Election Graphs

It has been 12 days since my last post. I probably should be doing these weekly at this point, but other things still get in the way. I'm taking time off from the day job for the final two weeks before the election though, so I'll probably do more updates then.

Within reason. Even with updates 12 days apart like this, a lot of the "movement" may just be noise. Just changes within the inherent uncertainty of polling, and with which pollsters happened to be included in the averages at the time of the update. So even when we talk about week to week changes, it will be important to look at the longer term trends, because there is so much polling going on these days, that short term variations may not be "real".

So we'll try to do that, starting with the summary of where we are:

In the last 12 days, the Election Graphs state level polling averages in the critical states have moved toward Trump. Harris is now in the weakest position she has been in since the end of July.

That however still leaves us with a race that is too close for polling to be able to reliably predict a winner. The range of reasonable possibilities goes from a healthy Harris win to a healthy Trump win, and anything in between.

At this very moment, Trump would be favored by a bit (EG currently gives Trump a 70% to 75% chance of winning), but the tipping point is close enough that the next batch of swing state polls could change that dramatically.

Polling is so close to the tie line, that tiny differences in the most recent polls can change who is "ahead". It is just too close for us to be able to tell who is "really" ahead with these kinds of poll averages, and the day to day or week to week changes may not be "real", and it is best to look at longer term trends.

And the longer term trend is that this "right on the line, could go either way" scenario has been where we have been since the end of July.  There has been some back and forth in the numbers week to week, but that overall conclusion has not changed substantially since shortly after Harris took over from Biden.

OK, with that out of the way, let's look at some of those short term changes I just told you to ignore.

On 2024-09-25 the spectrum of states with margins under 10% looked like this:

And as of 01:00 UTC on 2024-10-07 when I started this blog post:

So lets look at the changes:

Movement toward Trump:

• Michigan (10 EV): Harris by 2.8% -> Trump by 0.8% (Trump+3.6%)
• Iowa (6 EV): Trump+1.3% -> Trump+4.4% (Trump+3.1%)
• Pennsylvania (19 EV): Harris by 0.5% -> Harris by 1.1% (Trump+1.6%)
• Virginia (13 EV): Harris by 7.0% -> Harris by 5.5% (Trump+1.5%)
• North Carolina (16 EV): Trump by 0.8% -> Trump by 2.0% (Trump+1.2%)
• New Mexico (5 EV): Harris by 7.9% -> Harris by 7.2% (Trump+0.7%)
• Minnesota (10 EV): Harris by 5.8% -> Harris by 5.3% (Trump+0.5%)
• Texas (40 EV): Trump by 5.9% -> Trump by 6.3% (Trump+0.4%)
• Wisconsin (10 EV): Harris by 1.7% -> Harris by 1.5% (Trump+0.2%)

No Movement:

• Maine-All (2 EV): Harris by 9.3%
• Nevada (6 EV): Harris by 1.5%
• Maine-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 4.5%

Movement toward Harris:

• Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 1.0% -> Trump by 0.9% (Harris+0.1%)
• New Hampshire (4 EV): Harris by 7.4% -> Harris by 7.8% (Harris+0.4%)
• Florida (30 EV): Trump by 3.7% -> Trump by 2.9% (Harris+0.8%)
• Alaska (3 EV): Trump by 10.8% -> Trump by 9.8% (Harris+1.0%)
• Colorado (10 EV): Harris by 9.8% -> Harris by 10.9% (Harris+1.1%)
• Arizona (11 EV): Trump+1.2% -> Harris by 0.1% (Harris+1.3%)
• Ohio (17 EV): Trump+9.4% -> Trump+7.8% (Harris+1.6%)
• Nebraska-CD2 (1 EV): Harris by 4.3% -> Harris by 7.3% (Harris+3.0%)

Some changes in both directions. Arizona does move from Trump to Harris, but both Michigan and Pennsylvania move from Harris to Trump, and they outweigh Arizona, and the tipping point moves from Harris by 0.5% in Pennsylvania to Trump by 0.9% in Georgia.

Lets take a close up look at the tipping point state, along with three states on each side:

In the last two months the average in Nevada has ranged from Harris by 3.2% to Trump by 0.2%. Right now we have Harris by 1.5%, which is pretty close to the middle of that range. Looking at the longer term trend, Nevada looks like a pretty consistent narrow Harris lead.

The two month range in Arizona is from Harris by 0.6% to Trump by 2.8%, with Harris currently leading by 0.1%. While there have been occasional very narrow Harris leads here, most of the time Trump has led in Arizona. There is always the possibility of polls just systematically underestimating Harris, or a last minute change, but Arizona looks like a Trump state at the moment, despite the current tiny lead by Harris.

Michigan ranges from Harris by 4.5% to Trump by 0.8%, which is where it is right now. Almost the entire time Harris has been leading, but RIGHT NOW Trump is leading. The question is if this is an actual trend, or just that Trump has had a few good polls recently, and there will be a reversion to the mean with the next batch of polls.

Since there haven't really been any news events that you would think would move the polls, it seems reasonable to think Michigan is "really" a very narrow Harris lead. But it is worth paying close attention to the next few polls we see to see if this pops back to the Harris side of the center line.

Harris by 0.6% to Trump by 2.1%. Currently Trump by 0.9% and this is the tipping point state. Georgia has almost always been Trump. It is probably really a narrow Trump win minus systematic polling error or a last minute move.

