Looking at the presidential polling for the past two weeks, I am reminded of a famous line from Western movies (that has now become a total cliché): "It's quiet out there... too quiet."
Normally, by now I would have started writing one of these columns every week, but I decided not to do so last week because... well... nothing much was really happening in the polls. This week is largely the same, but I'm going to start posting these weekly anyway since we're only four weeks away from Election Day.
Things have barely budged in the past two weeks. In these charts, the lines are almost completely flat. There have been a few (very few) minor wiggles, but for the most part the important trendlines haven't budged in either direction. If the polls turn out to be right, this could wind up being yet another extremely close presidential election, hinging on a few tens of thousands of votes in a few key states.
That's if the polling is correct, of course. Which it may not be. In the past two presidential elections, the pollsters have underestimated Donald Trump's support. What were supposed to be blowout elections for both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden turned out instead to be nail-biters.
If the same thing happens this year, what is supposed to be a nail-biter could turn out to be an easy win for Trump. The margins are so close that if the polling is off by even two or three points in the crucial battleground states in his favor, then Trump could emerge victorious.
But the pollsters are keenly aware of what happened in the past two elections, and they've been diligently working to improve their forecasting models. This was made more difficult by the fact that the 2020 election was held in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic, so nobody knows what effect that truly had on voter turnout -- but it's likely it was not insignificant. So none of the pollsters really know if their new-and-improved methodologies really reflect the reality on the ground or not.
In any case, let's look at the state-by-state polling, with data (as always) provided by the fantastic Electoral-Vote.com site. The first of our charts shows the distribution of Electoral College votes based on the current state-level polling. Donald Trump's share of the Electoral Votes (EV) is in red and runs from the top of the graph downwards. Kamala Harris's share of EV is in blue and runs from the bottom up. States that are perfectly tied are shown in white. Whichever color crosses the 50-percent line in the middle will win the election (if all the polling is perfectly correct, of course).
[Click on any of theses graphs to see larger-scale versions.]
This is, you will note, rather static. Nothing much changed.
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