On November 5, Americans who have not voted by mail or in advance will go to their polling station to elect their president. And if we trust the polls, the game is very far from being over.
One month to the day before the American presidential election, voting intentions in favor of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump seem to no longer be experiencing any notable change. After the one and only debate between the two candidates’ running mates at the start of the week, and while no additional televised contest is planned between the Democratic vice-president and the former Republican president, Kamala Harris continues to be credited with a slight lead in opinion surveys carried out nationally.
According to the most recent poll carried out by the YouGov institute for The Economist between September 29 and October 1, that is to say before the debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, the party’s candidate for donkey is ahead of Donald Trump with 48% of voting intentions against 45%. A gap of three points which also corresponds to the margin of error for this survey.
These figures are in line with those published by other institutes in recent days. According to the site Fivethirtyeight which aggregates the various polls carried out in the country, Kamala Harris was on average in the lead with 48.4% of voting intentions against 45.8% in favor of Donald Trump, a difference of 2, 6 points between the two aspiring presidents. Just ten days ago, the difference observed was the same, within a tenth of a point.
Given these figures, it would be logical to present Kamala Harris as the favorite, but the voting method for the American presidential election invites us to put into perspective the extent of the lead enjoyed by the Democrat in these opinion polls.
No gap widened in key states
As the presidential vote takes the form of indirect universal suffrage, the result of this election does not depend on the total number of Americans voting for one or the other candidate but on the number of electors collected according to the “winner-takes” rule. -all” (“winner takes all”) in force in the overwhelming majority of states. The winner will therefore be the one who manages to reach the bar of 270 electors out of the 538 at stake.
With the outcome of the vote being almost beyond doubt in most states, whether they are Republican red or Democratic blue, everything will depend on a few “swing states”, those territories where the result remains uncertain.
And in the seven key states in question, neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris appears to have a clear lead. If we are to believe RealClearPolitics, another opinion poll aggregator, Arizona and Georgia are the only states where the Republican is at least one point behind Kamala Harris. The Democrat has a lead of this order in Nevada.
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In the four other key states (Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania), less than a point separates the two candidates. In Pennsylvania, it’s even a perfect draw in the polls: Kamala Harris, like Donald Trump, is credited with an average of 48.2% of voting intentions.