Harris by 3.0% to Trump by 1.1%, which is where things are now. Very similar to Michigan, almost all the time in the last two months, Harris has held a small lead in Pennsylvania. But at this very moment things have moved toward Trump and he is better off there than he has been since July.

The question is if this is a "real" move, or one that is just driven by a handful of outlier polls, where Trump's lead will disappear as soon as the next batch of polls comes in. We will see soon enough.

If I had to bet though, Pennsylvania is really still a very narrow Harris lead and this is a blip rather than a new trend.

North Carolina has ranged from Harris by 1.4% to Trump by 2.3%, and is currently Trump by 2.0%. Trump seems to be at the upper end of his range here, but Harris has only briefly taken the lead here. If I had to guess, I would say this is really just bouncing around Trump up by 1%.

Of all seven states we are looking at here, Florida is the ONLY one where there appears to be an actual trend, rather than just bouncing around a range as individual polls come in and out of the average, with no "real" movement.

In Florida two months ago Trump was ahead by 7.0%, but now he is only ahead by 2.9%. That's a 4.1% movement toward Harris. Trump is still leading Florida though, and a Harris win would still be an upset.

OK, that is all seven.

So, the point of all that was to try to classify all of these key states by the longer term trends rather than by the poll values at this exact moment.

Doing this, you would give Nevada, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to Harris, but Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida to Trump. (To round out the under 5% places, also Wisconsin to Harris, plus Iowa and Maine-CD2 to Trump.)

This would leave you with Harris 276 to Trump 262, a 14 electoral vote Harris win, which is a bit different than the straight up trust the averages summary currently on the site, which has Trump by 32 electoral votes:

Here is the thing though, ALL of the states reviewed above are close enough that if there is a systematic polling error favoring one side or the other, that they might not actually even be close.

Is my argument that "well, even though right now this state is on one side of the line, it has usually been on the other side and there is no clear trend, so therefore it is probably really on the other side" which I used on Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania plausible? Well yes. It is plausible.

It is also plausible that the straight "trust the current poll averages" number is closer to right than the exercise I just did above. Maybe the recent moves in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania aren't just short term spikes, but represent a real change that will last.

But it would also be plausible to suppose that the poll averages are systematically underestimating Trump in all or most of the close states, much as they did in 2016 and 2020, and therefore Trump may actually be ahead in all seven of these states (and maybe Wisconsin too).

And it would also be plausible to argue that lots of pollsters are overcompensating for their misses in 2016 and 2020 (see this Nate Cohn article for one possible mechanism) and so maybe Harris is really actually leading in most or all of these states.

And of course, there is always the possibility of an "October Surprise" news event that will change things completely in the last few weeks.

You could look at the tipping point the same way we have looked at the close states:

Using the same sort of logic, you'd say the tipping point has ranged from Harris by 2.8% to 1.1% over the last two months, with Trump currently ahead by 0.9%.

You'd say that this is mostly just bouncing around, and the center of attraction is probably just Harris ahead by maybe 1% or so. But you'd wonder about the recent move toward Trump, and watch the next polls in Michigan and Pennsylvania pretty closely to see if this just bounces back toward Harris.

The bottom line is we don't know. There are just too many states near the tipping point that are too close to call. To feel we could feel pretty confident about a winner, I'd want a tipping point over 5%, or at least close to 5%. But we are at a tipping point of 0.9%. So we just don't know.

This is where the probabilistic views I do here at Election Graphs come into place. I use data from 2008 through 2020 to compare final election results in those years to my poll averages X days before the election, and in turn use that to simulate the current election with the same levels of variation that were seen historically.

Originally, I had only done "If the election was today" with these simulations. But because until Election Day, that just isn't true, earlier this year I added a view taking into account the amount of time left.

At a super high level, the more time left, the higher the chances that the person behind in a state would be able to win after all. Also, on average over the last four elections, the final election graphs average underestimated the Republican by about 1.3% in the close states. (That simplifies things, but close enough.) But with more time left, how far off the close states were was different.

With only 30 days left, the "with X days left" view and the "if the election was today" views have gotten much much closer together. Which is of course what you expect. When we get to the very end, they will match exactly, because the election WILL be today.

But at this point they are already pretty close, basically indicating that the time left for things to change dramatically is disappearing quickly, and the probabilities are starting to be dominated by how the polling error will work out, where earlier the probabilities were dominated by the chances of "things changing" in the time left before the election.

So where are we right now?

• With 30 days left:
  • Harris odds between 23.5% and 30.4%
• If the election was today:
  • Harris odds between 20.7% and 25.0%

Here are the charts for the 30 days left view:

So wait, what's the deal here? Didn't I spend most of the first part of the post describing the race as a toss up where there was a decent chance either side could win by a decent margin?

Well yes. Yes I did. And this is NOT inconsistent with that. I also said that currently it would be a tossup with Trump favored. And this is exactly what this shows.

Rounding to big fractions, at the moment we're talking Trump favored over Harris by roughly 75/25. This is still a "toss up". We're not talking about a world where the underdog has a 1% chance, or a 0.1% chance or something else that is essentially miniscule. 25% can happen easily. There are many different scenarios you can imagine that get you to the person with a 25% chance winning.

