Former President Donald Trump is pulling ahead in the polls as the presidential election enters its home stretch.
A number of news outlets and election forecasters showed Trump overtaking Vice President Kamala Harris.
The race still remains a virtual dead heat, coming down to fine margins in just a few swing states. However, in the campaign’s closing weeks the former president has pulled ahead, perhaps presaging a dramatic return to the White House. The state of the race represents a return to normalcy as Republican-leaning voters that had previously entertained the possibility of crossing political lines and voting for Harris return home in the lead-up to Election Day.
Voters may have been eager to learn more about Harris, and excited by her candidacy, but it’s unrealistic to expect all of that interest will translate into votes, said Frank Kelly, senior political strategist at the investment firm DWS.
“At this point, this is where independents look at their tribal roots, and they head back to the tribe,” said Frank Kelly, senior political strategist at the investment firm DWS. “So you either don't vote or you go back to where you came from and a lot of people just end up doing that.”
For Harris, the major change in the race is that she is no longer gaining momentum, with gaining being the operative word. “Excitement’s over,” Kelly said.
The vice president surged in the polls after her dramatic entry into the race in July on the back of a rejuvenated Democratic Party and a raft of positive press coverage. In September, after her only televised debate with Trump, Harris was widely considered to have won—and she got a further bump in the polls.
“In some ways, it’s almost like a recalibration,” Kelly said. “She shot ahead because of the excitement, and the ‘vibe,’ and he's been clawing back that space.”
The Harris campaign has always maintained it expected the race to be extremely close to the point of being tied, while the Trump campaign regularly referred to Harris’s previous leads in the polls as a honeymoon phase that would peter out.
FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 52% chance of winning the election, whereas just a few weeks ago it gave Harris a 58% chance of winning.
That said, the flip-flopping may be more indicative of the state of the race than who actually leads it.
“It's two sides settling down for long trench warfare, and they're fighting over dozens of votes, as opposed to tens of thousands of votes,” Kelly said.
The race will come down to the slightest of margins among undecided voters in just a few swing states. Any change in those margins and the race could be altered dramatically. Of the seven swing states still in play—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina—all are within two points, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Michigan are all even, according to FiveThirtyEight. In Wisconsin, Harris is up one point against Trump, while Trump is ahead by a point in North Carolina and two points in Georgia and Arizona. Trump’s lead in Georgia appears to be widening to four points, according to a poll of likely voters from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the University of Georgia released Tuesday.
Because of the Electoral College, small movements in the polls in swing states can have large ripple effects for the outcome of the election. In a worrying sign for Harris, her polling results in swing states are all declining. In addition to the Georgia poll, Harris’s lead is slipping in the other swing states, according to ABC News. In no swing state, even where she leads, has Harris’s polling lead increased. That means the outcome of swing states could come down to each campaign’s ability to turn out voters in each of the swing states.
The Georgia poll that showed Harris slipping, like many others, found the 2024 election had an unusually high number of voters that were still open to switching their votes. Eight percent of likely voters in the Georgia poll were still undecided, while nationally that number was even higher, with 10% of saying they might still change their minds, according to an NBC poll.
In the closing weeks, Harris seems set on trying to win at least some of these voters to her side. Earlier this week, Harris campaigned with former Republican member of Congress Liz Cheney, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump following the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Research from the Democratic-aligned research group Blueprint (founded by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman) found the most convincing closing argument against Trump was that he lacked support from his own Republican cabinet officials, a message that the Harris campaign and its newfound Republican surrogates have been hammering home over the past few days.
“People really need to stop and think about how completely unprecedented that is,” Cheney said during a campaign stop with Harris.
While the outcome of the election remains a toss-up, Americans do sense the magnitude of this election in ways they haven’t before. Americans have shrugged off much of the disillusionment they feel for politics and politicians of either party, at least temporarily. An NBC News poll found 62% of registered voters believe this election will make a “great deal of difference” in their lives.
