AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL – Two months before the American presidential election, the suspense remains total. After Joe Biden’s withdrawal in mid-summer, the current Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and the Republican Donald Trump are now neck and neck, according to polls published this Sunday, September 8.
The debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump also involves a war of microphones
While Joe Biden, 81, has been going downhill since his completely failed debate at the end of June, Kamala Harris has managed to remobilize her party and give new hope to voters who already saw the billionaire surrounded by legal cases returning to the White House.
But the latest poll of the New York Times with Siena College has dealt a bit of a blow to Democrats’ hopes. Conducted between September 3 and 6, it reveals that nationally, Donald Trump now leads the former California attorney general by one percentage point (48 to 47 percent of the vote).
Too few surveys to draw conclusions
An Ipsos/Reuters poll at the end of August gave her 45% of the vote, compared to 41% for Donald Trump. The poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, for its part, still placed Kamala Harris in the lead in the polls, with 47.1% of the vote compared to 44.3% for the Republican. But has the soufflé already died down?
The journalist of the New York Times Nate Cohn tries to explain why the momentum seems to be back in Donald Trump’s favor in the Siena College survey. First, he says, is that the vice president got an extraordinary boost when Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the race. Harris’ honeymoon with the American people continued through the Democratic convention from August 19 to 22, when she was voted in by her party, boosting the numbers.
Since mid-August, Nate Cohn points out, the number of polls has dried up, in particular because of Labor Day on September 2, masking the beginning of Trump’s comeback. The latest explanation, according to him, is that pollsters are waiting for the September 10 debate between the two candidates to question voters. Which has led to the lack of data.
Will this long-awaited debate be able to drastically change the situation? This will be the first confrontation between Harris and Trump. The former has not appeared on a television set to debate since the 2020 presidential election, when she faced Mike Pence, then the Republican’s vice president. The latter did not come out weakened from the debate against Biden because of the president’s poor performance, despite his usual ineptitudes. So anything is possible during this meeting where the attitudes of the two candidates will be judged more than their answers on the substance.
Key states more scrutinized than ever
That said, it is better not to dwell too long on the national figures and to focus on the handful of swing states that will decide the election. However, here too, the suspense is total according to Siena College: Kamala Harris slightly beats Donald Trump in Wisconsin (50 to 47%), Michigan (49 to 47) and Pennsylvania (49 to 48). The candidates are tied (48) in Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona.
Another CBS News/YouGov study reveals that the election is being decided by a hair in Michigan (50 to 49 for Harris), Wisconsin (51 to 49) and Pennsylvania (50 to 50). Although the vice presidential candidate seems to maintain a slight advantage, these results are so close and included in the margin of error that it is impossible to draw conclusions at this stage.
For his part, analyst Nate Silver warns on his site about Kamala Harris’s loss of momentum in the swing states: between August 19 (in the middle of the Democratic convention) and September 6, the Democrats certainly remained in the lead but the Republicans gained ground, according to his data. Another lesson from Nate Cohn that risks giving the donkey’s party cold sweats: if the gap in votes between Harris and Trump at the state level is small but in favor of the Republicans, the vice president could win the popular vote but not the electoral college.
The trap of the popular vote and the electoral college
To understand this incongruity, a detour through the Constitution is necessary. Indeed, the American presidential election is not held by direct suffrage but by indirect suffrage. Americans vote for electors who will then designate the winner of the election. Subtlety: the presidential candidate who obtains the most votes at the level of a State wins all the electors of this State.
A concrete example for clarity. Texas has 40 electors. If 49% of the population votes Democrat and 51% votes Republican, the 40 electors in Texas will designate Trump as the winner and all the ballots that chose Harris will no longer have a say.
This is how it is possible, as in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, for a candidate to win more popular votes but fewer electors, and to lose the election. To see things clearly, Nate Silver warns that in 2024, Kamala Harris will have to win the popular vote by 4 points to be sure of beating her rival. It is (very) far from being won.
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