The presidential race polls, at this point, are kind of boring: Vice President Kamala Harris is leading by 2 percentage points in Pennsylvania. Yawn. She’s tied with former President Donald Trump in North Carolina? Same as it ever was. Trump’s up by a point in Arizona? Yeah, that’s what we expected to hear.
But four weeks before Election Day, a very steady and excruciatingly close presidential race is masking a still wide-open election, where even a slight polling error could lead to a variety of truly unexpected outcomes.
The election analysis firm Split Ticket gives Democratic nominee Harris a 57% chance of winning the presidency, based on its proprietary analysis of polling and other data. The firm’s forecast hasn’t changed much since she entered the race, despite dozens of additional polls, with Harris maintaining a tiny edge in Pennsylvania and Midwestern states while slightly trailing in the Sun Belt and North Carolina.
But Split Ticket co-founder Lakshya Jain said the seeming stability of the race as a toss-up is an illusion. It’s entirely possible Trump outperforms his 2016 margin of victory or that Harris wins all seven swing states ― an outcome that shows up in 25% of the firm’s election simulations.
“Nothing would really surprise me,” Jain told HuffPost. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Kamala Harris lost Pennsylvania but won North Carolina, right? These types of things happen.”
In Split Ticket’s model, for instance, there is a 57% chance at least one of the Democratic-leaning states of New Hampshire and Minnesota, or the GOP-tilted Texas and Florida ends up flipping to the other party. None of the four states has seen extensive advertising in the presidential race.
Polling error isn’t consistent either. Wisconsin, another battleground state, has seen perhaps the largest polling errors in the past eight years. Polling in the Upper Midwestern state predicted that both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 would do, on average, about 6 percentage points better than they ultimately did.
The accuracy of this year’s battleground state polling ― in Wisconsin and elsewhere ― could hinge on whether pollsters are overcorrecting for their mistakes in 2016 and 2020.
To account for the reluctance of many Trump-aligned or conservative voters to participate in polling, most major polls have asked voters to “recall” how they voted in the 2020 election and then used their answers to “weight” the poll’s sample in such a way that it reflects the makeup of the 2020 electorate. Since the makeup of electorates changes considerably from one presidential election to the next, and people sometimes do not accurately remember how they voted, this kind of weighting is potentially inaccurate, argues New York Times’ top polling expert, Nate Cohn.
And this year, the polls that use this practice ― “weighting for recall vote” ― have Trump doing better against Harris than those surveys, including those conducted by the Times, that do not.
Polling, unlike punditry, was quite accurate in the 2022 midterm elections, though that may be because the midterm electorate skews more educated and thus more likely to respond to pollsters.
“If we’re nervous we’re missing Trump voters, ‘weighting for recall’ can try to address that,” said Avery James, a data research analyst at Echelon Insights, a center-right polling firm. “But the nature of the problem is we won’t know until November.”
The uncertainty is extending up and down the ballot, from a potential return of Florida to swing-state status to Senate plays in highly partisan territory to a gubernatorial challenge in an unexpected place.
Two unlikely states are becoming Trump-Harris battlegrounds.
Only 1 or 2 points separate Trump and Harris in polling averages of the top battleground states, and that’s pretty much unchanged since Harris became the nominee. Harris is leading Trump in the so-called Northern “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, while Trump is running ahead of her in Georgia and Arizona.
One state threatens to upend the Rust Belt vs. Sun Belt dynamic: North Carolina, which was seen at the beginning of the election cycle as much friendlier for Trump and down-ticket Republicans.
Democrats are also bullish on North Carolina, which gives them a path to the presidency even if Harris loses one of the so-called Blue Wall states up north. Mounting scandals have completely tanked the gubernatorial candidacy of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who, according to recently revealed messages, allegedly called himself a “Black Nazi” in a porn forum more than a decade ago. It’s not out of the question that Robinson’s unpopularity and scandals could drag down the rest of the GOP ticket, including Trump, who is narrowly leading Harris in North Carolina.
Hurricane season is the wild card that could upend the race in either direction. North Carolina is reeling from the destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene in the mountainous — and politically red — western part of the state.
