Voters go to the polls on November 5 to choose their next president. The election was initially a rematch of 2020, but was overturned in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.
The key question now is – Will America be run by its first woman president or Will Donald Trump get a second term? Who is leading the national survey?
Harris has had a small lead over Trump in national polling averages since she entered the race in late July, and she remains ahead – as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest integer.
Harris saw a surge in her polling numbers in the early weeks of her campaign, establishing a lead of nearly four percentage points at the end of August.
The numbers were relatively stable through September, even after the only debate between the two candidates on September 10, which was attended by nearly 70 million people.
In recent days the gap between them has narrowed, as you can see in the chart of the poll tracker below, with trend lines showing averages and points showing individual poll results for each candidate.
While these national polls are a useful guide to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, they are not necessarily an accurate way to predict the outcome of the election.
That’s because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is awarded a number of votes roughly in line with the size of its population. A total of 538 electoral college votes are available, so a candidate must reach 270 to win.
There are 50 states in the US, but because most of them almost always vote for the same party, in reality there are only a handful where both candidates have a chance of winning. These are the countries where elections will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or winning States.
Who is winning in the state polls?
At the moment, polls are very tight in the 7 battleground states in this election, and none of the candidates has a decisive lead in any of them, according to polling averages.
If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, that helps underscore some differences between states – but it’s important to note that there are fewer state polls than national polls, so we have less data to go on and every poll has a margin of error which means the numbers could be higher or lower.
In Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, the lead has changed several times since early August, but Trump has a small lead at all for the time being.
In the other three states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Vancisconsin – Harris had led since early August, sometimes by two or three points, but in recent days the polls have tightened significantly and Trump now has a very small lead in Pennsylvania.
All three of those states had been Democratic strongholds before Trump turned them red on his way to winning the presidency in 2016. Biden recaptured them in 2020, and if Harris can do the same, then she will be on track to win the election.
In a sign of how the race has changed since Harris became the Democratic nominee, on the day Biden dropped out, he was behind Trump by nearly five percentage points on average in the seven battleground states.
In Pennsylvania, Biden was behind by nearly 4.5 percentage points when he left, as the chart below shows. It is a key state for both campaigns as it has the highest number of electoral votes of the seven and therefore winning makes it easier to reach the necessary 270 votes.
The figures we have used in the graph above are averages created by the poll analysis website 538 , which is part of the American news network ABC Neporbs. To create them, 538 collects data from individual surveys conducted both nationally and in battleground states by many polling companies.
As part of quality control, 538 only includes surveys from companies that meet certain criteria, such as being transparent about the number of people they surveyed, when the survey was conducted, and how the survey was conducted (phone calls, text messages, online, etc.).
