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!