Final polling averages show a close race nationally and in the swing states
I wish I could tell you something more helpful than "it's close," folks, but according to 538's final presidential election polling averages, that really is the most responsible conclusion.
According to 538's average of national polls, Vice President Kamala Harris currently has a 1.2 percentage point lead over former President Donald Trump in the national popular vote. Harris, at 48.0% of the vote in our average, is polling about 0.6 percentage points below her peak on Oct. 1 this year. Trump, meanwhile, posted his highest vote share of the campaign today, at 46.8%. That is the same exact % of the vote he won in 2020, to the first decimal point.
The picture is not much different at the state level. According to our final polling averages, the margin between Trump and Harris is 2.1 percentage points or fewer in all seven swing states. Trump currently leads by 2.1 points in Arizona, 0.9 points in North Carolina, 0.8 points in Georgia and 0.3 points in Nevada. Harris is up by 1.0 point in Wisconsin and in Michigan. And in Pennsylvania (the state that's most likely to decide the outcome of the election), Harris has a tiny 0.2-point edge.
Of course, it is worth stressing that the polls will not be exactly correct. In fact, they very likely will not be. Polls overestimated Democrats by more than 2 points in both 2016 and 2020, for example, and underestimated Republicans by 2 points in a handful of key Senate races in 2022. Errors that large could cause the entire Electoral College picture to flip. And in fact, the bias in polls was nearly twice as high — 4 points — in the 2020 race. Our election model thinks the expected bias in polls this year is 3.8 percentage points on average, and could be more or less, favoring either party equally. When we did the math we found that polling error can be expected to be larger than 2 points toward either candidate about 60% of the time.