Election 2024 updates: With Arizona, Trump sweeps all 7 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.

One of the trends we are going to be watching after Election Day is how educational polarization might have intensified among the American electorate. The Republican Party currently holds a six-point lead over the Democratic Party in voter preference among registered voters without a college degree, while the Democrats have a 13-point advantage among those with at least a bachelor's degree, according to Pew Research. This is a marked reversal from dominant voting patterns not even 20 years ago, when Republicans were predominantly viewed as the party of the wealthy and Democrats the party of the working class.

This divide has fundamentally reshaped our politics in recent years. Think of the Republican Party's embrace of anti-expert views on topics like vaccination or climate change or the wider conflict over teaching about race and gender in schools. These culture war issues — which also stem from a growing diploma divide, where higher educational attainment is increasingly aligned with liberal political values — have changed what issues our political parties prioritize, how they operate and which voters they try to win.

Recently, the 538 Politics podcast interviewed Matt Grossman and David Hopkins, political scientists and authors of "Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics." To hear their takes on this trend, check out the podcast here.

For decades, Wisconsin was a key brick in Democrats' "blue wall": It voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election from 1992 to 2012. But in 2016, that streak snapped: Trump won Wisconsin by 0.8 percentage points, helping propel him to the presidency.

Democrats flipped Wisconsin back in 2020, but Biden won it by only 0.6 points. And polls suggest 2024 could be the third consecutive presidential election in which Wisconsin is decided by less than 1 point. According to 538's final polling average of the state, Harris leads Trump by just 1.0 points.

If you dig into the crosstabs of those polls, it looks like Wisconsin is experiencing the same demographic trends as the rest of the country: White voters are getting more Democratic, while voters of color are getting more Republican. According to an average of crosstabs of Wisconsin polls conducted Sept. 18-Oct. 18, white Wisconsinites were supporting Trump by 1 point. But according to exit polls, they supported Trump in the 2020 election by 6 points. By contrast, according to crosstabs of Black and Hispanic Wisconsinites, those two groups had shifted toward Trump by more than 20 points each!

But there are two big caveats to this. The first is that Wisconsin's nonwhite population is pretty small. The state's citizen voting-age population is 86% white, 5% Black and 4% Hispanic. This makes it the whitest of the seven main swing states — meaning that any racial voting shifts in the 2024 election will have a muted impact here.

The second caveat is that, with such small Black and Hispanic populations, it's hard for pollsters to get a big enough sample of these voters in Wisconsin. That makes their Black and Hispanic crosstabs subject to a high amount of error.

More important in Wisconsin is the education gap. About one-third of Wisconsinites over age 25 have at least a bachelor's degree, while the remaining two-thirds do not. In 2020, Trump won non-college-educated voters in Wisconsin by 6 points, but Biden won college-educated Wisconsinites by 16 points.

Mary pointed out that there are some indications that polls could be overstating Harris' weakness with Black voters due to the difficulties in getting a representative sample among those voters. I wanted to add that polling is challenging in general, and polling Black voters is especially so.

After an election, pollsters calibrate for the future based on actual election results. But individual votes are of course private, so there's no gold standard that tells us how voters from certain demographic groups — including Black Americans — voted. And when pollsters do recalibrate after an election, they are far more likely to focus on the more numerous white voters.

It's also harder to recruit representative samples of Black voters in the first place. I recently co-authored an article, "Getting the Race Wrong," discussing the online and in-person surveys we conducted here in Philadelphia during the 2023 Democratic mayoral primary. In that race, our polls mirrored the public polls, getting the levels of support for Rebecca Rhynhart (the city's controller, who had significant support from Center City’s liberal neighborhoods) and Helen Gym (an at-large city councilmember who campaigned with Bernie Sanders and drew support from Philadelphia's most progressive neighborhoods) close to right.

But like the public polls, we significantly understated the support for the eventual winner, Cherelle Parker, a former city councilmember and state House representative. A big part of the reason why is that Parker dominated in Philadelphia's majority Black neighborhoods, in a city whose Democratic electorate is majority Black. Even when we upweighted the Black respondents who participated in our survey, our polls understated her support, in part because our Black respondents were significantly more likely to have a college degree than the general population of Black voters here in Philadelphia.