Labor Day is a critical mile-marker on the road to the general election, and Kamala Harris has reached it with a slim advantage over Donald Trump. But the former president would still be well within striking distance if the election were held today.
Because of Republicans’ advantage in the Electoral College, a race that Harris leads nationally by between 2 and 4 percentage points, on average, is the equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth, and it’s set to be decided in a smaller-than-usual number of states.
The polls are extraordinarily tight in all of them, and that isn’t expected to change much over the next nine weeks. In modern presidential elections, where the race stands on Labor Day is usually pretty close to where it ends up once the votes are counted.
Of the seven states that both campaigns have identified as the core Electoral College battlegrounds, Harris leads Trump in three of them — the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — according to multiple polling averages. But those leads are small: In only one state, Wisconsin, does an average show a greater than 3-point margin for the vice president.
In three others — Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — the polls are so close that different polling averages have different leaders as of Sunday night.
Only in the remaining swing state — North Carolina, which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 — does the former president lead in all three polling averages: FiveThirtyEight, RealClearPolitics and Silver Bulletin, the new data-journalism site from FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver. But that lead is only around 1 point.
The three states where Harris has a modest lead would be sufficient to win the presidency if she also wins the traditionally blue states and earns the electoral vote from Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, where a Split Ticket/SurveyUSA poll released on Saturday gave her a 5-point lead over Trump.
In short: Harris is narrowly ahead in the Rust Belt — which would be enough to win — but Trump is breathing down her neck. And those are also the states where the polling has been least accurate and specifically underestimated Trump in the past two elections. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led Trump in all three states in 2016, only to lose them. And now-President Joe Biden’s prospects looked like a slam dunk going into the 2020 election, but he barely escaped with victories in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
