Kamala Harris’ lead in the polls has now disappeared, according to the latest data from a top-rated pollster.
According to the final New York Times/Siena College poll before the election, conducted between October 20 and 23, Harris and Trump are tied on 48 percent each among 2,516 voters nationwide. Harris was 3 points ahead in the previous survey by the pollster, conducted between September 29 and October 6, a lead just outside of the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 points.
The New York Times and Siena College are rated as the most accurate pollsters by FiveThirtyEight. Newsweek has contacted the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment via email.
The latest poll is bad news for the Harris campaign, which is struggling to gain an edge over Trump in what could be one of the closest elections in modern history.
Mike Stewart/AP
In recent elections, Democrats have often led in the popular vote, even in years when they ultimately lost the Electoral College and the presidency.
However, polls show that two weeks before Election Day, Harris and Trump remain effectively tied, with Harris only marginally ahead of her opponent in FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker, which gives a lead of 1.7 points nationally—within the margin of error.
In order to claim victory, Harris needs to win the Electoral College, which depends on winning some of or all of the 7 battleground states, and the popular vote is not the decider.
Polls show that Harris’ margins in the battleground states have narrowed in the past month.
According to 538’s tracker, Harris is leading by a slim margin of between 0.1 and 0.7 points in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. A month ago, she led in the three states by up to 2.4 points. Meanwhile, Trump leads by between 1.2 and 1.8 points in North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia. He is also leading by 0.2 points in Pennsylvania, where Harris had been leading since moving to the top of the Democratic ticket.
Amid the tightening of the polls, in the past couple of weeks, electoral college predictions have flipped to show a greater likelihood of a Trump victory than one for Harris. For example, Silver’s current forecast gives Trump a 53.1 percent chance of winning the Electoral College vote to Harris’ 46.6 percent.
FiveThirtyEight’s forecast has also shifted in favor of Trump, showing that he has a 51 percent chance of winning the election compared to Harris’ 49 percent. RealClearPolitics’ forecast currently shows that Trump is predicted to win in every battleground state, giving him 312 Electoral College votes to Harris’ 227.
But it is not all bad news for Harris. Some recent polls, including polls by YouGov and Morning Consult, have given Harris a lead of up to 4 points. The most recent TIPP Insights poll, conducted between October 21 and 23, showed Harris leading by 3 points.
The New York Times/Siena College poll also showed some encouraging signs for Harris. The vice president has narrowed the gap with Trump on the economy, which remains the top issue for voters. Trump had a 13-point edge over Harris on which candidate could better manage the economy in the poll last month. That has shrunk to 6 percentage points.
Harris also has a 16-point lead over Trump on which candidate would do a better job in protecting abortion access, a central theme of her campaign. And the poll also shows that there is room for Harris to win over more supporters, with 15 percent of voters still undecided, a group that Harris leads with by 10 points. Two weeks ago, Trump had a marginal edge with undecided voters, on 36 percent to Harris’ 35 percent.
But the polls showed that Trump still maintains an edge over Harris on immigration, the cornerstone of his campaign. Fifteen percent of respondents named immigration as their top issue, up from 12 percent in the last poll, and 54 percent of voters said they trust Trump more than Harris on the issue, compared to 43 percent who said the same about Harris.
However, the polls are so close that the race remains a toss-up, Jon Parker, senior lecturer in American studies at Keele University in the U.K., told Newsweek last week.
“The race has gone from almost a toss-up to definitely a toss-up,” he said. However, he added that this “does not suggest that either campaign is winning or losing.”
