Why neck-and-neck polls ahead of Election Day could actually be good news for Donald Trump
Almost every major poll has the 2024 presidential race as a toss-up with just over a week until Election Day — and that appears to be good news for former President Donald Trump’s chances of returning to the White House.There are three major reasons: Of course, dead-heat polling suggests that the election could still go either way.But these factors point to Trump regaining momentum as Americans turn out in record numbers for early voting, fill out their mail-in ballots and prepare to line up at the polls on Election Day.Even in the polls where Trump is lagging behind Vice President Kamala Harris, there appears to be a clear trend of him gaining steam in the election homestretch while Harris’ numbers are falling.Head-to-head, Harris slightly currently edges Trump out 50% to 49% among likely voters.
They split evenly in battleground states at 50% apiece, according to a Sunday CBS News/YouGov poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.But critically, that marks a 1-point gain for Trump in the battleground states from two weeks ago, or an erosion of Harris’ advantage over Trump.
Harris led by up to 4 percentage points in national polls after the candidates’ only debate Sept.10.
At the start of October, Harris had a two-point edge over Trump in the RealClearPolitics aggregate of multi-candidate national polling.Now Trump is in the lead with 0.1 percentage points — well within the margin of error.
The mere fact that Trump is leading even in the aggregate of national polling is remarkable given that Republicans haven’t won the popular vote in two decades.Trump had been trailing President Biden by 7.4 percentage points in RCP’s 2020 aggregate at this point, and Hillary Clinton by 5.6 percentage points in 2016.
The actual results in both those races were much closer than the polls: Trump won in 2016 and trailed Clinton in the popular vote by just 2.1%.In 2020, he trailed Biden by 4.5 points.“Trump may finally get his grea...