There are only two weeks left before the November 5 elections. The presidential elections in the United States will be decided by a very fair margin, to the point where the paradox could occur if Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and loses the election if Donald Trump wins in the key states that give him a majority in the elections. College . According to the latest polls, the Republican has narrowed his lead over Harris and is already leading the polls in 3 of the 7 key states to win the White House.
The electoral college is made up of 538 delegates. To win, one of the candidates must receive at least 270 votes from the electoral college.
Delegates are distributed by state and the winning party in each territory wins the entire number of delegates allocated to that state, except in Maine (4) and Nebraska (3), where the system is proportional. With these two exceptions, it doesn’t matter whether you win a state by one vote or by a million: if you win, you get all the electoral votes in that state, and the loser in that state gets nothing.
The polls currently present a very tense scenario, with a slight advantage for Kamala Harris. In the following chart you can see how they are based on the average of surveys published by FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates different surveys and gives a different weight by date, sample size, methodology, transparency or bias of each polling station.
Harris leads with an advantage of less than two points over Trump, in a race in which Biden’s withdrawal was decisive: Harris has been rising in the polls since assuming the presidential race compared to the one who is still president, although the gap has narrowed considerably. a little last week. Today, they are only 1.7 points apart, whereas a few weeks ago, they were up to 3 points apart.
Donald Trump is ahead of Kamala Harris in Arizona and Georgia, and leads the polls in Pennsylvania (by a very narrow margin) and North Carolina, two contested states.
Precisely in Arizona, the Republican managed to reverse the polls and is ahead of Harris. In 2020, Joe Biden won this state with 49.4% of the vote and a margin of about 10,000 votes behind Trump.
The following map presents the victory forecasts for each candidate, according to the FiveThirtyEight model, which takes into account not only the polls but also the voting history, economic and social data of each state to simulate the victory probabilities of each candidate . According to this model, victory in the 2024 elections will be decided in the seven key states. Currently, the outcome is undecided in five of them and very close in favor of Trump in two others.
Harris, for her part, is leading in polls in Michigan and Wisconsin, key Rust Belt states that gave Trump the presidency in 2016.
In North Carolina, even if Trump continues to lead, the possibility of a color change this November 5 is not excluded. In 2020, the Republican managed to win by around 75,000 votes.
The following table provides a summary of how the race is shaping up in the polls for the seven tightest states that will decide the 2024 U.S. elections.
Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina are three swing states. It’s possible that Harris could win the White House without them, although that would be a very difficult scenario. For Trump, Georgia and North Carolina are more critical. For now, Pennsylvania continues to be considered the place that will have the last word and in this state, Trump has just succeeded, very narrowly, in overturning the polls.