North Carolina’s elections board just adopted changes that would allow outreach teams to help voters in disaster shelters complete their absentee ballots. But in the disaster’s aftermath, it remains to be seen whether people in the hardest hit counties will prioritize voting in this election.
“This level of uncertainty this close to Election Day is daunting,” said Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the state board of elections, who pointed out that poll workers are facing catastrophic losses in their own lives that might prevent them from working on Election Day.
There’s also no shortage of conspiracy theories falsely accusing the Biden administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency of abandoning the area, which, if left unchecked online, could feed into a bogus narrative with electoral consequences for Harris.
The other wild card state is Florida, where some Democrats are hopeful a referendum on abortion rights can help keep the state competitive even if the Harris campaign and its allies have yet to start aggressively spending money there. Polling has shown Harris within striking distance.
Florida is on track to get hit by another massive storm, Hurricane Milton, which is expected to make landfall this week near the panhandle. Regardless of the storm’s impact in Florida, James cautioned Democrats against excessive optimism in a state that has been trending right.
“Florida is hard to square with trends we’ve seen with Hispanic voters,” he said, citing analyst Adam Carlson’s aggregation of polling that indicates Latino voters moving 10 percentage points closer to Trump than they were in 2020 exit polling. “I would stay with the conventional wisdom that Florida is not a swing state.”
A Senate swing isn’t out of the question.
Republicans are favored to win control of the Senate in November due to the large number of vulnerable Democratic incumbents across the country, but the polling is close enough that a Democratic hold can’t be completely discounted.
The GOP is on track to pick up seats in the ruby-red states of West Virginia and Montana, which would be enough to win them a majority even if they lose in the all other battleground states. Democrats are hoping Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) survives on the strength of his personal brand, but he’s facing strong headwinds, including growing polarization and Trump’s sky-high popularity in Montana.
Democratic incumbents and candidates in the battleground states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona are in a much stronger position and lead their GOP opponents in polling averages of those races. Democrats also have maintained big fundraising advantages in those states, which has helped them remain on the air with ads longer than their GOP counterparts.
While Democrats are seeking upsets in Texas and Florida ― and certainly wouldn’t mind if a left-of-center independent pulled off a shock win in Nebraska ― the long-shot race with the most spending is in Maryland, where popular former GOP Gov. Larry Hogan is running against Democrat Angela Alsobrooks.
Although Maryland is very, very, very Democratic ― Biden’s margin of victory in the state was 33 percentage points, the third highest in the nation ― Hogan has a significant cash advantage, with Republicans reserving $19 million worth of television airtime in the final weeks of the race, compared with just $2 million for Democrats.
It would be a huge shock if either party succeeds in an upset win, but stranger things have happened. Bottom line, the battle for the Senate is a lot closer than anyone thought initially, with Democrats having to defend an exceedingly difficult map this election cycle.
Down-home decisions
And then there’s how the more local races could play out ― and, arguably just as important, what they hint at when it comes to the larger political shifts.
The battle for the House is narrow, with only a handful of seats up for grabs and the margin of victory expected to be thin. But with Republicans currently holding a scant eight-seat majority, it would take only a few upsets to shift the balance of power. Cook Political Report says just 26 of 435 seats in the lower chamber are considered toss-ups: 11 held by Democrats and 15 by Republicans. Democrats are slightly favored to pick up two GOP-held seats.
But even this short list hides some potential surprises. Two of the Republican-held seats considered toss-ups are districts in Iowa, where Democrats have struggled mightily since Trump’s emergence in 2016. If Democrats do have a shot at either seat, it could indicate Harris is at least holding her own among white working-class voters in the Midwest compared to Biden in 2020.
And then there’s Indiana’s gubernatorial race, which perhaps best shows how wide the aperture of political possibilities remains. Indiana has been a brutal state for Democrats since 2016 and has been won by a Democratic presidential candidate only once in the past 20-plus years. But in September, the Democratic Governors Association released polling for the gubernatorial race showing Democrat Jennifer McCormick, a former Republican and state superintendent of public instruction, trailing GOP Sen. Mike Braun by just a 44%-to-41% margin.
No one would be surprised if Braun ended up romping against McCormick ― but a shocking upset could still in the cards.
