With less than two weeks until the November 5 presidential elections in the United States, polls show a narrow margin between Democrats and Republicans. The battle is especially tight in Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where polls show a tie. In the first two states, the narrow margin is led by Harris. In the third, in which 19 electoral votes are disputed, Trump is only 0.3 points ahead in the polls.
It is such a fair margin that there may even be the paradox of Kamala Harris winning the popular vote and losing the elections if Donald Trump prevails in key states that give him the majority in the Electoral College. According to the latest polls, the Republican has narrowed the margin over Harris and already leads the polls in 3 of the 7 key states to win the White House.
The electoral college is made up of 538 delegates. To win, one of the candidates has to receive at least 270 votes from the electoral college.
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 get 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 a slight advantage 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 with an advantage of less than two points over Trump, in a race in which Biden’s withdrawal has been decisive: Harris has been rising in the polls since she assumed the presidential race with respect to the still president although the margin has narrowed quite a bit in the last week. Today, they are only separated by 1.7 points when a few weeks ago they were up to 3 points apart.
Donald Trump is ahead in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, while Harris is ahead in the polls in Michigan and Wisconsin, key states in the Rust Belt that gave Trump the presidency in 2016.
Precisely in Arizona, the Republican has managed to turn around the polls and is ahead of Harris. In 2020, Joe Biden won this state with 49.4% of the votes and a margin of about 10,000 votes difference with Trump.
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 a result that is undecided in five of them and very close in favor of Trump in two others.
Of 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 race is in the polls of 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. For Trump, Georgia and North Carolina are more critical. For now, Pennsylvania continues to be seen as the place that will have the last word and in this state Trump has just managed, by a very narrow margin, to turn around the polls.
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