Some Surprises in Last Battleground Polls, but Still a Deadlock

A rise for Kamala Harris in the Sun Belt, and a dip in the Northern swing states.

Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump stayed deadlocked to the finish in the final New York Times/Siena College polls of the 2024 presidential election, though there may be a hint she has ticked up in the final stretch.

The race remains essentially even across the seven states likeliest to decide the presidency.

Final NYT/Siena battleground poll results

Arizona: Trump +4

Georgia: Harris +1

Michigan: Trump +1

Nevada: Harris +3

North Carolina: Harris +3

Pennsylvania: Even

Wisconsin: Harris +3

Usually, the final polls point toward a relatively clear favorite, even if that candidate doesn’t go on to win. This will not be one of those elections.

While the overall poll result is largely unchanged since our previous wave of battleground polls, there were some notable shifts. Surprisingly, the longstanding gap between the Northern and Sun Belt battlegrounds narrowed considerably, with Ms. Harris faring better than before among young, Black and Hispanic voters, while Mr. Trump gained among white voters without a degree.

Ms. Harris led Black voters, 84 percent to 11 percent, up from 80-14 in the last wave of Times/Siena state polls. Similarly, she led among Hispanic voters, 56-35, up from 55-41.

The overall effect of these swings is somewhat contradictory. On average, Ms. Harris fared modestly better than our last round of surveys of the same states, but her gains were concentrated in states where she was previously struggling. Meanwhile, the so-called Blue Wall (Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) does not look quite as formidable of an obstacle to Mr. Trump as it once did. As a result, Ms Harris’s position in the Electoral College isn’t necessarily improved.

The survey does offer a clue that voters have been shifting down the stretch. We asked voters when they decided to support their candidate. Among those who said they decided over “the last few days,” Ms. Harris had a 58-42 lead — including leading, 66-34, among late deciders in the Sun Belt, while Mr. Trump led, 60-40, among late deciders in the North.

A word of caution: Hypothetically, many of these “late deciders” might have told a pollster earlier that they were Harris voters — if only we had called them at the time and asked them to formulate an opinion they hadn’t yet made. As a result, the responses to this question don’t necessarily explain the shift in the polls — even if they do align with the trend in this case.

That said, if the race did shift toward Ms. Harris, it wouldn’t be hard to explain. The news over the last two weeks hasn’t been great for Mr. Trump, from his former chief of staff John Kelly saying he meets the definition of a fascist to a speaker at Mr. Trump’s event at Madison Square Garden calling Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.”

In an election when a sliver of voters are torn between two candidates they see as having major weaknesses, it can be a big deal when the news focuses them mostly on one side’s liabilities.

Nevada and early voting

One of Ms. Harris’s best results among all our battleground polls: a three-point lead in Nevada.

This is pretty surprising. Of all the key states, Nevada has arguably produced some of the worst Times/Siena poll results of the cycle for Democrats. Before President Biden dropped out of the race, we had him losing to Mr. Trump by double digits.

More recently, Nevada has given Democrats some of their most disappointing numbers in early voting, with Republicans leading in the one state where early voting has tended to be a useful indicator of the outcome. What’s going on?

The Times/Siena poll does reflect the Republican advantage in early voting. Republicans have a two-point edge by party registration among early voters in the Times/Siena poll in Nevada, but early voters overall nonetheless say they back Ms. Harris by five points, as she has a wide lead among unaffiliated voters who cast early ballots.

The voters who remain to vote are better for Mr. Trump, but there are plenty of Democrats who seem likely to vote as well. Many say they already have done so; perhaps their outstanding mail ballots — everyone in Nevada is sent one — are sitting on the kitchen table or somewhere in the postal system.

The pattern is fairly similar across the battlegrounds: Democrats lead in early voting; Republicans lead with what remains, and in each case it’s not by the sweeping margins of four years ago, when the pandemic upended the usual early voting patterns.

To some extent, the diminished Democratic early voting edge can be interpreted as a return to the pre-election norm, but in many places — like Nevada — Republicans seem to be doing even better. There is a little bit of a leap of faith here for Democrats: They’re counting on a lot of people to vote on Election Day who didn’t in 2020 or 2022. Their track records of voting give plenty of reason to think they will do so, but if not, the result will quickly look very different.

Nonresponse bias?

Four years ago, the polls were thought to underestimate Mr. Trump because of nonresponse bias — in which his supporters were less likely to take surveys than demographically similar Biden supporters.

It’s hard to measure nonresponse bias — after all, we couldn’t reach these demographically similar voters — but one measure I track from time to time is the proportion of Democrats or Republicans who respond to a survey, after considering other factors.

Across these final polls, white Democrats were 16 percent likelier to respond than white Republicans. That’s a larger disparity than our earlier polls this year, and it’s not much better than our final polls in 2020 — even with the pandemic over. It raises the possibility that the polls could underestimate Mr. Trump yet again.

We do a lot to account for this, but in the end there are no guarantees.