With four weeks to go until Election Day, the 2024 polls continue to show a presidential race that remains on a knife’s edge — and well within the margin of error.
That’s true for recent national polls like NPR/PBS/Marist, which found Vice President Kamala Harris with a narrow edge against former President Donald Trump — 2 points among likely voters, 50%-48%, within the poll’s margin of error (plus or minus 3.7 percentage points).
It’s also true in the polls of the battleground states that will ultimately decide the presidential contest.
Harris and Trump are essentially tied, perhaps with a slight lean toward Trump, in the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. And while Harris has a slightly greater advantage in the Great Lakes states of Michigan and Wisconsin, those advantages are well within the boundaries of potential polling error. And the recent polling in all-important Pennsylvania — part of the most direct paths to 270 electoral votes for both Harris and Trump — appears to be a jump ball.
What the polls can tell us
Given polls’ margins of error, historically low response rates when reaching voters and, yes, past polling misses, it’s become a fool’s errand to expect precision from political polls.
What we can conclude from the public polling, however, is whether a race is close or not. And this race remains very close no matter how you look at it, across polls in all different states and nationally, including polls that have different assumptions of the 2024 electorate and that use different weighting techniques.
The polls also are helpful in determining a race’s trend. And this is a fundamentally different race than the one that existed before President Joe Biden stepped aside from his re-election campaign and endorsed Harris.
And the polls are useful in measuring a politician’s popularity: Most surveys right now show Harris with higher favorable ratings than Trump, after a sharp upswing in her numbers when she became a presidential candidate this summer.
That wasn’t the case when Biden was in the race.
What the polls can’t tell us
But the polls can’t tell us if a candidate is going to win a presidential contest if they’re ahead or behind by 1-2 points in a few surveys, whether nationally or in key battleground states.
The 2024 race, ultimately, will be decided by turnout, concluding news events, how the third-party/undecided vote breaks and other factors. Ultimately, what will matter is which candidate wins the important battleground states that could come down to a difference of 10,000 or 20,000 votes — margins too small to expect unambiguous clarity from pre-election polls.
