US polls: Trump vs Harris – who leads the race? | 2024 US Election News

With less than a week to go until Election Day, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are in a tight race to win over undecided voters.

According to the polls, few US presidential elections have been as hotly contested as this one.

Harris and Trump are in a dead heat, and the outcome may be decided by turnout in the seven key swing states.

Who is in charge?

From Tuesday FiveThirtyEight’s daily tracking of election polls shows Vice President Harris leading national polls by 1.5 percentage points over former President Trump. However, this lead is down slightly from last week’s margin of 1.8 points, indicating that Trump is gradually closing the gap.

According to the latest Reuters/Ipsos polls, Harris’ lead over Trump has narrowed in the final stretch of the election.

Harris has a narrow lead of just one percentage point over Republicans, 44 percent to 43 percent, nationally, according to the poll. The measurement has a margin of error of approximately three percentage points in both directions.

Asked which candidate had a superior approach to the economy, unemployment and jobs, voters in the poll favored Trump 47 percent to 37 percent. Trump has also maintained an edge on economic and immigration issues.

The survey also found that Harris’ lead on the issue of political extremism is narrowing. About 40 percent of voters thought she had a better approach to addressing political extremism and threats to democracy, while 38 percent favored Trump.

Both candidates’ margins are within the average of the polls’ margins of error, meaning both could potentially be in the lead. While most polls indicate that Harris is ahead in the national poll, the two candidates are closely matched in swing states.

It’s important to note that while national polls provide insight into voter sentiment, the Electoral College will ultimately decide the winner, not the national referendum. Many states tend to heavily favor either Republicans or Democrats.

What do the polls say about the swing states?

The seven key swing states are Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), North Carolina (16), Georgia (16), Michigan (15), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10) and Nevada (6), which together have 93 electoral votes. College votes.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of recent polls, Harris and Trump are within the margin of error in each of those states. In Michigan, Harris maintains a slight lead over Trump by a margin of +0.8 points since last week. She also has narrow gains in Nevada and Wisconsin, underscoring how easily those states could swing either way.

Conversely, Trump has a small lead in Pennsylvania and a more significant lead in North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.

Continuing last week’s trend, if the narrow margins reflected in the poll average hold on election night, Trump is favored to win. But even a slight shift away from him in these critical states — or an underestimation of Harris’ support — could result in a victory for the vice president.

Notably, in the 2020 presidential election, Georgia, where Trump currently leads, switched from Republican to Democratic after nearly 30 years of voting Republicans. Similarly, Arizona, where Trump also has a lead, was won by Democrats by just 0.3 percentage points.

How reliable are opinion polls?

Polling predicts how the population might vote by surveying a sample of voters. Surveys are most often conducted over the phone or online. In some cases it is by mail or in person.

Poll trackers, which aggregate a number of polls, are weighted based on a number of factors, such as the sample size of the poll, the quality of the pollster, how recently the poll was conducted, and the particular methods used.

Polls are never 100 percent accurate. Both the 2016 and 2020 US elections saw polls underestimate the popularity of Republican candidates.

The polls got it wrong again in the 2022 midterm elections. That time they signed the support for the Democrats and predicted a Republican victory, only to be proven wrong.

Experts note that although polling services are sophisticated, they have a limited shelf life.

“The problem is that, as the cliché goes, they’re snapshots in time, so as soon as you see them, they’re already out of date. The big question (this year is) with the undecided voters,” said Steven Erlanger, the European diplomatic correspondent at The New York Times, to Al Jazeera’s Inside Story program.

Many of the polls before this year’s presidential election have shown the difference in support between Harris and Trump within the margin of error.