I often use 2016 as an example here. Election Graphs did not have a probabilistic view in 2016, but the median of sites I could find that did have probabilities gave Trump a 14% chance of winning. And he won. That was a long shot underdog win, and it still happened.

A 25% chance is a much bigger chance than that, and is very possible. I still consider that in the toss up zone, although admittedly on the edge of it.

This is lower than the big guys have Harris at this point. Here is a sampler:

• 538: Harris 55%
• The Hill / DDHQ: Harris 54%
• The Economist: Harris 50%

So why do I have it so much lower? It really comes down to the following:

• The Election Graphs odds are based on how far off the EG polling averages were from 2008 to 2020. On average over these four cycles, in close states the polls underestimated the Republican by 1.3%. So we essentially (again a simplification) don't give the Democrat a 50/50 shot at winning a state unless they are ahead by at least 1.3%. So we are essentially assuming the pols are going to underestimate the Republican, meaning that a small Trump lead has a bigger impact on the odds than you might think otherwise.
• At this exact moment, the last week or two so has been full of polling showing Trump ahead in key states. One week ago, we had Harris odds between 53.4% and 57.5%. The dip in the last week is very specifically due to these recent polls moving the tipping point from Harris ahead by 1.2% to Trump ahead by 0.9%. If the next set of polls pops averages back in Harris's direction, the odds will go back up quite a bit. With things so close, a move of 1% or 2% has a huge impact on the odds.
• My polling averages are intentionally designed to be much more reactive to short term changes as polls get more frequent as the election gets closer. The "big guys" average over longer time periods, and so are less reactive to each individual poll. On the one hand, this makes EG susceptible to false movements due to outliers. On the other, it let us catch the last minute swing toward Trump in 2016 that many others did not.
• If this last week of polls are actually the start of a new trend, then my numbers are just a leading indicator, and the others will follow as more polls come in. If they are just outliers, my numbers will revert to the mean as the next few polls come in.

My argument when I went through the 7 key states was essentially that Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are probably just being pushed around by outliers right now and will revert to the mean, probably bringing the EG probabilistic numbers back closer to 50/50 as more polls come in.

Of course that is just a gut feel. An educated guess looking at the long term trends and also at which pollsters are currently included in the averages. Maybe the next polls will confirm the recent move toward Trump instead.

We will know soon enough.

The first bullet above… the direction of historical polling errors, can also be shown by this chart:

This only shows 2016 and 2020, not the previous elections, but it shows very clearly how much better Trump is doing in the state polling in 2024 than he did in 2020 when he lost, but also how much better he is doing than in 2016 when he won.

Almost the entire time, Trump has been polling better in 2024 than he did not only in 2020, but than he did in 2016, when he won.

Given that context, 25% odds for Harris don't seem that unreasonable. For a Harris win, we either need a big move in the next few weeks, or for the polling error to be in the opposite direction than it has been the last couple cycles.

Now, there are a variety of good reasons to think the polling error might indeed be the opposite direction this time. But we won't really know until after the election.

And this comes to another point. The fact that all the averages and the tipping point are close does not necessarily mean the actual election will be close. It might be. But it also might not be.

Here are charts based on my two models (Independent States and Uniform Swing) showing the range of reasonable possibilities given current polling and the probabilistic model based on historical data:

With Independent States, the 2σ (95.45%) range goes from Harris by 70 to Trump by 100.

With Uniform Swing that 2σ (95.45%) range increases to Harris by 254 to Trump by 156.

That second range is probably a bit too wide. As I've said before the "real" numbers are probably somewhere between the two models. But even the narrower of these two is still a really wide range.

Yes, it might end up close, we could end up waiting a week to find out who won the election. But it is also very reasonably possible that EITHER of the two candidates will end up winning by a healthy margin in the Electoral College and we will know the winner on Election Night. Landslides on either side are even still possible, although less likely.

We just don't have the precision in polling data to have a reliable prediction of who will win.

It may not be close in the end, but it IS too close to call.

Finally, the current map:

29.6 days until polls start to close on Election Night.

Keep watching.

[Edited 2024-10-07 15:21 UTC to correct one place where I flipped Harris and Trump, and spacing in one other place.]

It has only been 14 days since my last post. The 42 days we have left is only 6 weeks. It is time to do these posts more often. So here we go.

Last time our summary line was "a toss up situation, but one where Harris had the momentum".

This time I'd say "a toss up situation, where Harris has a slight edge, but the race is pretty static".

If a summary is all you want, there you go. If you want to dig in to more of the changes since last time, keep going.

As we have before, I'll start by seeing how the spectrum of states has changed since last time.

On 2024-09-10 things looked like this:

And as now of 2024-09-25:

Last time there were 144 electoral votes in the "weak" categories where things could very reasonably go either way. Now there are only 131 electoral votes in that category, but that is still huge.

Narrowed from the states with a margin under 5%, to just those under 2%, there are STILL 84 electoral votes that are too close to call. 78 if you remove Iowa (which has only had one Harris vs Trump poll and is likely redder than is indicated here).

And the tipping point state is right in the middle of those close states.

This is all just to say that this race remains "too close to call".  Every single one of the models on Election Graphs show both a Harris win and a Trump win to be reasonably possible.

OK, now how have the states moved since last time?

