US presidential election minus five weeks

Polls and forecast models continue to find little or nothing to separate the two presidential contenders.

All three of the main forecast models are now very much singing from the same song sheet, with The Economist and FiveThirtyEight both putting Kamala Harris’s win probability at 56% and Nate Silver’s differing only insofar as it goes to one decimal place. A very similar story is told by a regularly updated YouGov MRP poll presently drawing on 100,000 respondents, which rates Harris favourite in enough states to get within 13 electoral college votes of a majority and another two (Pennsylvania and Georgia) as toss-ups each with enough votes to get her over the line. Adrian Beaumont’s latest overview is available at The Conversation.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

693 comments on “US presidential election minus five weeks”

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  1. Thinking through the week that the election just might be decided by the Gen X white guy Chads, Brads and Todds who are turned off by Trump but can’t quite come at Harris, I wondered whatever happened to Joe the Plumber (who actually wasn’t named Joe, nor was he actually a plumber). Turns out he died last year. Who knew.

    Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who briefly became “Joe the Plumber,” the metaphorical American middle-class Everyman, by injecting himself into the 2008 presidential campaign in an impromptu nationally-televised face-off with Barack Obama over taxing small businesses, died on Sunday at his home in Campbellsport, Wis., about 60 miles north of Milwaukee. He was 49.

    The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Katie Wurzelbacher, said.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/us/politics/samuel-wurzelbacher-joe-the-plumber-dead.html

  3. How many is Trump doing?

    It doesn’t matter how many Trump is doing. Incidentally he’s doing 3 or 4 rallies/events each week. Vance is more omnipresent in the media than Harris or Walz.

    My point is that Harris and Walz have a huge physical and competency advantage over Trump and need to use it. Her weakness is that voters across the country consistently say they want to see more of her, and she should give them that.

    If a second debate is off the table then get creative in how you present yourself to voters.

    (Yes, she may have an official role during Helene briefings which takes her away from campaigning, but Helene has only been an issue for the last week.)

  4. In the last week, Kamala Harris has:

    – visited the border, and provided a comprehensive statement on immigration in Arizona
    – held a rally in Nevada with 7,500 attending
    – met with Zellynsky in Washington
    – invited All the Smoke podcasters to her VP residence for a one hour interview
    – suspended scheduled events (a bus tour of rural Pennsylvania which Tim Walz did) to get a briefing from FEMA on Hurricane Helene
    – visited disaster hit Georgia
    – held a joint rally in Wisconsin with Liz Cheney
    – I understand she now in Michigan – and is booked for a long form interview on 60 Minutes

    I figure the remaining weeks will be similar

  5. Tina Peters, Colorado Election Cheater, sentenced to 9 years in prison

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/3/2274530/-Tina-Peters-Colorado-Election-Cheater-sentenced-to-9-years-in-prison?utm_campaign=trending

    “From the Denver Post:

    “A judge sentenced a former Colorado county clerk to nine years behind bars Thursday for leading a voting system data-breach scheme inspired by the rampant false claims that fraud altered the 2020 presidential outcome.

    Judge Matthew Barrett handed down the sentence after jurors found Tina Peters guilty in August for allowing a man to misuse a security card to access to the Mesa County election system and for being deceptive about that person’s identity.

    The man was affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Trump.

    At trial, prosecutors said Peters, a Republican, was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the presidential election results.

    A one-time hero to election deniers, Peters has been unapologetic about what happened.”

    As Rick Wilson said: Everything Trump touches, dies

  6. I agree Harris is just as active as she needs to be. The comment from voters that they want to see more of her reminds me of people here saying they didn’t support the Voice because they didn’t know about it. It’s an easy cop out when asked why you don’t support something and you don’t have a considered / rational / publicly palatable reason. Anyone who seriously wants to learn more about Harris to inform their vote could find it out very easily.

  7. @ven, all Trump’s minions keep getting prosecuted and in many cases, incarcerated, and he remains untouched. WTF.

    Fortune favours the mega rich.

