With just 30 days left before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are hitting overdrive in the final sprint. Mail-in ballots are being printed and sent out and early in-person voting has already kicked off in a handful of states.
There’s a lot at stake for both campaigns in what has been one of the most unprecedented general elections in modern history, with two assassination attempts on Trump, a shakeup at the top of the Democratic ticket, and a cascade of polling that shows both candidates locked in a dead-heat race for the White House.
In the few remaining weeks of this election cycle, both campaigns are spending money on advertising in battleground states, and hoping that their respective ground strategies will boost voter turnout and help them cross the finish line.
The metrics that will swing the vote in either direction in the final 30 days vary.
“The things that we can count involve campaign spending. It involves donations. It involves things like opening up field offices,” Jacob Neiheisel, a political science professor at the University of Buffalo, told yesterday. “So all of those things that are observable to us are, often, the things that we focus on ... they’re parts of the broader environment that matters.”
It is unclear which campaign has the most advantages in the remaining four weeks.
“I think it’s probably pretty close to a toss-up. It could definitely go either way,” Anthony Fowler, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, told.
He explained that despite how greatly Harris and Trump contrast ideologically, much of the electorate is ideologically moderate, and likely to fall “roughly in between the two of them.”
“So it kind of makes sense to me that there’s a big group of people who, even though maybe they don’t really like either candidate very much, they’re almost indifferent between them, and haven’t quite decided which one they’re going to support.”
These are some of the factors most likely to decide the election in the final 30 days.
Polling Data
Recent polling data suggests that the race between the two candidates remains razor-thin. While Harris leads by 2.7 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, surveys in the seven battleground states paint a different picture.
Among the formerly “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, recent polls have Harris leading by between 1 and 5 percent, trailing Trump, or tied.
Throughout the Sun Belt, Harris has led multiple September polls, but others show Trump leading by 1 percent or more.
“I think that absolutely, polling is really hard nowadays,” Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said.
“It is [challenging] to get representative samples in an era when sometimes fewer than 1 percent of the people that you try to talk to are actually willing to talk to you and tell you [which candidate they support].”
Trump was historically underestimated in polls leading up to the 2016 and 2020 elections, but Hopkins says polling errors could go in either direction this time around.
Fowler agrees.
“[Polling] could, in principle, go either way,” he said. “With Harris, she’s a little bit less of a known commodity. And so there probably are some voters who are still trying to decide how much they do or don’t like Kamala Harris ... depending on how the last month of the campaign goes, her popularity could go up or down.”
However, Fowler cautions that Trump could still outperform the polls again, as non-college graduates historically respond to polls less frequently than college graduates, who tend to lean toward Democrats.
For some in the polling industry, Trump’s overperformance relative to past polls is complicated. There’s the “shy Trump voter” theory, which suggests many of those who supported him in 2016 and 2020 were not just less likely to speak with pollsters, but also less likely to be forthcoming with their preference.
“So in 2016, I would say it’s very fair to suggest that pollsters, by and large, undercounted that shy Trump vote. I think that was a real phenomenon,” Jim Lee, president and CEO of Susquehanna Polling, stated.
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