Movement toward Trump:

• Maine-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 1.4% -> Trump by 4.5% (Trump+3.1%)
• North Carolina (16 EV): Harris by 0.5% -> Trump by 0.8% (Trump+1.3%)
• Maine-All (2 EV): Harris by 10.6% -> Harris by 9.3% (Trump+1.3%)
• Minnesota (10 EV): Harris by 6.6% -> Harris by 5.8% (Trump+0.8%)
• Iowa (6 EV): Trump by 0.6% -> Trump by 1.3% (Trump+0.7%)
• New Mexico (5 EV): Harris by 8.0% -> Harris by 7.9% (Trump+0.1%)
• Arizona (11 EV): Trump by 1.1% -> Trump by 1.2% (Trump+0.1%)

No Movement:

• Nebraska-CD2 (1 EV): Harris by 4.3%

Movement toward Harris:

• Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 1.2% -> Trump by 1.0% (Harris+0.2%)
• Colorado (10 EV): Harris by 9.5% -> Harris by 9.8% (Harris+0.3%)
• Wisconsin (10 EV): Harris by 1.4% -> Harris by 1.7% (Harris+0.3%)
• Pennsylvania (19 EV): Harris by 0.2% -> Harris by 0.5% (Harris+0.3%)
• Ohio (17 EV): Trump by 9.8% -> Trump by 9.4% (Harris+0.4%)
• Florida (30 EV): Trump by 4.2% -> Trump by 3.7% (Harris+0.5%)
• Michigan (15 EV): Harris by 1.9% -> Harris by 2.8% (Harris+0.9%)
• Texas (40 EV): Trump by 6.8% -> Trump by 5.9% (Harris+0.9%)
• Nevada (6 EV): Harris by 0.4% -> Harris by 1.5% (Harris+1.1%)
• New Hampshire (4 EV): Harris by 6.1% -> Harris by 7.4% (Harris+1.3%)
• Virginia (13 EV): Harris by 4.3% -> Harris by 7.0% (Harris+2.7%)

More have moved toward Harris (11) than toward Trump (7).

But the one state that flipped sides was North Carolina, which moved from Harris to Trump.

And the tipping point only moved by 0.1% (from Harris by 0.4% in Nevada, to Harris by 0.5% in Pennsylvania).

All this together means that while there has been lots of churn, the overall picture hasn't changed that much in the last two weeks.

Here are the charts for the tipping point state and the three states on either side. This corresponds to the "seven swing states" that get talked about most often these days.

Every single one of these seven states shows the same high level pattern. A rapid move toward Harris after she became the nominee, but then they just essentially bounce around within a range.

Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Pennsylvania have all MOSTLY stayed on the Harris side of the center line, with only brief ventures onto the Trump side.

North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona are the opposite, staying MOSTLY on the Trump side of the center line, with only brief ventures onto the Harris side.

If the current leader in each of these states win, then you end up with a narrow Harris win. (Harris 276 to Trump 262)

All of these states are close states though. They are all close enough that both outcomes are reasonably probable.

We're talking about the "underdog" in one of these states having a 30% to 40% chance of winning, even in the ones of these states with the largest margins.

Looking at the tipping point (the margin in the state that would put the winner over the top) you can see this closeness in another way:

Basically, ever since late July, the tipping point has just bounced around between the tie line and a 2% Harris lead (with a couple very brief forays outside that zone).

Harris has been behind where Clinton was 8 years previously except for a couple very brief moments, and has NEVER been even close to where Biden was 4 years ago.

Even taking the high end of this range for Harris, a 2% lead can easily disappear in a few days with the wrong news cycle, and of course we have seen polling errors larger than that.

• 2008: Obama's  tipping point was 3.45% better than predicted by EG.
• 2012: Obama's tipping point was 0.89% better than predicted by EG.
• 2016: Trump's tipping point was 2.36% better than predicted by EG.
• 2020: Biden's tipping point was 1.41% worse than predicted by EG.

The EG tipping point underestimated the Democrat in 2008 and 2012.

The EG tipping point underestimated the Republican in 2016 and 2020.

Which will happen this time?

You can easily come up with a lot of reasons to think this time polls are underestimating Harris. Poll performance in 2022 and special elections and referenda since then. A potential enthusiasm gap. Pollsters overcompensating for errors in 2016 and 2020. Etc.

But you can also come up with reasons polls may still be underestimating Republicans. Trump supporters still don't trust or respond to pollsters, just as they didn't in 2016 or 2020. Or pollsters just aren't properly modeling turnout and are underestimating turnout of Trump demographics. Etc.

Honestly, my gut is that polls may be underestimating Harris this time. But that is nothing more than a gut feeling, and could easily be wrong.

We know there will be polling error. There is always polling error. It is inevitable. There are fundamental limits to polling techniques.

If one candidate is winning convincingly, it doesn't matter. The difference between a candidate winning by 12% or by 14% is a difference not many people care about. Either way the candidate wins.

But if that is a difference between one candidate winning by 1% or the other candidate winning by 1%, it makes a huge difference.

So, we're once again just saying the race is too close to call, but in a different way. Lets try to quantify that:

Right now looking at my two probabilistic models that account for the amount of time left before the election (one that assumes the polling errors in the states will be independent, and one that assumes the polling error will be the same everywhere) you get Harris's chance of winning ranging from 53.6% (uniform swing) to 68.8% (independent states).

