Less than 24 hours before the opening of polling stations in the United States presidential elections, polls show that the distance between Democrats and Republicans is very small. The race is especially close in the key states of Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin, where polls show a tie on the eve of the elections.
The margin is so fair that there may even be the paradox of Kamala Harris winning the popular vote and losing the November 5 elections, if Donald Trump – who has been closing the gap on the Democrat – prevails in key states that give him the majority in the Electoral College and, therefore, the keys to the White House.
According to polls, Michigan and Wisconsin favor Harris, but by less than one percentage point. These are key states of the Rust Belt (in Spanish, rust belt) that gave Trump the presidency in 2016. Now, the Democratic candidate barely has 0.78 and 0.83 points of advantage respectively in those territories. Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina lean, by a greater distance, toward Trump.
On the other hand, in Nevada and Pennsylvania, both candidates are still very tied. The Republican is 0.18 points above Harris in Pennsylvania, the key state that distributes the most votes in the Electoral College (19 in total), the body that is responsible for electing the president.
The Electoral College is made up of 538 delegates. To win, one of the candidates has to receive at least 270 votes. The delegates are distributed by state and the winning party in each territory takes the entire number of delegates assigned to that state, except in Maine (4) and Nebraska (5), where the system is proportional. With these two exceptions, it makes no difference whether you win a state by one ballot or by a million: if you win, you take all the electoral votes in that state and the loser in that state gets nothing.
The polls, at the moment, present a very tight scenario, with an increasingly slim lead for Kamala Harris. In the following graph you can see how they are based on the average of surveys published by FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates different surveys and gives different weight by date, sample size, methodology, transparency or bias of each polling house.
Harris is ahead in the total vote obtained nationally (known as the popular vote), with an advantage of just 0.9 points over Trump. Harris has been rising in the polls since she assumed the presidential race last August with respect to still-president Joe Biden, although the margin has been narrowing in recent weeks. A month ago it had up to three points difference.
The following map shows the victory forecast for each candidate, according to the FiveThirtyEight model, which not only takes into account the polls but also the historical vote, economic and social data of each state to simulate the probabilities of winning for each candidate.
According to that model, victory in the 2024 elections will be decided in the seven key states. Right now the model gives an undecided result in four of them and very close in favor of Trump in the other three.
Among the most contested states, the Democratic candidate would need to win Nevada and Wisconsin, in addition to Michigan, to reach the electoral college majority of 270 electoral votes.
The following table shows a summary of how the polls are in the seven states where the battle is tightest and that will decide the 2024 elections in the United States.
Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina are three swing states. There is a possibility that Harris could win the White House without them, although it would be a very difficult scenario. Trump’s victory in Georgia and North Carolina is not guaranteed, while in Arizona he is more than two and a half points ahead of his opponent. For now, Pennsylvania continues to be seen as the place that will have the last word and in this state Trump has managed to place himself first in the polls on the eve of the elections.
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