State of the Race: A Calm Week and Perhaps the Clearest Picture Yet
"It’s getting easier to trust that the news isn’t driving the numbers, and we take a closer look at the Hispanic vote.
With five weeks to go until the election, the polls show a close and stable race for president.
Overall, Kamala Harris is ahead of Donald J. Trump by three percentage points in The New York Times’s average of national polls, while the race remains extraordinarily close in the seven key battleground states. No candidate enjoys a significant lead in states worth the 270 electoral votes needed to win.
If you’ve read this weekly polling update before, that summary might sound pretty familiar. The polls have been remarkably steady, with no clear indications of any meaningful shift either way.
Still, there is something different about the polls this past week. It’s not a difference in the top-line numbers, but the context: This was a relatively calm week of political news, at least compared with the last few months. As a result, this might be the clearest read we’ve had of the race so far. It was arguably the first “quiet” week since Vice President Harris’s entry into the race.
Think of all that happened from late July to mid-September. Over just that short span, Ms. Harris became her party’s nominee; she selected her vice-presidential running mate; the Democrats held their convention; Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump debated; and then an assassination attempt against Mr. Trump was thwarted on Sept. 15.
At every stage, these events made it harder to be sure the polls were offering a relatively unvarnished assessment of the race. It was reasonable to wonder, for instance, whether Ms. Harris’s standing was being inflated by a series of media-driven bounces. Good news for Mr. Trump, on the other hand, could be interpreted as a sign that an earlier Harris bounce was fading.
This week, it’s getting easier to trust that the news isn’t driving the numbers. It’s been three weeks since the debate and two weeks since the assassination attempt, and there’s been plenty of nonpolitical news in the headlines. This includes the Fed’s rate cutting, Hurricane Helene and the Israeli attacks on Hezbollah. Even the big political news — the indictment of New York’s mayor, Eric Adams — didn’t have much bearing on the presidential matchup.
There are a few hints that, perhaps, Ms. Harris’s numbers have slipped a bit since the post-debate polls — more on that in a bit. But on balance, a relatively calm and neutral political environment returned and it didn’t require any major revision to our understanding of the race.
As a result, we can be more confident in this week’s state of the race roundup, even though the numbers don’t look very different.
What if the polls are wrong?
While a relatively quiet political environment makes us more confident in the state of the race, there are still no guarantees.
If the polls are off as they were two or four years ago, the outcome might be very different than the polls suggest today. Either candidate could win decisively.
| Polling Leader | If Polls miss like they did in … | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2020 | ||
| National | +3 Harris | +3 Harris | +1 Trump |
| Wisconsin | +2 Harris | +4 Harris | +8 Trump |
| Nevada | +1 Harris | +4 Harris | +2 Trump |
| Michigan | +1 Harris | +7 Harris | +4 Trump |
| Pennsylvania | +1 Harris | +6 Harris | +3 Trump |
| North Carolina | Even | +1 Harris | +4 Trump |
| Georgia | +1 Trump | +1 Trump | +3 Trump |
| Arizona | +2 Trump | +1 Harris | +5 Trump |
Electoral votes counting only states where a candidate leads by 3 or more:
Electoral votes if current polling translates perfectly to results (it won’t):
Electoral votes if state polls miss in the same way they did in 2020:
Electoral votes if state polls miss in the same way they did in 2022:
With this much uncertainty, the polls don’t suggest that either candidate is a clear favorite. At this point, there’s a good chance they never will.
Arizona and Pennsylvania
While the poll averages didn’t move much last week, they did budge in Pennsylvania and Arizona, two states where we got the most new high-quality polling.
In each case, the averages shifted a tad toward Mr. Trump — though not enough to change the big picture.
In the reckoning of our average, Pennsylvania is now virtually a dead heat. Ms. Harris’s lead is under one point, which hardly counts as a lead at all; Fox News, Susquehanna and Muhlenberg College polls all showed a tie.
This raises the possibility of a slight dip for Ms. Harris in Pennsylvania, as she led by about two points in a wave of high-quality polls immediately after the presidential debate. Oddly, an unusually large share of the high-quality polling post-debate was focused on Pennsylvania, so it’s possible that a receding post-debate bounce would only be discernible in Pennsylvania.
Arizona is the other state with plenty of high-quality polling, and it’s now the battleground state where Mr. Trump fares best in our average, with a two-point lead.
The balance of the high-quality polling in Arizona this past week was arguably even better for Mr. Trump than that, as he led by six points in a USA Today/Suffolk poll, by three in a Fox poll, by one via Marist, and by five in the Times/Siena poll released last Monday.
One factor in Mr. Trump’s strength appears to be the state’s Hispanic vote. Of the four high-quality polls released this past week, none showed Ms. Harris leading among Hispanic voters by more than 12 points, even though most estimates suggest President Biden won by at least 20 points among Hispanic voters when he narrowly carried the state four years ago.
Hispanic voters
The past week also provided a national snapshot of the Hispanic vote, thanks to two high-quality polls of Hispanic voters conducted by Pew Research and NBC News/Telemundo.
The polls told the same story: Mr. Trump is doing better among Hispanic voters than four years ago, when Mr. Biden outgained him among them, 62-36.
NBC/Telemundo showed Ms. Harris up by just 14 points among Hispanic voters, 54-40, while Pew Research found her up by 18, 57-39.
The two tallies are similar to a compilation of Times/Siena national polls, which have shown Ms. Harris up by 56-39 among Hispanic voters. We’ll have our own deep polling dive on Hispanic voters soon.
Mr. Trump’s strength among Hispanic voters this cycle might seem surprising, but four years ago he made big gains among them across the country. And in 2016, he fared no worse than Mitt Romney’s 2012 showing among them, even though his anti-immigration rhetoric created the expectation of a significant backlash. In retrospect, his resilience among Hispanic voters in 2016 looks like a harbinger of what was to come.
This time, his strength might help him in two states with large Hispanic populations, Arizona and Nevada. It might also help him in the national popular vote, as Hispanic voters disproportionately live in noncompetitive states like California and Texas.
Nonetheless, a good showing for Mr. Trump among Hispanic voters won’t do as much for him in the states that seem to represent Ms. Harris’s best path to victory: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Nate Cohn is The Times’s chief political analyst. He covers elections, public opinion, demographics and polling. More about Nate Cohn"
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