Evening Report

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Surprising polls, unusual voting patterns inject uncertainty ahead of Election Day

Public polling shows an improbably tight race for the White House, with former President Trump and Vice President Harris effectively tied heading into Election Day.

That could portend a drawn out and contentious vote counting process — or the race could be called early, as a tiny polling error in one direction could set one candidate or the other up for a battlegrounds sweep and a convincing Electoral College victory.

• If the polls undercount Trump’s support by the same margins they did in 2020, he’d likely win every swing state.
  
  
• If the polls undercount Democratic support by the same margins they did in the 2022 House and Senate elections, Harris would win most or all of the battlegrounds.

Nate Silver’s latest forecast finds Trump's slight advantage eroding in the past few days, effectively bringing the odds for each candidate to 50-50.

The Hill/Decision Desk HQ model gives Trump a 53 percent chance of victory, which is essentially equivalent to a coin toss:

National: Harris 0.1

AZ: Trump 2.3

GA: Trump 1.8

MI: Harris 0.6

NC: Trump 1.4

NV: Trump 1.3

PA: Trump 0.7

WI: Trump 0.2

The broader election narrative in the final days of the race has tilted toward Harris, with Trump ensconced in ugly controversies and a shocking Des Moines Register poll finding Harris with a 3 point lead in Iowa.

• Did comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist joke about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally break through? A new Univision/YouGov survey taken after that controversy finds Harris with a wide lead among Latinos in Pennsylvania.
  
  
• The Des Moines Register poll sent shockwaves through the political world. Still, few believe that Harris will win Iowa — an Emerson poll released the same day found Trump with a 10 point lead.
  
  
• However, Ann Selzer’s polls have generally hit the mark, while doubling as a useful regional forecast. In 2016 and 2020, the Des Moines Register polls picked up on Trump’s support among the white working class voters that broke his way across the Midwest and Rust Belt.

This time around, Selzer’s poll finds women — and in particular older women — breaking in huge numbers for Harris.

• Selzer said the women she polled are animated by the issue of abortion. Iowa’s six-week abortion ban finally went into affect over the summer after being tied up in the courts.
  
  
• The Des Moines Register poll raised the possibility of Harris’s support among a “silent” contingent that are being undercounted in the polls. According to NPR, some conservative women have kept their support for Harris a secret.

Of course, the Trump campaign knows the "silent" voter phenomenon all too well, as pollsters undercounted his supporters in both 2016 and 2020.

The New York Times polling analyst Nate Cohn wrote over the weekend:

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