I don't know where within this range reality is, but my gut is that it is closer to uniform swing simply because the same big pollsters are polling all the close states, and thus any methodological issues they have will likely be similar across all those states.

So with this, Harris is favored a little bit at the moment, but not a lot. Even taking the high end of this range, 70/30 odds give a non-trivial chance for Trump to win.

In 2016 this site did not have probabilistic models yet, but the average of all the sites I could find that gave election odds averaged out to a 14% chance of a Trump win, and Trump won. We're looking at odds for Trump that are more than double his chances in 2016.

But looking at the "if the election was today" numbers gives an important additional caveat to that:

If we had the exact same polling on Election Day as we do today, Harris's range of chances drops to 39.4% to 41.9%.

So rather than being too close to call with a Harris advantage, it would be too close to call with a Trump advantage.

This is quite simply because on average from 2008 to 2020, the polling error  between the final Election Graphs averages and the actual election results underestimated the Republican by about 1.3% in the close states. And right now Harris's tipping point lead is only 0.5%.

I give her better odds given 42 days left until the election essentially because there is still plenty of time to improve those numbers.

(More precisely, on average from 2008 to 2020, the Democrat being ahead by this much 6 weeks out from the election was a bit more correlated with an eventual victory than having a lead like this on Election Day is.)

The detailed math is more complicated of course, but given the history of polling errors from 2008 to 2020 that I've used to build the Election Graphs probabilistic models, to have a better than 50/50 chance of winning in my models when we get to Election Day, Harris will need to be ahead on the tipping point metric by more than 1.3% when we get there.

If either the Democratic Convention or the Harris vs Trump debate had any impact, it was small and short lived. Any ups and downs in August and September may in fact just be based on which pollsters were in the field in any given week rather than actual changes in public opinion.

If you smooth things out, the race has actually been pretty static since Harris's initial surge.

Right now things are a tossup with a slight Harris edge.

If Harris wants to keep it that way though, she needs to improve her poll numbers a bit more in the next six weeks.

If she wants to actually be more confident of a win, she has to improve them quite a bit, not just a little bit.

If she slips any, or even just holds steady, when we get to Election Day it will be a toss up with Trump slightly favored.

So… bottom line, we're still in a "too close to call" situation, and absent something big happening, it is quite likely we still will be in six weeks.

Of course, "something big" sometimes happens. Both 2016 and 2020 had points in the last 100 days where the tipping point moved in one direction or the other by more than 4% in just a week or two.

A 4% move in either direction would massively change what the race looks like. A candidate leading by 4% in the tipping point would be strongly favored. An upset wouldn't be impossible, but would be much more of a surprise.

Things SEEM more sticky this time around, but you never know when those "big events" may happen.

There are new polls almost every day at this point. Sometimes there are days with LOTS of new polls.

I try to get the new polls included in the site quickly whenever they come out. I've just booked time off from the day job for the last two weeks before the election just to keep up with the inevitable deluge of polls at the end.

So don't wait for these blog posts. Check out electiongraphs.com regularly in between posts too. And follow us on Mastodon.

Lets close things out with the current map:

41.8 days until polls close in the first states on election night.

Stay tuned!

It has been 23 days since my last post.

At that time, things had moved from "Trump is heavily favored, but it is still possible for Harris to catch up" when Biden first dropped out, to a toss up situation, but one where Harris had the momentum.

Lets see how the polls have moved since then.

The bottom line for those who don't want to read further, is that while lots of states have moved in Harris's direction, some critical ones have moved toward Trump as well, and so on balance, it is still a toss up.

Now more details for those who want them.

Here's where the close states were back on 2024-08-18:

And now as of 2024-09-10:

The first thing to note is just the massive volume of really close states.

There are a full 144 electoral votes where the margin is under 5%. We have seen multiple examples of states with margins under 5% go to the other candidate in previous elections. Any of these states are legitimately "close" and the candidate that is behind has a non-trivial chance of winning the state.

When this site does "best cases" for both candidates based on just trusting the polls, we consider the possibility that all 144 of these electoral votes could go to one of the candidates. That gives this massive range of possibilities:

Even if you narrow this and only look at places with margins under 2%, you still have 100 electoral votes in play.

Well, Iowa is in here because there have been no polls at all there so we are looking at previous elections to generate the average, and it is probably actually redder than it appears. Take it out and there are still 94 electoral votes in play, and the election could very easily go either way.

So lets compare the before and after on those states and how things changed in the last 23 days:

Movement toward Trump:

• Ohio (17 EV): Trump by 7.1% -> Trump by 9.8% (Trump+2.7%)
• New Mexico (5 EV): Harris by 10.3% -> Harris by 8.0% (Trump+2.3%)
• Arizona (11 EV): Harris by 0.8% -> Trump by 1.1% (Trump+1.9%)
• Wisconsin (10 EV): Harris by 3.2% -> Harris by 1.4% (Trump+1.8%)
• Pennsylvania (19 EV): Harris by 1.9% -> Harris by 0.2% (Trump+1.7%)
• Maine-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 0.2% -> Trump by 1.4% (Trump+1.2%)

No Movement:

• Iowa (4 EV): Trump by 0.6%

Movement toward Harris:

• Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 1.6% -> Trump by 1.2% (Harris+0.4%)
• Michigan (15 EV): Harris by 1.5% -> Harris by 1.9% (Harris+0.4%)
• Minnesota (10 EV): Harris by 6.2% -> Harris by 6.6% (Harris+0.4%)
• Nevada (6 EV): Trump by 0.7% -> Harris by 0.4% (Harris+1.1%)
• Virginia (13 EV): Harris by 3.2% -> Harris by 4.3% (Harris+1.1%)
• Texas (40 EV): Trump by 8.2% -> Trump by 6.8% (Harris+1.4%)
• Florida (30 EV): Trump by 6.0% -> Trump by 4.2% (Harris+1.8%)
• North Carolina (16 EV): Trump by 1.5% -> Harris by 0.5% (Harris+2.0%)
• New Hampshire (4 EV): Harris by 3.0% -> Harris by 6.1% (Harris+3.1%)
• Colorado (10 EV): Harris by 5.6% -> Harris by 9.5% (Harris+3.9%)
• Nebraska-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 4.7% -> Harris by 4.3% (Harris+9.0%)

So we have a mixed bag. More states moved toward Harris than moved toward Trump, but some of those states that have moved toward Trump are important.

Here are the charts of the tipping point state at the moment (Nevada) and the two states on either side (ignoring Iowa since there have been no polls there). Really, all of the states under 5% are battleground states, but these five states are currently the center of that battleground, and the ones the race is pivoting around at the moment:

The thing to note is that in all of these key states when looking at the trend (rather than just comparing to the last blog post) it seems like Harris peaked, followed by movement back toward Trump.

As of now, in North Carolina and Arizona a move back toward Harris has started. But things look pretty flat lately in Nevada and Pennsylvania. And it looks like things may still be trending toward Trump in Wisconsin.

All of these are incredibly close states. So to see how this looks in terms of the overall impact on the national race, lets look at the tipping point, which is the margin in the state that would put the winner over the edge:

There have been ups and downs along the way as polls in various close states have jittered, but the high level trend is that Harris peaked at a 1.8% lead in the tipping point, but has since lost ground, and at the moment is at a 0.4% lead in the tipping point.

This is an incredibly narrow lead. Let me add in the comparison lines for 2016 and 2020:

Although there was a moment like it looked like it might happen, so far Harris has never been doing better than Clinton was doing the same number of days before the election, let alone Biden.

So the fact that Harris is narrowly ahead, should not give Democrats a whole lot of confidence. Right now this race is on a knife's edge.

But we can quantify this. Lets look at my probabilistic models for a moment.

First the charts that try to take into account how much time is left before the election, by comparing how far off Election Graphs poll averages at this same amount of time before the election were to the actual election results in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020.

  

I have two models based on the extremes of how correlated the polling errors in the states are. To explain this a bit more:

The Independent States model says that it is perfectly reasonable to think that Harris might do a lot better than expected in Florida at the same time that she does a lot worse than expected in Virginia. The error in one state tells you nothing about the errors in other states.

Meanwhile, the Uniform Swing model says, no, if the polls have been underestimating Trump in one state, they are probably underestimating him everywhere. So you basically only have to worry about the nationwide bias in the polling averages.

The actual truth is somewhere in between, but I don't know where. So I present both models and the range of possibilities they represent.

First thing I'll note, since last time the chances of a 269-269 tie have plummeted. On August 18th I had that as 1.8% to 10.8% depending on the model. I now have the chance of a tie as between 0.0% and 1.6%. Which is probably for the best. A tied electoral college would be a very chaotic scenario.

Since ties would most likely go to Trump given how those are resolved, let's look at Harris odds.

Last time Harris's win chances were between 49.8% and 52.9%. Despite the move toward Trump in the tipping point, this has now increased to between 60.1% and 73.5%.

Why?

Um, I'm honestly not entirely sure. It might take a deep dive into the data that I don't have time to do to really understand fully, but here are three possibilities:

• There is less time left before the election for things to change, so even though the lead is smaller, it is more likely to stick.
• The specific configuration of exactly how far ahead in each state each candidate is means that even though her tipping point is less, there are a lot more "paths to victory" for Harris than before, and the path for Trump is narrower.
• Quite simply historically Democrats being slightly up in early September has correlated with them doing well in November more than being slightly up at the end of October does.

One interesting thing though, is that things look very different in the "if the election was now" view that I have been mostly ignoring since I introduced the models that take into account the remaining time:

Here Harris's odds are only 34.5% to 40.7%. This is much lower.

Explaining this is easier. Basically, on average for the last four election cycles the FINAL Election Graphs averages in close states have underestimated the Republican a bit. So in states where the Democrat has a lead, but a very narrow lead there at the very end, the models still give the Republican a very good chance of wining. In a 50/50 situation the Republican is favored a bit.

Now, we won't know until after Election Day if the poll averages once again underestimate the Republican, or if this time they underestimate the Democrat.

But IF polls are underestimating the Republican again, the difference between the "if the election was now" and "with 56 days left" models essentially means that if Harris still had these same numbers on Election Day, Trump would be favored, but right now she still has plenty of time to improve the situation further, so her odds right now are higher. To feel good about the election, Harris needs to further improve her numbers as Election Day approaches. Where she is right now isn't "good enough".

