Dead heat poll results are astonishing – and unlikely, say these experts | US elections 2024

The US presidential election campaign is entering its final weekend. Polls show that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris appear to be permanently deadlocked, and there is little indication as to which of them will win on Tuesday.

At the end of another troubled week that began with Trump's racially charged rally at New York's Madison Square Garden and was punctuated by celebrity endorsements, misogynistic comments and insults about “trash” being thrown out left and right, the 10-day showed -Guardian poll average tracker Little has changed compared to seven days earlier, as voters' loyalty to their chosen candidate appears relatively insensitive to campaign events, however seismic.

Nationally, Harris, the Democratic nominee, has a one-point lead, 48% to 47%, over her Republican opponent, virtually identical to last week's lead. Such an advantage is consistent with the margin of error of most surveys.

Even in the contested states there is still a dead heat. In Pennsylvania, the candidates are tied at 48% and is often considered a key swing state because it has the most electoral votes (19). In the other two blue wall states, Michigan and Wisconsin, Harris has a one-point lead each, while Trump is slightly ahead in the Sun Belt: up 1% in North Carolina and 2% in Georgia and Arizona. In Nevada, his average lead in the polls is less than one percentage point.

The latest poll came amid unprecedented levels of early voting in several states, where about 65 million Americans had already cast their ballots as of Friday.

It is notoriously difficult to predict future early voting results, although according to Politico, about 58% of early voters in Pennsylvania aged 65 or older were registered Democrats, compared to 35% of the same cohort who were registered Republicans; The two major parties have roughly the same number of registered voters among older adults in the state. About 53% of the population voted for Trump in Pennsylvania in 2020, even though he lost the state to Joe Biden.

Unlike four years ago, Trump encouraged his supporters to vote early. Democrats turning out in larger numbers could be a positive indicator for them in a landmark state where commentators have predicted turnout will be key to the outcome. Democratic strategists have claimed they have a 10% to 20% lead in turnout among high-profile voters in the three blue wall states.

But in a fractured political landscape that includes threats of retaliation from Trump, accusations of fascism and racism from Harris, and warnings that democracy itself is on the ballot, veteran observers have doubted the bigger picture — that unity over time — among minds.

Polling and analysis site FiveThirtyEight's simulator, based on a collection of national and state data, predicted Friday morning that Trump would win 53 times out of 100, compared to 47 times for Harris, again similar to a week earlier.

In a late wave of positive news for Harris, a Marist poll on Friday suggested she could break the deadlock: It showed her leading Trump by 3% in Michigan and Wisconsin and by 2% in Pennsylvania. Winning all three states likely represents Harris' clearest path to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. However, the results remained within the poll's margin of error.

This near-monolithic picture, emerging from multiple polls, has raised suspicions among some analysts that pollsters are “hovering” around state polling averages because they fear being wrong for the third straight time after surveying Trump's support in the years 2016 and 2020 were significantly underestimated.

Josh Clinton, a politics professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, the network's polling director, asked on NBC's website whether the tie reflected not the mood of voters but rather the risk-averse decision-making of pollsters. Some, they suggested, might be suspicious of results that indicate unusually large leads for a candidate and implement corrective weighting.

Of the last 321 battleground polls, 124 — nearly 40% — showed a lead of a single point or less, the two wrote. Pennsylvania was the “most troubling” case, with 20 of 59 polls showing an exact tie, while another 26 had margins of less than 1%.

According to Clinton and Lapinski, this indicated “not only an astonishingly close race, but also an impossibly close race.”

Because of the randomness inherent in polls, a large number of polls can be expected to show greater diversity of opinion, even in close elections. The lack of such variation suggests either that pollsters are adjusting for “weird” margins of 5% or more, Clinton and Lapinski argued — or the following second possibility, which they found more likely.

“Some of the tools pollsters are using in 2024 to address the polling problems of 2020, such as weighting by party affiliation, prior voting, or other factors, can smooth out the differences and reduce variation in reported poll results,” they write.

Both explanations “raise the possibility that the election results could be unexpectedly different than the razor-sharp narrative that the state poll clusters and poll averages suggest,” they added.

Amid the uncertainty, one thing is certain: No matter how much pollsters have judged the contest in recent weeks, as Harris and Trump face off in the final days of the most consequential U.S. election in decades, something has to give.