  9. There is disheartening and revealing polling data from a few days ago showing that Kamala Harris is in a significantly weaker position with union households and vocational and trade school graduates than all previous Democratic candidates for president of the past 40 years.

    That is why the race is tied. The reality is that if Kamala Harris were running on Bernie’s policies she’d be fifteen points ahead. Bernie is the most popular politician in the country because the people like his policies and they like his integrity. Kamala is tied with an extremely corrupt lunatic. She is tied with an authoritarian, a cruel and insecure man, consumed by grievances, indifferent to voters. She, on the other hand, is a good person, she’s warm, she’s not unhinged, she ought to be way ahead. She isn’t because her politics are anachronistic. Her policy offerings are slim pickings and they do not not resonate with the electorate.

    Kamala needs to strike a much more populist tone. For example, on housing it isn’t enough to offer people subsidies to buy housing in an overpriced, corruptly organised housing market. She needs to hammer the fact in every public appearance that property developers and private equity firms are inflating prices and screwing people. She needs to promise to take away their power to do that.

    For families with children you can’t just promise a meagre child tax credit. You need to say that you’ll add early childhood education to public schools, you’ll fund all public schools to bring their resourcing to the required level for children to thrive, and you’ll provide all public school students in the nation with breakfast and lunch for free so that hunger isn’t a cause of disengagement from learning.

    You can’t campaign as a generic centrist Democrat in this day and age and expect to do well. Voters see centrist Democrats as allies of the establishment. They hate the establishment. Harris’s centrism is dragging down her vote share. She needs to adapt to the circumstances and drop the stale 1990s-style platitudes.

  10. If a second debate is off the table then get creative in how you present yourself to voters.

    I’ve been assuming Kamala is going to show up for the second debate and face off against an empty lectern. Not so?

  11. Nicholas – I really admire your passion, but seriously dude, you really need to get out more. You seem to have this idea that there’s latent silent majority of far Left voters who are just waiting for someone to offer a far Left manifesto. Obviously Bernie has his fans, and I like him too, but he has never been able to get the support of a majority of Democratic Party voters, let alone a majority of the wider electorate. There’s simply no appetite in the majority of the US electorate for the policies you (and me too, to some extent) would like government to enact. You might be pretty disdainful of so-called “centrists”, but the uncomfortable truth is that where a lot more voters see themselves.

  12. BTSays @ #142 Friday, October 4th, 2024 – 5:27 pm

    C@tmomma

    Nebraska senate race

    Yes it’s interesting. I think I posted a polls here last week showing this dead heat. A race largely been under the radar.

    It’s clearly personal appeal because the other Nebraska senate seat is also up as a special election, and the GOP candidate is polling as you’d normally expect – significant double-digits ahead of the Dem candidate.

    The line of attack against Deb Fischer is that she is just another career politician.

  13. Hugoaugogo @ #163 Friday, October 4th, 2024 – 8:43 pm

    Nicholas – I really admire your passion, but seriously dude, you really need to get out more. You seem to have this idea that there’s latent silent majority of far Left voters who are just waiting for someone to offer a far Left manifesto. Obviously Bernie has his fans, and I like him too, but he has never been able to get the support of a majority of Democratic Party voters, let alone a majority of the wider electorate. There’s simply no appetite in the majority of the US electorate for the policies you (and me too, to some extent) would like government to enact. You might be pretty disdainful of so-called “centrists”, but the uncomfortable truth is that where a lot more voters see themselves.

    It must break Nicholas’ heart that Bernie Sanders has endorsed ‘Centrist’ Kamala Harris.

    You are also correct to point out that most of the voters are in the centre and is it so strange that politicians want to appeal to them?

  15. That’s because people believe that, considering his history as a Democratic Party supporter, Trump isn’t that conservative really.

