The Anatomy of a Swing State – Harris vs. Trump – October 30th
Bottom Line: We’re now only 6 days away from Election Day. We’ll start with an overview of where Trump stands today in polling against Harris compared to where he stood on Election Day 2020 against Biden using the RealClear Politics polling average nationally.
- Election Day 2020: Biden +7.2%
- October 30th, 2024: Trump +0.2%
For a fifth straight week Donald Trump has improved in the polls and for the first time since early August he’s shown with a slight head-to-head advantage nationally. A momentum swing in this race is apparent as we’re now only six days away from Election Day with early voting trends also favoring Trump. Donald Trump is running well ahead of where he was in the polls four years ago in his loss to Joe Biden and where he was eight years ago in his win over Hillary Clinton.
As of now what we see is that Donald Trump is running an average of 7.4% points better today than he was on Election Day 2020.
These are the states that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won by 7.4% or less in 2020:
- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nebraska’s 2nd District, New Hampshire, Nevada, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin
Those are currently the key swing states to watch as of this week. The expectation would be that Trump would be able to retain the states he won four years ago with the question being whether he’d be able to flip enough swing states back his way to win the election.
With Donald Trump’s continued improvement in the polls this week has presented three additional opportunities that are in play for him as the map is expanding. Those three additional opportunities for electoral college votes include Nebraska’s 2nd District, New Hampshire and Minnesota.
As of today, the RealClear average of state polls shows...
- Harris retaining: Nebraska’s 2nd District, New Hampshire, Michigan, Minnesota.
- Trump flipping: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin
As a result, this is what the electoral college breakout looks like in this second to last update... Trump leading 297 to 241. While the map expanded for Trump this week, it wasn’t all good news as Michigan moved back into Harris’s column for the first time in two weeks.
When accounting for how the polls performed in each of these states in the prior two presidential elections here’s what we see:
- Trump has performed in line with what the polls have suggested would happen in Arizona.
- Trump has underperformed his polling in Georgia and Nevada
- Trump has outperformed his polling in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin
If the polls perform similarly this cycle compared to how they’ve performed the prior two cycles Harris would carry Nevada with Trump carrying the other five states. Adjusted for the margin of error in the polls previously, Trump is shown with a 291-247 vote advantage currently.
What this illustrates is that within the final week of this campaign, the race appears to be positioned for a win for Trump with a margin that’s a bit narrower than his 2016 electoral vote margin.