These are the last crucial hours of the campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris for this American presidential election. Some of the very latest polls, to be viewed with caution, show a very slight rise for the Democratic candidate in the “swing states”.
Home straight. On the eve of the election of the 47th President of the United States, polls are struggling to decide between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in the race for the White House. According to the New York Times this Sunday, November 3, it has been decades since polls have shown such close predictions in so many states across the country.
According to most of these polls, Democrat Kamala Harris would win the “popular vote”, that is, she would obtain the greatest number of votes nationally.
However, many of these same polls give his Republican opponent the winner of the election. At issue: the functioning of the American ballot, very different from ours, which makes the outcome difficult to predict.
Kamala Harris leads nationally
According to calculations by the specialized site Fivethirtyeight, which aggregates the main polls carried out across the Atlantic, voting intentions at the national level are, this Sunday, 47.9% for Kamala Harris against 46.89% for Donald Trump. A difference of a small percentage point, which is even reduced to 0.3 for the RealClearPolling site, another poll aggregator.
According to the latest ABC News/Ipsos poll this weekend, Joe Biden's current vice-president even won 49% of the vote, compared to 46% for her Republican competitor.
Regardless, all of these predictions are close enough to leave room for suspense regarding the outcome of the vote. Indeed, these opinion surveys carried out on a national scale must be read with great caution because the American election is not decided by direct universal suffrage as in France.
Americans vote in each state to elect 538 electors, who will in turn designate the president. To win the election, a candidate must win an absolute majority of these voters, i.e. the “magic” number of 270.
L’importance des “swing states”
Still according to the aggregator Fivethirtyeight, the latest polls give, on average, 192 solid voters for Kamala Harris and 35 probable voters against respectively 122 and 95 for Donald Trump, to which it is possible to add 42 possible voters. According to these calculations, 52 of the 538 remain uncertain.
In this tight race, the two candidates cannot therefore only count on the states where the outcome is a foregone conclusion, historically won by one or the other of the main parties. They must conquer other states outside their strongholds: the “pivot states”.
This year, there are seven of these “swing states”: Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Together they represent 93 valuable electors.
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A very close race
It is in these states that the polls are particularly scrutinized. According to FiveThirtEight, the vice-president would be leading in Michigan (15 voters) and in Wisconsin (10) with a lead of 0.8 points over Donald Trump.
Nevada (6) and Pennsylvania (19) would be the scene of an extremely close duel between the candidates, with less than 0.5 points difference each time.
Finally, Donald Trump would be preferred to Kamala Harris in Arizona (11 voters), where he has a 2.6 point lead over the Democrat, in Georgia (16) with a 1.5 point lead, as well as in Carolina. from the North (16) with a small point lead.
It is therefore logically in Pennsylvania that the two candidates are throwing their last strength this Monday, at a tense and anxiety-inducing end to the campaign.
Margin of error
In detail, certain polling institutes publish different results, like the New York Times which now gives Kamala Harris a marginal lead in Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin and to a lesser extent in Georgia, while that Donald Trump is leading the race in Arizona.
In such a configuration, the Democratic candidate would obtain at least 274 electoral votes, and therefore enough to win the White House. Indeed, in the United States, the vote operates under the principle of “winner-takes-all”, that is to say that the candidate who wins the majority of votes in a given state wins all of the electors allocated to this state. The states of Nebraska and Maine are exceptions because the electors are allocated there by proportional representation.
In any case, the polls for the seven key states are within the margin of error, meaning they could swing one way or the other.
77 million voters have already voted
These small margins show, indeed, how close this presidential election is. According to Forbes, Donald Trump is leading in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, meaning he is expected to win the election.
For its part, the Washington Post wrote this Sunday that the Republican candidate is ahead of his opponent in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. According to the various polls aggregated by Fivethirtyeight, Donald Trump wins 53 times out of 100 compared to 46 for his competitor.
Even more particular, an influential poll from the local daily Des Moines Register gives Kamala Harris the winner in Iowa, a state which was nevertheless widely considered to have won the Republican cause.
While more than 77 million Americans have already voted early, out of 244 million voters, only a few tens of thousands of votes could decide the outcome of the election, hence the importance of watching these polls with great caution.
And this presidential election generates as much suspense over the result of the election as over the post-election period, Donald Trump, who never acknowledged his defeat in 2020 and whose supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, having already begun to question the integrity of voting operations.
