As next week’s crucial presidential debate looms into view, Kamala Harris has maintained her narrow lead over Donald Trump in head-to-head polls but is locked in a tighter race in the crucial swing states needed to win the US election.
Ever since Harris entered the contest – after Joe Biden dropped out following a disastrous debate performance that highlighted fears over his age and mental acuity – the vice-president has ridden a wave of support and enthusiasm, turning the race on its head. A solid but slight Trump advantage morphed into a Harris lead.
But as Harris faces her first ever debate as a presidential nominee, there are signs that her upwards swing has hit a ceiling. Meanwhile, Trump will be hoping the debate offers his campaign a chance to recapture some momentum.
Yet the race remains so tight in the swing states – and with a Republican advantage in the electoral college – that one commentator on Politico this week called it the “equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth”.
At the same time, the narrow geographical focus of the election is sharply coming into view, with the first ballots to determine the next occupant of the White House due to be mailed out to voters.
North Carolina had aimed to start mailing out its presidential ballots on Friday. But in what might be seen as a metaphor for the cliffhanging nature of the contest between Harris and Trump, what should have been standard protocol was delayed by a dispute over whether Robert F Kennedy Jr, hitherto running as an independent candidate, should have a place on the ballot.
Kennedy, who suspended his campaign on 23 August and endorsed Trump, is suing the North Carolina board of elections over its refusal to remove his name from the ballot in a state where surveys show the result on a knife edge.
A judge on the state’s supreme court ruled against him on Thursday but gave him 24 hours to appeal – resulting in a temporary delay to ballots being dispatched. And on Friday, the state’s appeals court issued an interim stop on the dissemination of mail-in ballots to allow Kennedy’s appeal to be heard.
The postponement added another layer of suspense to a contest that could not be tighter, according to fresh Guardian analysis of recent polls.
In a state with 16 electoral college votes up for grabs but where a Democratic presidential candidate has won only once since 1980, Trump and Harris are deadlocked at 48.07%.
The figures illustrate why Kennedy - who is trying to help Trump after concluding that his presence in the race was draining his support - is so keen to remove his name from the ballot.
A tiny number of voters putting their cross next to Kennedy’s name on ballot papers could be enough to deprive Trump of the only one of seven swing states he won in his 2020 defeat at the hands of Joe Biden.
The North Carolina imbroglio shows in a microcosm what has become a reality of this – and, increasingly, all – US presidential elections: that while voters will flock to the polls across all 50 states, some states matter more than others under America’s unique electoral college.
The system designates a set number of electors for each state based on population – with 538 for the entire country, meaning that 270 electoral college votes are needed to win.
While the outcome in numerous states is a foregone conclusion – with many southern and midwestern states reliably Republican and others like New York and California solidly Democratic – the roughly equal partisan division of such states in electoral vote terms means much rests on the small number where party loyalties are evenly split.
It also means that the national polling figures – while indicative of overall trends – are not what necessarily decides the election. The Guardian’s latest national poll tracker, taken over a 10-day average, showed Harris at 47.5% compared with 43.9% for Trump, which is encouraging for her but probably not a big enough cushion to guarantee an electoral college win if replicated on polling day.
In this context, arguably even more important than North Carolina is Pennsylvania, one of the Democrats’ designated “blue wall” states – along with fellow battlegrounds Michigan and Wisconsin – and sometimes given a “Rust belt” label because of its status as the heartland of the US steel industry.
Biden won it by slightly more than 80,000 votes in 2020, capturing its 19 electoral votes.
This time, various permutations suggest that it might be key to the paths being charted by both Harris and Trump to reach the magic 270 total.
That explains why the state has become such a focal point of both campaigns’ activity in recent days; On Monday, Harris appeared with Biden at a Labor Day parade in Pittsburgh in their first joint campaign appearance since she replaced him atop the Democratic ticket, while Trump attended a televised town hall event hosted by Fox News and fronted by Sean Hannity on Wednesday.
This Tuesday, the candidates will meet in their only scheduled presidential debate in Philadelphia, the biggest city in Pennsylvania.
The data shows Harris with a wafer-thin lead in the state of 1.7% – 48.9% to 47.2% – within the margin of error. Other polls show the race even tighter; a CNN survey this week had candidates tied at 47% each.
The tight scenario underpins why states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina – and others like Georgia and two “Sun belt” states, Nevada and Arizona – are now the targets of the lion’s share of campaign resources. Maga Inc, a Trump-backing Super Pac, recently spent a reported $16m in adverts for North Carolina while the Trump campaign has diverted its efforts away from other less winnable locations to focus on the seven battleground states.
In the war of resources and ad spending, Harris may have the advantage. Figures published on Friday showed her campaign had outraised Trump’s by $361m to $130m in August, and had raised a total of $615m since she became her party’s nominee in July.
It seems an eye-watering sum and surely enough to sustain a message across this vast country. But the clarion call will be heard loudest in those states where the result is likely to remain too close to call even after polls close.
• This article was amended on 8 September 2024. An earlier version said that there were 539 US electoral college electors instead of 538.