  16. In the United States of today the terms “liberal” and “progressive” are chiefly associated with cultural topics like transgender health care, anti-sexism campaigns, anti-racism campaigns, history curricula in schools. Economic populism is not something that voters strongly associate with being progressive, liberal, libertarian, or conservative. It is seen as anti-establishment and pro-helping people in a direct way. It has a broad trans-ideological appeal to voters in general. Media personalities and corrupt people in political and corporate life want to hang on to their power. They might think it would discredit economic populism to link it to a progressive or liberal identity. But when voters are facing multiple crises in their lives, they just want help. If they see someone offering to help, they’ll support that person.

    The reason why Donald Trump is perceived as less conservative than other Republicans is because he cultivated an anti-establishment persona. During his term his policies on taxation, labour law, and corporate regulations were very pro-establishment. But his demeanour has created the impression of being against the establishment. What I advocate is a genuine economic populism that takes a lot of the precariousness out of people’s lives by guaranteeing the basics.

  17. FWIW, I think the Harris campaign has been pretty good with its messaging and themes. I’d like to see her do a little more prime time media but otherwise, it has been an efficient campaign (whose ads, I am reliably told, are plastering the airwaves in swing states.)

    Don’t be mistaken – she absolutely can lose from here (Trump has a baked-in advantage) but the contrast between the two campaigns and candidates in both energy and efficiency is stark.

  18. Wat Tyler says:
    Friday, October 4, 2024 at 11:18 pm

    Democrats ($915 mill) are outspending the Republicans ($352 mill) by about 3 to one and yet they look like they’ll lose both the House and the Senate and possibly the White House.

    So much for the Democrats and their campaign financing reforms.

  21. Should be corrected to “they’ll lose both the White House and the Senate, and probably the House”.

    As it stands I would say well over 50% chance they lose all three

    Just look at past polling form – Trump 2016, Brexit 2016, Morrison 2019

  22. I’m having trouble finding “ScromoII” on 538s list of credible election forecasters for some reason, is it under another name?

  24. Wat Tyler @ #167 Friday, October 4th, 2024 – 11:18 pm

    FWIW, I think the Harris campaign has been pretty good with its messaging and themes. I’d like to see her do a little more prime time media but otherwise, it has been an efficient campaign (whose ads, I am reliably told, are plastering the airwaves in swing states.)

    Don’t be mistaken – she absolutely can lose from here (Trump has a baked-in advantage) but the contrast between the two campaigns and candidates in both energy and efficiency is stark.

    Kamala Harris is doing a sit down interview with American 60 Minutes on Sunday night US time.

  27. Harris could certainly do some more visible campaigning.

    I’m not sure what they can do with Walz to be honest: perhaps give him a one-way ticket back to Minnesota. As the dust settles on the V-P debate, I think his performance looks worse and worse in hindsight. What sticks in my memory were his “knucklehead” excuse for falsely claiming that he was in China (or was it Hong Kong) when Tiananmen Square happened and his participation in the stupid game of exchanging pleasantries and compliments with Vance, which totally undercut Kamala’s message that Trump and Vance are “weird.”

    She should have gone with Shapiro. It becomes clearer by the day. Worst of all, the voters know it, and many suspect that she didn’t want to have a V-P candidate who might outshine her. And there’s certainly no danger of that happening with good old knucklehead.

    If she ends up losing Pennsylvania by a few thousand votes and thereby the election, we are never going to hear the end of it. And justly so.

  30. The VP debate wasn’t a strong performance by Walz, but it hasn’t done him any harm. His favourability has increased after the performance and the only memorable thing from it is Vance refusing to say Trump lost the 2020 election – he was dogged by reporters the other day chasing him in a building trying to get him to answer.

    Walz messed up the Tiananmen Sq question (he should’ve just admitted outright he misspoke, apologised and moved on), but I seriously doubt voters are going to care much about something that happened in 1989. After all Republicans couldn’t get traction with the ‘stolen valour’ thing and this will be the same.

  31. Knucklehead? That’s a bit much mb?

    Ok. Let’s use the word. Nothing wrong with a knucklehead on the ticket. Id suggest Biden was one. Quayle. You could argue Trump and Bush Jn were their tickets knuckleheads.

    I don’t find Walz to be very inspiring. But I’m not the market. And that’s something we should all keep in mind.