And there we have it. Lets close it out with the current map:

As I type this, there have been about a dozen new state level polls since I started this blog post. They would have changed some of the data here a bit, but I have to make a cutoff somewhere when I make one of these posts, and as we approach the election, the number of polls per day is increasing dramatically. So things change every day. Multiple times a day in fact.

So don't wait for these blog posts. Check out electiongraphs.com regularly in between posts. Or follow us on Mastodon.

For now though, the Harris vs Trump debate starts in less than an hour, and I'm going to be watching it. We'll see in a week or two if it makes any difference. Debates usually don't. But the last one sure did!

56.0 days until the polls in the first states start closing on Election Day.

It will be a wild ride!

It has been 21 days since my last post, but it has been an eventful 21 days.

The last post was about a week after Biden dropped out. There had only been a small number of Harris vs Trump polls that reflected the reality of Harris actually being the nominee rather than just a hypothetical replacement.

At that point polls already showed Harris doing noticeably better against Trump than Biden had been doing.

Three weeks later polls have continued to move dramatically toward Harris.

In fact Harris has taken the lead in the electoral college if you just take the poll averages at face value.

If you look at the probabilistic views that use information about how far off Election Graphs averages were from actual election results from 2004 to 2020, Harris is now over 50% to win in one of my four models. Specifically she's ahead in the one of the four I think best represents reality.

All of the Election Graphs views now show a very close race. This is by no means a "Harris is definitely winning" scenario. But things have shifted very quickly from a "Trump is heavily favored, but it is still possible for Biden to catch up" situation a month ago, to a true toss up situation, and one where Harris has the momentum.

Now, let's get into some details:

There's the new map to start with. Lots more blue than there was three weeks ago.

But let's hit some graphs.

This is the tipping point, the margin in the state that would put the winning candidate over the top in the Electoral College. When Biden dropped out, he was behind by 5.0% to Trump in this metric. (That includes straggler Biden vs Trump polls that were released after he dropped out.)

Harris started behind by only 2.9%. It took longer for us to know it, because polls are released with a lag, but it now seems that within 4 days, Harris had already erased that 2.9% lead by Trump and the tipping point was now in her favor.

Since then the movement toward Harris has been slower, and there was a short time where the tipping point moved back toward Trump for a few days due to a few polls in Pennsylvania, but that quickly reversed and Harris has continued to strengthen, with the tipping point now being 1.1% (in between MI and AZ).

Let's look more specifically at the states.

Here were the close states as of my post on 2024-07-28:

And here they are as of 2024-08-18:

There are still a bunch of states with one or more pair of parentheses, indicating there are still not five actual Harris vs Trump 2024 polls, and the poll average is augmented by previous election results, but we have good data in a lot more states than we did.

Here are the movements in the last three weeks:

Movement toward Trump:

• Ohio (17 EV): Trump by 4.3% -> Trump by 7.1% (Trump+2.8%)
• Maine-CD2 (1 EV): Harris by 1.6% -> Trump by 0.2% (Trump+1.8%)
• Florida (30 EV): Trump by 4.3% -> Trump by 6.0% (Trump+1.7%)
• New Hampshire (4 EV): Harris by 3.4% -> Harris by 3.0% (Trump+0.4%)

No Movement:

• Nebraska-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 4.7%
• Iowa (4 EV): Trump by 0.6%
• Virginia (13 EV): Harris by 3.2%
• Colorado (10 EV): Harris by 5.6%

Movement toward Harris:

• Minnesota (10 EV): Harris by 5.5% -> Harris by 6.2% (Harris+0.7%)
• New Mexico (5 EV): Harris by 8.7% -> Harris by 10.3% (Harris+1.6%)
• Texas (40 EV): Trump by 10.1% -> Trump by 8.2% (Harris+1.9%)
• North Carolina (16 EV): Trump by 4.2% -> Trump by 1.5% (Harris+2.7%)
• Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 4.5% -> Trump by 1.6% (Harris+2.9%)
• Michigan (15 EV): Trump by 1.6% -> Harris by 1.5% (Harris+3.1%)
• Pennsylvania (19 EV): Trump by 1.3% -> Harris by 1.9% (Harris+3.2%)
• Wisconsin (10 EV): Trump by 0.2% -> Harris by 3.2% (Harris+3.4%)
• Nevada (6 EV): Trump by 6.1% -> Trump by 0.7% (Harris+5.4%)
• Arizona (11 EV): Trump by 5.8% -> Harris by 0.8% (Harris+6.6%)

The four states with no movement are states where there have been no new polls since the last update. In some of the cases there are no Harris vs Trump polls at all, so these are just averages of elections from 2008 to 2020.

In others, there are a handful of Harris vs Trump polls, but they are all from before Biden dropped out. In either case, we really need new polling.

In the four cases where Trump increased, ALL of them were where actual Harris vs Trump polling was replacing old election results in the average, reflecting that these places are more Republican than they had been in 2008 and 2012 for instance.

So these movements are less about measuring something that really changed in the last 3 weeks, and more about just getting enough data to understand the current situation.

As the most dramatic example, let's look at Florida:

The red line for the polling average was moving toward Trump until very recently. But this is because the new polls were replacing old elections in the average that were very close, as well as a couple of really good Harris results in 2021 and 2022.

But if you look just at the new polls in July and August, you can see them clearly trending toward Harris. With the last couple of polls, the average is now moving that direction again too.

The average still doesn't show Harris as particularly competitive in Florida. EG gives her an 8.2% chance of winning the state given this average this long before the election.

