With just one week to go until the election, polls show that this could be one of the closest races in modern history.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker, Harris and Trump remain effectively tied, with Harris only marginally ahead of her opponent by 1.5 points nationally—a lead within the margin of error.
Meanwhile, the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, conducted between October 20 and 23, showed Harris and Trump tied on 48 percent each. Harris was 3 points ahead in the previous survey by the pollster, conducted between September 29 and October 6, a lead just outside of the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 points.
Polls in the swing states are similarly close. According to 538’s tracker, Harris is leading by a slim margin of 0.7 points in Michigan, while she is tied with Trump in Wisconsin. A month ago, she led in both by up to 2.4 points. Meanwhile, Trump leads by between 1.2 and 1.8 points in North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia. He is also leading by 0.3 points in Pennsylvania and 0.2 points in Nevada, where Harris had been leading since moving to the top of the Democratic ticket.
Amid the tight polls, the race remains anybody’s to win. “The race has gone from almost a toss-up to definitely a toss-up,” Jon Parker, senior lecturer in American studies at Keele University in the U.K., told Newsweek last week. However, he went on to say that this “does not suggest that either campaign is winning or losing.”
Newsweek has contacted the Harris and Trump campaigns for comment via email.
Parker added that with the election so close, it “will come down to turnout and whose voters are the most committed on election day.”
Polling data indicates similar levels of motivation between registered Republicans and Democrats heading into the election. In a recent YouGov/Economist survey, conducted from October 19-22, Trump held a slight enthusiasm advantage: 54 percent of Trump supporters described themselves as “extremely enthusiastic” about their vote, with an additional 19 percent as “very enthusiastic.” For Harris, 47 percent of her supporters were “extremely enthusiastic,” while 23 percent were “very enthusiastic.”
A separate poll by Harris X, conducted between October 9-11 among 1,622 likely voters, found Trump voters are more motivated by support for him personally than by opposition to Harris. In this poll, 80 percent of those intending to vote for Trump stated their vote was a vote for him, compared to 20 percent who cited it as a vote against Harris. Among Harris voters, 75 percent saw their vote as in support of her, while 25 percent considered it a vote against Trump.
Given the narrow margin separating the two candidates, the polls, which show a slight advantage for Trump, could spell trouble for Harris if her supporters do not turn out to vote.
But for Thomas Gift, associate professor of political science at the UCL School of Public Policy, the silver bullet for the Harris campaign could be in swaying undecided voters. “Ultimately, the election will be determined as much by which coalitions turn out to cast their ballot as by last-minute shifts among a shrinking pool of undecided voters,” Gift told Newsweek. The latest Angus Reid poll, conducted between October 23 and 27 showed that only 3 percent of voters are still undecided nationally.
But Gift warned that most voters have made up their minds. “The number of truly undecided voters is small and vanishing,” he said. “If Americans are still unsure of who they’re going to vote for now, the odds are that they won’t show up to the polls at all. Many of these undecided voters are turned off by Trump’s personality and character, but also can’t bear the thought of supporting Harris’s policies.”
However, J. Wesley Leckrone, professor of political science at Widener University, told Newsweek that Harris and Trump should still be focusing on motivating undecided voters to go out to the polls on November 5 amid such a close race.
“There’s a very small number of undecided voters, and in general, these voters tend to be people who have limited information about politics and don’t spend much time thinking about it. Their biggest decision is whether or not they will vote at all, rather than which candidate they will support,” Leckrone said.
“The election outcome will largely depend on whether these voters show up on Election Day and how effectively each side mobilizes these undecided voters to participate. Generally, these voters tend to vote similarly to how they have in previous elections. So it’s not necessarily about swaying their vote choice, but rather about getting them to the polls,” he added.
Audrey Hayes, associate political science professor at the University of Georgia, said she thinks undecided voters could swing the election for Harris, particularly in the crucial swing state of Georgia.
“If we use the data from the most recent Atlanta Journal Constitution poll, undecideds (from a pool of likely voters surveyed) made up 8.2 percent of respondents,” she told Newsweek.
“Of these more were men, Black, millennial, and older and educated. If I were a betting person, I would say that looking at all that information, my best guess would be that they would tilt a bit more to Harris, with the exception of men, who will likely split a bit more toward Trump,” she added. Black voters, as well as younger and college-educated voters historically lean more toward the Democrats.
“One other data point is that most of the people saying they are undecided identify as Democrats and Independents. That suggests to me, that they will likely split more heavily to Harris,” she said.
But Gift worries that Harris’ messaging has not appealed to swing voters or undecided voters, largely because she has failed to define herself independently from president Biden.
“Harris’s closing pitch to swing voters—doubling down on the claim that democracy is at stake in ’24—seems like a flawed strategy. While large fractions of voters believe democracy is at risk, only a tiny fraction of Americans think it’s the top issue in this election,” he said.
“Harris has largely failed to communicate what her top policy priority in the first 100 days of her administration would be. She’s also failed to explain how she’d differ from Joe Biden‘s approach.
“Those missteps could cost her in trying to lock in the support of left-leaning moderates (or even some disillusioned Republicans) who want a reason to come out to the polls other than the fact that Harris isn’t Trump.”
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