David Pratt: The US election is set once again to go down to the wire

“If I had to bet, I think Kamala Harris will win comfortably,” Stewart, now turned broadcaster, recently opined on social media and in a radio interview.

While admitting that making predictions a few weeks out “is a real way to humiliate myself”, Stewart’s assessment is based on what he believes to be flawed polling data and a broken business model for polling companies.

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This and the fact that pollsters failed to predict the result in 2016, means they have added a percentage to Trump’s vote to try and reinforce themselves and are now “sticking together as a herd”, Stewart went on to explain.

“None of them wants to be probably what I’ll be in a few weeks’ time – someone who predicted a Kamala Harris victory and got it wrong,” he observed wryly.

While there are others who undoubtedly share the former diplomat’s view that Harris will win fairly easily, such people tend to be thin on the ground right now. As with barely 10 days to the vote, most of the signs currently point to a presidential contest that’s set to go down to the wire.

In fact, ever since the advent of modern polling in the mid-20th century, the presidential polls have nearly always projected a winner by this point in the campaign cycle.

The one important exception was the 2000 election between George W Bush and Al Gore and few of us who were around at that time will forget the Florida recount that was ultimately ended by a controversial Supreme Court ruling.

Those, though, were more politically tranquil days compared to the supercharged and polarised political climate of America today, where if such dubiety over results were to occur now, then it would come as no surprise to see armed militias mustering in disputed neighbourhoods.

But if most observers are of the view that the November 5 ballot is going to be close, just how close is close, and what then can we take from the latest polls?

Well, if we begin with the US national picture, then according to the final national poll by The New York Times and Siena College, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are locked in a dead heat for the popular vote – 48% to 48%.

This stability of the current race is in itself remarkable, say analysts. To take historical comparisons, the polls moved more than 30 points in the 1976 election between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford; in August 1988, Michael Dukakis led the election by 17 points before losing the presidency to George HW Bush.

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Today’s contest could not be more different, says Jeremy Shapiro, research director of the US Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

“In today’s highly polarised environment, it seems that public opinion is not so malleable. Swing voters are increasingly a myth as, in every election, the polls seem to remain more stable,” wrote Shapiro recently on the ECFR website.

“In 2024, it is now only a slight exaggeration to say we know how everyone in America will vote – we just don’t know who will show up,” Shapiro added.

Even a deluge of events – themselves tumultuous by any standards in recent American history – seems to have failed to move the dial significantly.

A bitter war in the Middle East that America and its key ally Israel is locked into, two assassination attempts on Trump and a shift in Democratic Party candidate from Joe Biden to Harris appear to have had little impact on the dynamics of the race.

Yes, the Democrats did have an uptick in momentum after Harris replaced Biden three months ago and effectively eliminated Trump’s widening lead.

But as The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) observed in last Friday’s edition, since then, Harris has struggled somewhat to distinguish her candidacy from Biden.

In a new poll of its own, the newspaper found that a majority of voters – 54% – say she would largely continue Biden’s approach and policies, while 41% said she would bring her own fresh ideas and new leadership to the White House.

“This has been the central challenge for Harris in the snap election: Can she seize the mantle of change?” the WSJ cited David Wasserman, elections analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report that analyses US elections, as saying.

But if the latest result of The New York Times poll shows Harris and Trump locked in a dead heat for the popular vote then one from the Financial Times (FT) also shows the former president having overtaken Harris as the candidate Americans trust with the economy.

The findings of the final monthly poll for the FT and the University of Michigan Ross School of Business found 44% of registered voters said they trusted Trump more to handle the economy versus 43% for Harris.

This is the first time Trump has led Harris on the issue in the FT-Michigan Ross poll and is significant given that most US elections are often described as “pocketbook” whereby the economy and who would leave them better off financially comes first in voter priorities.

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Here too, then, the results would suggest that Harris’s campaign has momentum problems.

Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business, said Harris’s economic policy proposals had “stirred up as much disappointment as enthusiasm”.

“If she is going to win the election, she is going to have to win it on other issues,” Ross told the Financial Times.

But the national picture is only one factor here. While it might provide valuable insights into voter sentiment, the ultimate winner will be decided by the Electoral College, which reflects the outcomes in individual states.

