| Whatever the polls say, some Democrats will not be swayed. They can feel it in their waters, and sniff it on the air: Trump is closing in on a second term in the Oval Office. We might hazily date this phenomenon to early October, when betting markets got ahead of the electoral models in their assessment of the odds of a Trump victory. Meanwhile, the leads Harris established after replacing Biden started to disappear. “After the incredible sugar high of Harris’ introduction, she inevitably was going to come down to earth a bit,” David Smith said. “And compounding that is the fact that Democrats are serial ‘bed-wetters’, as they’re sometimes known, often prone to panicking about things going wrong.” For many of the bed-wetters, it may come down to a set of intangible observations: Trump has been underestimated before. This matters so much – a classic confusion of stakes and odds. And we live in an era where, when an OK thing and a bad thing are in competition, there only ever seems to be one winner. One way to deal with all this is with an “emotional hedge”: work on the assumption that Trump is going to win, to soften the blow if it comes. The other is with information. I totally understand if you’re not in the mood for that, but here it is anyway. What do the national polls say? The headline national polling averages show an extraordinarily close race, with Harris ahead by 49% to 48%, by 47% to 46%, or by 48% to 47%, depending on who’s counting. Those results are within the margin of error, meaning they are not inconsistent with a victory for either candidate. The national polls have changed astonishingly little in historical terms: “This race is remarkable for its closeness but also the insane stability of polls here in the closing weeks,” Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, told NBC News. “This race just doesn’t seem to budge.” That is in line with what David is told by pundits and analysts studying the numbers. “The thing I keep hearing is that it could go either way. Anyone who says with certainty that either Harris or Trump is going to win is either foolish or has godlike powers.” What about the battleground states? Because of the electoral college system, the popular vote is of secondary importance in deciding the final result (a majority voted against Trump in 2016, after all, but he still ended up in the White House). But in the seven states that will probably decide the outcome, there isn’t a lot more to hold on to: polling averages in each are either tied or within a couple of points. There is some evidence for the bed-wetters to point to here. A piece (£) by the election data expert Nate Silver (quoted in this piece by law) on Sunday looked at what his modelling shows in these seven states, and found that Trump is a strong favourite (with a 64% chance of victory or better) in three of them; Harris’ strongest shot is in Michigan, where she has a 56% chance, and the others are virtual ties. You can see why this would make the Harris campaign nervous, but the reality is that these remain knife-edge numbers, David said. “It’s still hard to say that one candidate or another is winning in the swing states. In Pennsylvania, for example, it was half a percentage point in 2020, and there’s every reason to believe it’s going to be just as close, or even closer, this time.” Are the polls reliable? One point often cited by those betting on a Trump win is that his support was significantly underestimated in key states in 2016 and 2020. Why wouldn’t the same thing happen this time? It’s perfectly possible, but pollsters have tried to correct for the errors that have led them down the wrong path in the past – namely, weighting their results to account for more voters without a college degree, which appears to have been the problem in 2016. The 2020 error has been harder to pinpoint, but many experts blame “nonresponse bias” – the theory that Trump supporters don’t trust pollsters and are therefore less likely to tell them what they think. Pollsters have attempted to address that problem in different ways. As the New York Times’ chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, explains, what it may come down to in the end is whether the less engaged voters who support Trump show up in greater numbers than the pollsters anticipate – and that’s certainly possible. On the other hand, it is also possible that pollsters have overcorrected in a way that means Harris is underestimated. The unsatisfying but sensible solution is to wait a week and see what happens. What are the vibes like? Oh, the vibes are frantic. Broadly speaking, Republicans are rubbing their hands and Democrats are wringing theirs. This piece on Axios from Friday, with the headline “Dems fear they’re blowing it”, gives you a flavour: they’re worrying about early voting trends in Nevada, agonising over whether calling Trump a fascist is helpful, and reflecting grimly on the hand Harris inherited from Joe Biden. “She is who she is,” is the best one strategist can muster. “Let’s hope it’s enough.” There is a long history of Democrats taking an Eeyorish view when the stakes are high. Still, it’s not a totally insane position. It’s unscientific, but it feels like most reporters visiting swing states – like Chris McGreal in Michigan – are finding voters edging towards Trump. There is plenty of polling suggesting that Trump has made inroads with Black men and Hispanic voters. High inflation has worked against incumbent governments all over the world this year; Trump seems to be immune from criticism for behaviour that would disqualify any other candidate. And many voters blame Harris for irregular immigration across the US’s southern border. Could the vibes be wrong? Absolutely. There are counterpoints to all of this, including evidence of Harris’s success with suburban white women, and recent polling that shows her improving among Hispanic and Black voters. There is evidence that a majority of voters see her as embodying “change” more genuinely than Trump does. And there is a sense that much of it is psychological anyway: Democrats got carried away by “Kamalamentum”, and so the return of the race to a more balanced state has had a disproportionate impact on their mood. As one source close to the Harris campaign suggested to ABC News: “Democrats … were hoping that she was going to pull away and are coming to the realisation that this race is much closer than they hoped.” They added: “The bed-wetting to me makes sense based on the stakes, but not so much based on the odds.” This dynamic may even be helpful to the Harris campaign, which has constantly reminded its supporters that they should avoid the complacency which some believe helped Trump beat Hillary Clinton. “The language you hear from Harris and the Democrats is, quite sensibly, ‘we are the underdog’,” David said. “That’s a big difference from 2016. The knowledge that Trump can win is part of motivating people to really knuckle down. Will it be enough? I have absolutely no idea.” In other words: Harris’s hopes are, still, more or less a coin toss. That is more than enough to worry about without insisting that her defeat is a done deal. | 