Five days before the United States presidential elections, polls show that the distance between Democrats and Republicans is very close. The race is especially close in the key states of Nevada and Pennsylvania, where polls show a tie.
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, wins 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 are slightly favoring Harris. These are key states of the Rust Belt (in Spanish, rust belt) that gave Trump the presidency in 2016, but he barely has a lead of 1.07 and 0.71 points, respectively.
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 0.36 points above Harris in Pennsylvania, the key state that distributes the most votes in the Electoral College (19 in total), which is responsible for choosing 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 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 in the total vote obtained nationally (known as the popular vote), with a lead of 1.3 points over Trump. Harris has been rising in the polls since she assumed the presidential race with respect to the still president, although the margin has been narrowing in recent weeks. A month ago they 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.
Of the most contested states, the Democratic candidate would need to win in Nevada and Wisconsin, in addition to keeping 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 managed, by a very narrow margin, to turn around the polls.
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