to abortion access have heightened the gender divide.
Another Contested Election?
Not everyone, however, is balking at making a clear call. American University Prof. Alan Lichtman is forecasting a Harris win. He correctly predicted Trump’s 2016 victory and has only been wrong on one presidential election since 1980: the 2000 contest between then-Vice President Al Gore and George W. Bush, who was Texas governor at the time.
Gore actually won the popular vote by a mere 0.5 percent. But Bush won the Electoral College by just five votes after a months-long recount in Florida was ended by a Supreme Court decision, Bush v. Gore. Bush won the state by just 537 votes, which saw lawyers debating over “hanging chads” — or incompletely punched paper ballots.
Florida has since enacted election reforms to prevent a repeat of the 2000 fiasco. But Trump is positioning himself to once again contest the election as “stolen.” The surest way to avoid such a scenario, aside from a Trump win, would be a decisive Harris Electoral College victory.
An Electoral College tie is highly unlikely. But a more probable crisis scenario could see the presidential race going down to a single state and a prolonged battle over its results.
Globely News covers the game changers transforming the worlds of business, sports, politics, and technology. From AI and electric vehicles to the rise of China and the NFL's next stars, we've got you covered.