The seven key swing states that could determine the election are Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada. Together, these states account for 93 Electoral College votes.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s daily poll tracker, Harris’s support in Michigan has grown marginally, from less than half a percentage point to 0.7%. The vice-president is marginally ahead in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Trump has a slight edge over Harris in Pennsylvania and holds a slightly larger lead in North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia. In Nevada, Trump and Harris are in a dead heat.

But what is most important for anyone looking at these figures is to bear in mind that the results from each state fall within the margin of error of the polls, indicating that the race remains extremely close, and that these swing states could still shift in favour of either candidate.

The term and meaning of “within the poll’s margin of error” really matters here, says Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac Poll, Quinnipiac University, which has been taking the pulse of the public on policy issues and elections for the past 30 years.

According to Schwartz, ever since the 2016 US election, people have been paying far more attention to this technical term.

“In that year, some polls in Florida, for example, indicated that Hillary Clinton was just a couple of percentage points ahead of Trump. Journalists and the public largely – and incorrectly – understood that apparent popular vote lead to mean Clinton was likely to win,” Schwartz points out in a recent article in the online portal The Conversation, which publishes articles by academics and experts in their research field.

“But those one or two percentage points were within their polls’ margins of error. And Clinton lost Florida. In a poll about a political race, the margin of error tells readers the likely range of results of an election,” Schwartz goes on to explain.

With polls falling within the recent margin of error in so many of the key swing states and given that they hold the key to the presidency, it’s hardly surprising then that both Republican and Democrat campaign teams have pulled out all the stops there.

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In all seven of these battleground states, political ads are everywhere, all the time and the White House race is inescapable.

Already the 2024 election is on track to be the most expensive ever, with the vast majority of funds going to advertising. The Harris campaign and its affiliated committees have pumped more than $1.1 billion into advertising, almost double the $602 million spent by the Trump campaign and its aligned committees, according to the Financial Times ad tracker.

The swing states that will decide the vote have received $1.36bn of the two campaigns’ combined spending. The biggest share – $373.5m – has gone to Pennsylvania, considered the most crucial battleground state.

The FT ad tracker suggests that in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, Trump ads slam Harris over immigration, while in Georgia and North Carolina, pro-Harris ads concentrate on abortion rights.

But clues as to what the outcome will be on November 5 are not only to be found in polls and advertising. As analysis by The Economist magazine has highlighted, millions of Americans have already voted and while nobody knows whom they voted for, it is possible to compare turnout with previous cycles and draw inferences from that.

Already the scouring of early-vote numbers for clues about who might ultimately win is under way, and, says The Economist, some detect warning signs for the Harris campaign. It indicates that provisional evidence suggests that voter enthusiasm remains high.

Early in-person voters in Georgia have shattered records, with 1.5 million turning up in the first eight days, compared with just 1 million in 2020. North Carolina, another swing state, has also exceeded 2020’s comparable figures, but more modestly. Officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, the most populous jurisdiction in that swing state, project turnout similar to 2020.

According to The Economist’s statistical model of the election, its latest forecast gives Trump a 53% chance of returning to the White House, up seven percentage points in the past week.

“Although the race remains more or less a coin toss, it is now weighted slightly in Trump’s direction. The shift in our model reflects a steady narrowing of Harris’s lead in national polls during the past month. State-specific polls published in the past week confirm that Trump’s position has strengthened slightly in the plausibly decisive states,” the magazine’s research concluded.

In all, according to data from aggregator FiveThirtyEight, it’s been estimated that 907 polls by 141 pollsters regarding next month’s US presidential election have been conducted online, via text message or over the phone.

This in total amounts to 821,525 American voters, nationally and in 44 states and congressional districts, and yet it would seem we are no closer to nailing down a definitive result on what many regard as the most significant US presidential election of modern times.

These “snapshots” of what the outcome might be are just that – “snapshots”. Perhaps Rory Stewart’s assessment that flawed polling data and a broken business model for polling companies has some credence when it comes to forming his belief that Harris will win “comfortably”.

But even he is the first to admit that nothing is certain in this contest – indeed, far from it. So much could still happen in the next 10 days, from breaking scandals to tactical mistakes made by the candidates themselves to faltering voter turnout – though the last looks unlikely in this fiercely fought political battle.

As the Financial Times US national editor Edward Luce rightly pointed out in a column a few days ago, since both sides believes the worst of the other, this is a contest where no quarter is being given and the 2024 race “is a toss-up between mutually hostile Americas”.

Yes, it really is too close to call and that in itself is making many people – not just Americans – very nervous indeed.