Dead-heat study results are astonishing — and improbable, these experts say | US election 2024

The US presidential race enters its final weekend with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in seemingly permanent deadlock and little indication of who will emerge victorious on Tuesday.

At the end of another unruly week that began with Trump’s racially charged rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden and was marked by celebrities, misogynistic comments and insults about “garbage” being leveled left and right, the Guardian’s 10-day average tracking. little change from seven days earlier, when voters’ loyalty to their chosen candidate seemed relatively impervious to campaign events, however seismic.

Nationally, Harris, the Democratic nominee, has a one-point advantage, 48% to 47%, over his Republican opponent, virtually identical to last week. Such an advantage is well within the margin of error of most polls.

The battleground states also remain in deadlock. The candidates are evenly split at 48% in Pennsylvania, often seen as the key swing state because it has the most electoral votes (19). Harris has a one-point lead in the other two blue-walled states, Michigan and Wisconsin, while Trump is marginally ahead in the Sun Belt: up 1% in North Carolina and 2% in Georgia and Arizona. In Nevada, his average advantage in the polls is less than a percentage point.

The latest poll comes amid unprecedented levels of early voting in several states, which as of Friday had seen around 65 million Americans already cast their ballots.

Predicting future results from early voting is notoriously difficult, although about 58% of early voters in Pennsylvania age 65 or older were registered Democrats, This was reported by Politikencompared to 35% from the same cohort who were registered Republicans; the two major parties have roughly equal numbers of registered voters in the state among older adults. About 53% of the population voted for Trump in Pennsylvania in 2020, even while he lost the state to Joe Biden.

Unlike four years ago, Trump has encouraged his supporters to cast early votes. Democrats turning out in greater numbers could be a positive indicator for them in a close state where commentators have predicted voter turnout will be key to the outcome. Democratic strategists have claimed that they have a 10-20% lead in turnout in the three blue wall states.

But in a divided political landscape that has featured threats of retaliation from Trump, accusations of fascism and racism from Harris, and warnings that democracy itself is on the ballot, the bigger picture — that uniformity over a longer period of time — has seasoned observers, scratching their heads.

The poll analysis page FiveThirtyEight’s simulator — based on a compilation of national and state data — as of Friday morning, the forecast was that Trump would win 53 times out of 100 compared to 47 times for Harris, again similar to a week before.

In a late burst of positive news for Harris, a Marist poll on Friday showed the possibility that she could break the deadlock: it showed her leading Trump by 3% in Michigan and Wisconsin and 2% in Pennsylvania. Winning all three states likely represents Harris’ clearest path to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. But the results remained within the study’s margins of error.

This near-monolithic picture, emerging from several polls, has sparked suspicions among some analysts of “herding” around state poll averages by pollsters wary of being proven wrong for the third time in a row after underestimating Trump’s support in 2016 and 2020 significantly.

Writing on NBC’s websiteJosh Clinton, a professor of politics at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, the network’s director of elections, pondered whether the tied race did not reflect voter sentiment, but rather risk-averse decision-making from the polls. Some, they suggested, may be wary of results that indicate unusually large leads for a candidate and introduce corrective weighting.

Of the last 321 battleground polls, 124 — nearly 40% — showed margins of a single point or less, the pair wrote. Pennsylvania was the most “disturbing” case, with 20 of 59 polls showing an exact tie, while another 26 showed margins of less than 1%.

This indicated “not just an astonishingly close race, but an improbably close race,” according to Clinton and Lapinski.

A large number of surveys are expected to show a wider variety of opinions, even in a close election, because of the randomness inherent in polls. The absence of such variation suggests that either pollsters are adjusting for “weird” margins of 5% or more, Clinton and Lapinski argued — or the following second possibility, which they considered more likely.

“Some of the tools pollsters use in 2024 to address the 2020 voting issues, such as weighting by partisanship, past voting numbers, or other factors, may even out the differences and reduce variability in reported poll results,” they write.

Both explanations “raise the possibility that the results of the election could be unexpectedly different than the knife-edge narrative, the cluster of state polls and poll averages suggests,” they added.

Amid the uncertainty, one thing is certain: Regardless of how close pollsters have depicted the contest over the past several weeks, as Harris and Trump go head-to-head in the final days of the most consequential American election in decades, something will give.