    Now, He hasn’t turned Minnesota into a cert and Michigan and Wisconsin are still very close. But a VP rarely makes a huge difference. I just hope the Harris campaign haven’t made the assumption that picking a VP from that area (and an older white non-elite dude from that area) will automatically win those states.

    The more I think about it, the more tempting Castro should have been as an option. Odd was never really in the mix as the Dems need to start being in the running in Texas and Florida more often. Is a non white ticket too much? Something in his background check? No high level exec experience? Hmmmm. It would have been a risk.

    For me….. Shapiro most impressive but Walz a better pick for ticket balance. But I would have chosen Buttigieg or the Kentucky dude. Both (and Shapiro) would make excellent future leaders tho – keeping their powder dry? But again, I’m not a US swing voter.

  32. Team Katich. I didn’t come up with “Knucklehead”, Walz did.

    It’s all part of his folksy, backwoods shtick, which I don’t buy.

    To me, he’s just a garden variety Dem politician. And not a particularly good one.

  35. Team Katich. I didn’t come up with “Knucklehead”, Walz did.
    ————————————
    Doesn’t matter who came up with it. An attempt at being self-effacing doesn’t mean he is best described as being a knucklehead. He clearly isn’t.

    And sure, the folksy stuff irritates me too, it’s an OTT way to show he isn’t of the elite. It’s the US. OTT is how it’s done.

  37. MVP Harris in Flint, Michigan.(Watch video)

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/4/2274798/-MVP-Harris-live-in-Flint-MI-The-Place-is-Packed?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

    “Victor Shi
    @Victorshi2020
    WOW. This is the the line to see VP Kamala Harris in Flint, Michigan right now — & there are still 4 hours to go before VP Harris is set to speak. A gigantic crowd of fired up Michigan voters for Kamala Harris. Truly jaw-dropping & amazing. (Watch video)

    https://x.com/Victorshi2020/status/1842266715423457629?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1842266715423457629%7Ctwgr%5Ebf59f081e7ec7e25cfdcc8cc5680c1777cd4f2a4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailykos.com%2Fstories%2F2024%2F10%2F4%2F2274798%2F-MVP-Harris-live-in-Flint-MI-The-Place-is-Packed
    “

  38. Mavis says:
    Saturday, October 5, 2024 at 8:25 am
    Springstein endorses Harris/Waltz:

    Not a criticism of you, Mavis, but it would be news if he didn’t.

  39. Why do Trump’s rally crowds leave early?

    In Atlanta over the summer, crowds gathered for several blocks down a busy highway in the sweltering heat, waiting to get inside a Trump rally. But as he kept talking, slashing into Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and going off script, hundreds if not thousands of people left the arena.

    More recently, in Indiana, Pa., attendees trickled out as Trump falsely claimed that “every legal expert” wanted abortion policy sent back to the states, over an hour into his speech. More left as he repeated his warning about “World War III.”

    By 9:20 p.m., about 90 minutes after he began, the empty seats were noticeable at the Kovalchick Convention and Athletic Complex, while Trump called the nation’s capital a “horror show.” He wrapped up his speech about five minutes later.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/04/trump-rally-departures-early/

  41. Ven says:
    Saturday, October 5, 2024 at 8:38 am

    It’s Flint, Michigan. It’d be news if it was a small crowd (if the media reported on it).

  42. Biden is spot on. The election will be fair, but the outcome, especially if Harris wins, most likely will not be peaceful.

    President Joe Biden said he was concerned that the upcoming presidential election might not be peaceful, using a surprise appearance at the White House Briefing Room on Friday to suggest that former president Donald Trump’s rhetoric may lead to a “dangerous” outcome.

    “I’m confident it’ll be free and fair. I don’t know whether it’ll be peaceful,” Biden said of the election. “The things that Trump has said and the things that he said last time out, when he didn’t like the outcome of the election, were very dangerous.”