But even here, there does seem to be a trend toward Harris, with the most recent polls indicating a close race.

This kind of thing was happening in all of the areas moving toward Trump, including the one that flipped from blue to red:

We just had our first 2024 Harris vs Trump poll in Maine's 2nd Congressional District.

Before that our average had Harris up by 1.6%. Democrats had won ME-CD2 in 2004, 2008, and 2012. But Republicans won in 2016 and 2020. On average, these come out to a small Democratic lead. But the trend has been toward the Republicans.

So as a real 2024 poll replaces the 2004 results in the average, this moves toward Trump, and flips to the red side of the line. The new poll's two results average to Trump up by only 3% though, which is a lot less than Trump's 10.3% and 7.4% wins in 2016 and 2020 respectively.

Let's quickly look at all other jurisdictions crossing the center line:

All of these mirror the initial tipping point chart I showed, with an initial rapid movement toward Harris right after Biden dropped out, which has slowed down since then but has not yet stopped.

So yes. Harris has made lots of progress in a few weeks.

Now let's talk about how close things still are, looking at this in a bunch of different ways.

First up, the categorization view. This just looks at all the states where the margin is less than 5%, and shows the range of results that can happen if all those states end up going to one side or another.

In the end, 5% is a pretty small margin. With the right poll errors, or the right news events that change the race, a 5% margin can disappear pretty quickly.

Considering all of these electoral votes as "could go either way" you can get results from Trump by 122 EV all the way to Harris by 114 EV. Quite simply, even though the middle line, where each candidate wins all the states where they lead the polls, gives you a 22 EV Harris win, either candidate can still easily win.

Of course, "every state with a margin under 5% could go either way" is an oversimplification. Let's look at how this comes out in my probabilistic views that take into account how long there is before the election.

(I'm only going to look at the two that take into account the amount of time left before the election, ignoring the "if the election was now" ones.)

Basically, these look at the Election Graphs averages in 2008 to 2020 at the same amount of time before the election at various margins, then compares to how often those averages ended up picking the winner, and uses that information to run simulations of the electoral college given the current polling.

Since on average from 2008 to 2020, the Election Graphs poll averages have underestimated the Republican in close states, this effectively means that when states are tied, we still give the Republican a small advantage. For our probabilities to be showing a 50/50 situation, the Democrat has to be ahead by a little bit.

Which is where we are today.

One of these simulations assumes the eventual poll errors in each state are completely independent, the other assumes the poll error is uniform across all states. Obviously the reality is somewhere in between. My guess is closer to the uniform swing side of these ranges, but let's look at the full range between these two models.

On the day Biden dropped out, Harris's chances were between 7.4% and 18.1%.

As of this post, this has increased to being between 49.8% and 52.9%.

Huge improvement from where things were before… to now being essentially a coin toss.

But wait, what is that white bit?

Well, that is the chances for a 269-269 tie, which would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where the NEW House would decide the President, but voting by state delegations, which even if Democrats retake the House would probably still be Republican dominated. So ties would most likely end up going to Trump. But only after a lot of additional drama.

Right now the states are lined up such that if Harris wins every state she leads EXCEPT Arizona (where she lead by only 0.8% at the moment) then you end up with that 269-269 tie.

Right now, Election Graphs gives odds for that between 1.8% and 10.8%. Still an unlikely scenario, but a pretty big chance for an outcome that would be chaotic at best.

Contingent elections for President have only happened twice in US history. That would be the 1800 and 1824 elections. (For 1836 there was a contingent election for Vice President only.) If this were to happen, it would be the first time in 200 years.

These odds would essentially go away if either Maine's 2nd or Nebraska's 2nd end up on the blue side of the line. We discussed ME-CD2 above. There have been zero Harris vs Trump polls for NE-CD2 yet. It went Republican in 2004, 2012, and 2016. But the Democrat won in 2008 and 2020. On average over the last 5 cycles, it is R+4.7%. But in 2020 it was D+6.5%.

We really need more polls in ME-CD2 and NE-CD2. This is the kind of close year where they could be the difference between having a clear winner, and having a 269-269 tie that throws the election into the House.

Back to the tipping point for one last view on the "lots of movement toward Harris, but Democrats should not be feeling confident yet" theme:

Right now, for the first time since Biden dropped out, Harris is doing better than… where Clinton was when she had worst polling she ever had.

Just barely.

And of course we all know Clinton ended up losing.

Harris is still running behind where Clinton usually was in 2016, and even further behind where Biden usually was in 2020.

This may still change. The DNC is about to start. We have Trump's sentencing for the NY case on the calendar soon after that. And debates coming up that may end up favoring Harris. Or the poll errors could underestimate the Democrat this year, after a couple of cycles of underestimating the Republican.

So Harris has plenty of opportunity to pull further ahead.

But things could go the other way too.

Trump's campaign may eventually figure out ways to effectively attack Harris. They may get their stride back after, as JD Vance said, being "sucker punched" by the shift from Biden to Harris. Or there may be news events that reflect badly on the Biden/Harris administration. Or Harris may make some mistakes that cost her, or be hit by some currently unknown October surprise scandal.

You never know.

We really are in coin toss territory right now.

Every day is going to matter.

So pay attention.

78.9 days until the first polls close on election night 2024.