A week before Election Day, an estimated 47 million votes have already been cast in the presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It’s possible the polls are wrong, but it’s unlikely they will change much before this long and winding campaign cycle ends. Polling analysts, who have varying methods of averaging polls, have slightly different takes on the race. But without splitting hairs, it’s hard to see this as anything other than an incredibly close race where late turnout trends and polling errors wind up telling us what we cannot know right now: the identity of the 47th president.

In national polling averages, Kamala Harris leads by 1.5 percent per FiveThirtyEight; 1.2 percent per Nate Silver; 2 percent according to the Washington Post (which rounds numbers) and one percent according to the New York Times (which also rounds numbers). RealClearPolitics, which unlike the other outlets doesn’t weigh polls for accuracy or adjust them for partisan bias, shows Trump leading nationally by an eyelash (0.1 percent).

While national polls can help us understand trends and underlying dynamics, mostly because they tend to have larger samples, the fact that they have been so very close for weeks if not months suggests they can’t tell us who will actually win. The best we can do is extrapolate, based on the relationship between the national popular vote and the electoral vote count in previous election. It makes Democrats nervous to see Harris leading Trump by under 2 percent in the national polls because Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 while winning the national popular vote by 2.1 percent, while Joe Biden barely won in 2020 despite winning the popular vote by 4.5 percent. But we have no idea if Trump will again have an........

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