    Biden’s comments, which also referenced the refusal by Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), to acknowledge the former president’s 2020 election loss, came during his first-ever visit to a space where reporters typically question White House officials.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/04/biden-election-trump-israel/

  43. meher baba says:
    Saturday, October 5, 2024 at 8:11 am

    I find it strange that he isn’t being hounded out of the slot for his lying about his being in Hong Kong when the Tiananmen Square massacre happened. Aren’t the Democrats pure as the driven snow compared to the Republicans?

    What else is he lying about?

    Then again, Billary had trouble with her memory as well.

  44. Confessions says:
    Saturday, October 5, 2024 at 8:44 am

    If Trump wins, the protests will be “mainly peaceful”, like the BLM ones, no doubt.

  45. Fubar
    I didn’t suggest Castro bc of identity the way you think. I suggested him bc he is from the south and I believe youthfulness (or at least an age differential in the ticket) is important in a VP pick. So long as you are spoiled for competent choice.

    I am suggesting he wasn’t considered because he is of colour.

  46. Grifters gotta keep grifting. This is serious shit on the part of Oklahoma, transferring millions in taxpayer dollars directly to Trump’s coffers.

    The state of Oklahoma wants to buy 55,000 classroom Bibles, and the request for proposals includes some specific requirements: The books must include the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents. They may not include commentary. They must be leather-bound, or at least use “leather-like” material.

    The Bible is the best-selling book in the world, but very few — and maybe just one — will meet these requirements. It’s backed by former president Donald Trump and retails for $60.

    In March, Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, endorsed the “God Bless the USA Bible,” and he earns money from sales through a licensing agreement.

    Oklahoma stirred controversy this year when Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters announced that all of the state’s public schools would be required to teach the Bible. Walters has also pushed schools to post the Ten Commandments and fought for a state-funded Catholic charter school, a move found unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court.

    Walters has called the Bible a “necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country” and has mandated that every school in the state teach it starting this year. Some school districts have said they won’t go along, and the state Supreme Court ruled this summer that decisions about content — in that case, about library books — shall be made locally. But Walters has pressed ahead, this week publishing a request for proposals to supply the state with Bibles for every Oklahoma school.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/10/04/oklahoma-schools-trump-bible/

  47. Is North Carolina flipping blue this November? Seems perhaps not at this stage.

    To win the White House, Harris must win a similar supermajority of moderate voters nationwide – but if she is to capture North Carolina, the Vice President has to be closer to Governor Roy Cooper’s 67% moderate support level, and, as of today, Harris is at 60% – 7 points off from that goal. In the governor’s race, Josh Stein is at 68% with moderate voters in our average, which is what puts him in a prime position to take the state.

    While it remains true that Harris is close to where she needs to be to win the state, she still has substantially more work to do to win moderate voters, limit losses with Black voters, and to stem the exodus of non-college white voters.

    https://greattransformation.substack.com/p/is-north-carolina-flipping-blue-this?utm_source=app-post-stats-page&triedRedirect=true

  48. FUBAR: In an amazing psychic feat on the part of her parents, Hillary was named for Edmund Hillary in 1947: six years years before he ascended Mt Everest, when he was but an obscure NZ outdoor enthusiast.

    The advent of the internet means that public figures can no longer get away with this sort of crap. The same goes with Trump and his tendency to claim that he started out with nothing.

  49. evads says:
    Saturday, October 5, 2024 at 2:01 am
    @Fubar 11.49pm

    Not sure why you think it looks like the Dems will lose the House. Surely they’re favoured at the moment.

    ScromoII says:
    Saturday, October 5, 2024 at 3:49 am
    Should be corrected to “they’ll lose both the White House and the Senate, and probably the House”.

    My comment is based on the following data from Real Clear Politics:

    House – Reps 207 Dems 196 Toss up 32

    https://www.realclearpolling.com/maps/house/2024/toss-up

    Senate – Reps 50 Dems 45 Toss Up 5

    https://www.realclearpolling.com/maps/senate/2024/toss-up

    Electoral College Trump 281 Harris 257

    https://www.realclearpolling.com/maps/president/2024/no-toss-up/electoral-college-state-changes

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