ANALYSIS | Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump is the closest presidential race of the century in the US

() – The 2024 presidential election remain the closest of the century in the United States. In fact, it is the closest race for the White House in the last 60 years.

Polls since the September 10 debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris show that while the vice president appears to have opened a slight advantage at national level As for his Republican rival, his race remains well within the margin of error and too close to call. This is especially the case when looking at the Electoral College.

Let’s think about the polls published this Sunday by CBS News and NBC News. Her polls are among Harris’ best to date, and yet the Democratic candidate only has a lead of 4 and 5 points, respectively. The Democratic candidate’s largest lead in the CBS News/YouGov and NBC News polls in 2016 and 2020 was at least double what Harris has now.

To put Sunday’s new polls into a broader context, consider all the national polls conducted since the debate. This includes the polls mentioned above and the polls from ABC News/Ipsos, Fox News and The New York Times/Siena CollegeOn average, according to the latest poll, Harris has a 3-point lead.

This is consistent with what we have seen all year: none of the candidates has been able to open up a lead of 5 points or more in national polls. This includes the period when the President Joe Biden was the likely and then the presumptive Democratic nominee.

The fact that no one has led by even 5 points this cycle is noteworthy because it is incredibly rare. Even in races that end up being very close, one of the candidates eventually builds up a significant lead. This year, most voters seem to be locked in.

Even Harris’s dominant performance in the Trump debate – according to voters – only seemed to move the score a few points.

You’d have to go back to the 1960 campaign to find a race in which the major party candidates were consistently within 5 points of each other in an average of national polls. Every presidential year since then has had at least three weeks in which a candidate won by 5 points or more.

A 3-point lead in national polls is far from certain for Harris. Since 1948, the average difference between polls on election eve and the result on election day has been 3 points. Some years, like 2020, the error rate is even higher.

(At this distance from the elections, the average difference between the polls and the final result would, logically, be greater.)

But perhaps the most important reason this election is so close is that this is not a national election. Instead, it is a race to 270 electoral votes via the Electoral College.

Trump is likely in a better position in the Electoral College than in the popular vote because of his coalition (i.e. white voters without a college degree are overrepresented in key battleground states). An estimate from my old colleague Nate Silver suggests Harris would need to win the popular vote by more than 3 points to be considered a clear favorite in the Electoral College.

It isn’t yet.

In fact, neither Harris nor Trump has a big lead if you look at the state-level data. According to the classification According to ‘s current poll, Harris has 225 electoral votes to Trump’s 219. Seven states and the sole electoral vote of Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District remain up for grabs.

Harris appears to be doing slightly better than Trump in three of the seven states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This battleground in the north is similar to what the Biden campaign hoped to achieve in the spring.

But when I say Harris does “slightly better” than Trump, the emphasis is on the word. slightly. Harris is polling about 2 points ahead of Trump in all of them.

We are talking about races within the margin of error and without a clear leader.

Meanwhile, Trump is doing slightly better than Harris in two of these states: Arizona and Georgia. But as with Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for Harris, Trump is doing one or two points better, on average, than Harris in the polls in these two states.

If electoral votes were allocated to the candidate with a lead of more than 1 point at this point in the polls, Harris would be at 269 to Trump’s 246.

Nevada and North Carolina are within a point and way too close, as are the other five states. But for the sake of this exercise, we’re going to give Trump North Carolina, a state he’s won twice before and where the polling average has the former president ahead of Harris by mere decimal points. In this scenario, he would come in at 262 electoral votes.

The scant data we have on Nebraska’s 2nd District indicates that Harris is a favorite there. (The Cornhusker State is one of two states, along with Maine, that splits some of its electoral votes by congressional district.) In 2020, Biden won the 2nd District. current version of the 2nd District by 6 points, a significantly wider margin than we’ve seen in all seven battleground states this year. Most models, as well as betting markets, have Harris ahead in this Omaha-area seat.

A win in Nebraska’s 2nd District would likely give Harris exactly 270 electoral votes when Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are added together. Now that’s a close call.

There is a catch here, however. Some Nebraska Republicans, urged by Trump, want to change the state’s method of allocating electoral votes to a winner-take-all format.

No Democrat has won Nebraska at the presidential level since 1964.

If that last-minute change were to occur, Trump would get 263 electoral votes to Harris’s 269, and the race would come down to Nevada and its 6 electoral votes. The last published poll that meets ‘s standards for publication was our own survey conducted by SSRS last month, which found Harris at 48% and Trump at 47%, well within the margin of error.

In other words, a Trump victory in Nevada is quite plausible and would leave us with a 269-269 tie.

This would lead to the presidential race to the House of Representativeswhere each state delegation will have one vote. Trump would likely be the favorite in that scenario because the Republicans continue to have more state delegations in the House than Democrats in January.

Regardless of who wins in Nevada, we could be waiting a while for the state to silver count your ballots. And considering the time it has taken to previous close electionswe could expect days with the presidency in the balance.

The bottom line is that this year’s presidential race is as close as it could get. A small shift in either direction could make all the difference.