Five days before the American presidential elections, polls show that the distance between Democrats and Republicans is very narrow. The race is particularly close in the key states of Nevada and Pennsylvania, where polls show a tie.
The margin is so close that there could even be the paradox of Kamala Harris winning the popular vote and losing the November 5 election if Donald Trump, who is closing the gap with the Democrat, wins in key states that give him the lead. majority. the Electoral College and, therefore, the keys to the White House.
According to polls, Michigan and Wisconsin are slightly in favor of Harris. These are key states in the Rust Belt that gave Trump the presidency in 2016, but he has a lead of just 1.07 and 0.71 points, respectively.
Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina are leaning further and further toward Trump. On the other hand, in Nevada and Pennsylvania, the two candidates are still very tied. The Republican is ahead of Harris by 0.36 points in Pennsylvania, the key state which distributes the most votes to the electoral college (19 in total), responsible for choosing the president.
The Electoral College is made up of 538 delegates. To win, one of the candidates must receive at least 270 votes. 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 (5), 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 win 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 the total vote received nationally (called the popular vote), with a 1.3 point lead over Trump. Harris has been rising in the polls since taking on the presidential race compared to whoever is still president, although the gap has narrowed in recent weeks. A month ago, they were up to three points apart.
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 model gives an undecided result in four of them and very close in favor of Trump in the other three.
Among the most contested states, the Democratic candidate would have to win in Nevada and Wisconsin, in addition to retaining Michigan, to reach the electoral majority of 270 electoral 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 seen as the place that will have the last word, and in that state, Trump managed, by a very slim margin, to flip the polls.
