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Where will the 2024 election be decided?
In short, everywhere.
A new batch of polls came out this week, with a little less than one month to go in the presidential election. Kamala Harris’s “honeymoon” surge is now officially over.
Donald Trump is on the rise. A new Quinnipiac poll of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan this week showed him leading in the latter two; RealClearPolitics’s polling average now has him ahead for the first time in months in the state of Michigan, a state which spurned Hillary Clinton in 2016 but flipped back to Democratic control in 2020.
Meanwhile polls in all the swing states from Emerson College suggest neither candidate is ahead, outside the margin of error.
What’s really clear — what Quinnipiac’s poll and every other survey of the race indicates this week — is how close the race is in every state. No candidate has a lead higher than the low single digits in more than a half dozen states, all of which will play a significant role in the Electoral College.
What does that mean? It means we have no idea what the Electoral College result is actually going to look like right now. A swing of just 1-2 points in a state or two could change the race’s dynamics completely over the next few weeks — Trump could see his lead in the midwest evaporate, or Harris could see hers collapse in Pennsylvania. The former president could lose control of North Carolina.
It’s truly anyone’s ballgame.
The Senate is a different story. The path Democrats will need to tread to keep the upper chamber is looking more and more difficult by the day.
A Marist poll on Thursday found vulnerable Republican candidates in Florida and Texas, Rick Scott and Ted Cruz, treading water. Both are still in danger, but holding on — for now. In a NYT/Siena poll, both races were trending even further in Republicans’ favor. Meanwhile, Tim Sheehy is pulling away with it in Montana, endangering the future of incumbent Democrat Jon Tester — one of the few remaining Blue Dogs in the Senate.
With a presumed loss of Tester’s seat, coupled with the loss of West Virginia’s Senate seat, GOP control of the upper chamber is looking very likely. Democratic Senate candidates are still leading in Maryland, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona, but still may be faced with a 51-49 GOP Senate next January, thanks to an unfavorable map.
Democrats have a few reasons to be frustrated right now. Beyond a very possible loss of control in the Senate, there’s a broader issue here: Kamala Harris and her campaign, as well as the Democratic Party as a whole, have not seen their massive advantages in fundraising and volunteer signups translate into convincing polling advantages. And with the debates likely over, there are now comparatively few opportunities to move the polls in a big way between now and Election Day.
Keep an eye out over the next few weeks as Trump and Harris try their respective Hail Marys. October is already a third over; both candidates should be feeling desperate.
Trump’s may already be revealed. On Wednesday, he announced plans to host a mega-rally at Madison Square Garden in New York; running mate JD Vance said he’d be attending on Thursday. The event is being billed by the Trump campaign as an effort to make a play for New York — but more likely, it’s just a chance to boost the normal audience size and media coverage of what would otherwise be a typical campaign rally.
Harris, meanwhile, is deploying Tim Walz — who had disappeared from view for several weeks — out to Wisconsin for a series of events on Monday.
Make sense of the US election with The Independent’s experts in our exclusive virtual event ‘Harris vs. Trump: who will make history?’ Reserve your space here.
