Swing state map: Polls move in Trump’s direction, but the race remains tight

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Former President Donald Trump once again appears to be in the driver’s seat in this presidential election.

When looking strictly at the polls, Trump now has the edge in two states and the other five most closely watched states are toss-ups. At the end of August, Vice President Harris had leads large enough in three of the seven states for them to lean in her direction, according to an NPR analysis of polling averages at the time.

Now, Trump has taken over the lead in an average of the polls in the seven swing states for the first time since Harris got in the race.

Surveys in the past couple of weeks have moved in Trump’s direction, and the leads Harris had in the most competitive and critical states have mostly evaporated. Everything is still within the margin of error and incredibly close — just 0.34 percentage points separate Trump and Harris. But the consistency of the change — and the fact that it’s all in Trump’s direction — has Democrats concerned.

When President Biden dropped out of the race and Harris stepped in, Democratic enthusiasm went up, and the trajectory of the race moved in her direction. But since then, Trump’s team has gone intensely negative, looking to drag Harris’ numbers down.

The Harris campaign maintains that the race has been close all along, that they always expected a close race, and there hasn’t been much movement, with the exception of Harris’ entry.

In 2016 and 2020, surveys in the presidential election overstated Democrats’ standing. Even though Biden won in 2020, he had been leading by more in many swing state polls than what the final result showed. Does that mean Trump will win this election? Maybe. Or have the pollsters corrected errors, making this more of a true coin-flip race? That’s possible, too.

Polls also understated Democrats’ support in the 2022 midterms. Of course, Trump wasn’t on the ballot then.

Given that these contests are all well within the margins of error, mobilization of key voting groups is the most important thing at this point for both sides, as early voting has kicked off in some places with many more states joining them in the coming days.

Because all of the seven swing states are within the margin of error, they remain a toss-up in NPR’s “analysis” map (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada). That’s not based strictly on polling, but historical trends and conversations with campaigns and party strategists.

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The “polling map” is based on the average of two polling aggregators — FiveThirtyEight and DDHQ/The Hill. If a candidate has a lead of 1 point or more in each of them, then a state is moved to Lean D or R. If not, they are Toss-ups.

Neither candidate is yet favored to win in enough states to put them at or over the 270 electoral votes needed to win, with three weeks to go until voting ends.