THE surprising result of the highly regarded Selzer poll in Iowa, showing the vice president Kamala Harris former executive president Donald Trump 47% to 44% in a state he had carried from 53% to 45% in 2020, suggests something like a 1980 scenario: a wave of late deciders in the final days of the campaign set aside their indecision and opt for a candidate on whom they had hesitated. to support. Pat Caddell, Jimmy Carter’s pollster, and Richard Wirthlin, Ronald Reagan’s pollster, assured me afterwards that after the candidates’ only debate on Tuesday, October 28, their campaign weekend polls showed a huge push in favor of Reagan. Caddell had the unpleasant task of telling President Carter on Monday morning that he was not going to win re-election. Reagan won the popular vote 51% to 41% and carried 44 states.

The analogy this year would be a massive swing in counties outside metropolitan areas and college towns of more than a million individuals, away from Trump, whose victory in 2016 and near-victory in 2020 were due to massive majorities there, and towards Harris. Iowa, which is the largest state without a county in a metro area of ​​more than 1 million people and whose two major college counties garner just 8 percent of the vote, could be a harbinger, as this was the case in 2016. But I have not seen, nor have I read, any accounts of anyone else seeing any other signs of such a surge. At this point, the Selzer poll looks, despite its pollster’s well-deserved reputation, like an outlier: one in 20 polls that, according to polling theory, produces results well outside the margin of error.

A second possibility is a third consecutive election decided by a few thousand votes in a few of the target states. Trump won in 2016 by leading Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by a total of 77,736 votes and lost in 2020 by falling short in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by a total of 42,918 votes. Analysts, none are more brilliant than Nate Silver with his updated 538 modelClosely following these five states, as well as Nevada, which Trump narrowly lost twice, and North Carolina, which he narrowly won twice.

These seven target states, which currently have 93 electoral votes it appears, will determine the outcome, while the other 43 states and the District of Columbia will provide, by sizable margins, 226 electoral votes for Harris and 219 for Trump – despite the only Selzer poll in Iowa and a single survey in New Hampshire, Trump ahead by an eerily precise margin of 50.2% to 49.8%. THE RealClearPolitics average of recent polls shows Trump leading in five of the seven states with an average lead of 0.8 percentage points but by a margin greater than 2 points (still within the margin of error) in only one state (Trump in Arizona). The final edition of the most sophisticated Money Newsletterupdated 30 minutes after midnight, similarly shows Trump ahead in five of seven states, with a lead in only one state (Arizona, again, for Trump) that is greater than 1.2 points – in other words, again, well within the margin of error.

Smart readers, looking at these numbers, are once again predicting a close election, which will once again be decided by microscopic percentages of the vote in one or more of the seven target states – particularly Pennsylvania, the most divided state in each summary and with the most (19) electoral votes. This makes some sense. As Silver pointed out, polling errors in 2016 and 2020 underestimated Trump’s final vote, but polling errors in other years underestimated candidates from both parties in no particular way . If you look at the aggregate polls in target states and add 2 points to Trump’s numbers in each state, he gets over 300 electoral votes, and if you add 2 points to Harris’s numbers in each state, she gets that result. THE from the New York Times The excellent polling analyst Nate Cohn has argued that the many pollsters who weight their results based on respondents’ recalled vote in 2020 could be exaggerate support for Trumpbut he also maintained that “there is no reason to believe that the pollsters “fixed” what didn’t work in 2020.” He concludes: “I have no idea if our polls (or any polls) can be “good”: too good for Harris or too good for Trump. Nobody does it. Make your choice.

But there’s something different about these numbers compared to 2016 and 2020, when national polls tended to show significantly higher margins than Democratic candidates actually won in target states. This year, they will not: CPR Harris has just 0.1 point lead nationally, not far from the 0.8 point lead he gave Trump in target states, and Silver has Harris ahead 1 point nationally all trailing by an average lead of 0.4 points in the goal. States. This implies that the Republican popular vote margin in the 24 states considered safe Republican would be close to the Democratic popular vote margin in the 19 states and Washington, DC, considered safe Democratic. This would be a drastic change from 2020, when Democrats’ popular vote margin in their safe seats was 14.8 million, far ahead of Republicans’ popular vote margin in their safe seats (which was 7.9 million ). Reported trends favoring Trump among Latino voters, young black voters and Jewish voters could narrow that gap, but it seems unlikely they will be able to close it.

If in doubt, you can consult Occam’s Razor. Fundamentals usually matter. Repeated polls show that far more voters retrospectively approve of the Trump administration’s performance than the administration of President Joe Biden, whose actions Harris has refused to disapprove of. Voters, none of whom under 65 have experienced significant inflation before as adults, disapprove of Biden’s economic performance. Most voters disapprove of the immigration control policy that has allowed an estimated 7 million illegal immigrants to enter the country. You might argue that these responses are unwarranted, but they exist. The last time voters were able to compare the performances in office of two successive presidents was in 1892, when they rejected incumbent Benjamin Harrison and re-elected Grover Cleveland to office. I default to expecting them to do something like that this year – in which case, the polls will have once again underestimated Trump’s vote. But I can easily see how it could go the other way. If Nate Cohn has no idea who will win, and if Nate Silver estimates the odds at 50% for a Harris victory and 49.6% for a Trump victory, I’m not going any further than I think. ‘ve already done to predict who will win. to have.