2 weeks ago
Are the polls 'improbably tight'? Some experts think so
Robert Tait
The US presidential election campaign enters its final weekend with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in seemingly permanent deadlock and few clues as to which of them will prevail on Tuesday.
At the end of another unruly week that began with Trump’s racially charged rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden and was punctuated by celebrity endorsements, misogynistic comments and insults about “garbage” being levelled left and right, the Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker showed little change from seven days earlier, with voter loyalty to their chosen candidate appearing relatively impervious to campaign events, however seismic.
ly, Harris, the Democratic nominee, has a one-point advantage, 48% to 47%, over her Republican opponent, virtually identical to last week. Such an advantage is well with the margin of error of most polls.
The battleground states, too, remain in a dead heat. The candidates are evenly tied at 48% in Pennsylvania, often seen as the most important swing state because it has the most electoral votes (19). Harris has single-point leads in the two other blue-wall states, Michigan and Wisconsin, while Trump is marginally ahead in the Sun belt: up by 1% in North Carolina and 2% in Georgia and Arizona. In Nevada, his average advantage in the polls is less than a percentage point.
Writing on NBC’s website, Josh Clinton, a politics professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, the network’s director of elections, pondered whether the tied race reflected not the sentiments of the voters, but rather risk-averse decision-making by pollsters. Some, they suggested, may be wary of findings indicating unusually large leads for one candidate and introduce corrective weighting.
Of the last 321 polls in the battlegrounds, 124 – nearly 40% – showed margins of a single point or less, the pair wrote. Pennsylvania was the most “troubling” case, with 20 out of 59 polls showing an exact tie, while another 26 showed margins of less than 1%.
This indicated “not just an astonishingly tight race, but also an improbably tight race”, according to Clinton and Lapinski.
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Michelle Obama has taken the stage at a rally in Montgomery county in Pennsylvania.
She was preceded by musician Alicia Keys who encouraged the crowd to keep fighting for feminist causes. “This is not some dystopian Netflix show I’m talking about. this is the platform the other side is running on. They want to turn back the clock,” Keys said, hinting at the points in Project 2025.
Watch Obama live here:
Michelle Obama is campaigning again for Kamala Harris this afternoon alongside singer Alicia Keys at an event in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
I’m excited to be back out on the campaign trail for @KamalaHarris!
Today, I’ll be with @AliciaKeys in Norristown, Pennsylvania, making my closing argument about why this election is so important to the progress we seek. With only three days left, we’ve all got to organize,… pic.twitter.com/qZEoeNkuRt
Earlier today, supporters were gathered outside the local high school where Obama will appear.
The line to see Michelle Obama campaigning for VP Harris snakes around the lot and a field in Norristown, PA. Event itself is taking place in a HS gym pic.twitter.com/U6Kghr9Uah
— Sarah Ewall-Wice (@EwallWice) November 2, 2024Diana Ramirez-Simon
Trump has wrapped up his speech in Salem, Virginia, in his usual manner, reciting his Maga chants that have come to mark the ends of his rallies: “We will make America great again … we will make America strong again!”
This time, he has pointedly added a new chant before leaving the stage: “We will make America healthy again!”, perhaps in reference to recent reports that Robert F Kennedy Jr could assume some control over US health and food safety in a second Trump administration.
According to the Washington Post, Kennedy has met with Trump transition officials to help draw up an agenda for a new administration and could take a broad “health tsar” position that would not require confirmation by the Senate.
Diana Ramirez-Simon
Tim Walz has made his fifth visit to Arizona for a final campaign pitch for Kamala Harris as the US 2024 presidential race enters its final days.
Harris and Trump are locked in a fierce battle for the swing state and have made several trips to court voters. According to the website FiveThirtyEight, Trump leads Harris by 2.2 points in the state. More than 1.2 million Arizonans have already cast their ballots in this election.
Walz was in Flagstaff earlier this evening and is about to take the stage in Tucson. Watch live here:
As the candidates continue a busy day of events, Donald Trump and Tim Walz are still expected to make at least one more appearance each this evening. Trump is returning to North Carolina, where he’ll speak at a rally in Greensboro at 7.30pm ET while Walz heads to Tucson, Arizona.
RFK Jr vows to remove fluoride from public water
In a post on X, Robert F Kennedy Jr has said that he would remove fluoride from all public water if Donald Trump is elected and gives him responsibility over the nation’s health agencies.
“Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease,” Kennedy wrote.
On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water. Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease. President…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 2, 2024Although fluoride is associated with some health issues, dentists strongly recommend adding it to public water to prevent tooth decay. Fluoride is naturally occurring in drinking water at varying levels.
US district judge Edward Chen ruled on 24 September that the Environmental Protection Agency must take action regarding fluoride in drinking water, claiming his finding does not “conclude with certainty” any harmful effects but that there is evidence of the risk of cognitive decline.
The ruling stems from an August report from the Department of Health and Human Service’s Toxicology Program, which found that drinking water that contained more than twice the recommended limit of fluoride was “consistently associated” with lower IQ in children.
Despite this ruling, the American Dental Association said in a statement in September that it remains “staunchly in support” of adding fluoride to community drinking water to help prevent tooth decay.
Diana Ramirez-Simon
Speaking to the crowd in Virginia, Trump is once again fixated on his hair. “I’m having a bad hair day! I have to have a bad hair day in front of Virginia? That’s not good,” Trump said, turning around presumably to look into a monitor that shows the back of his head.
Trump’s hair – and his appearance, in general – has lately become a standard talking point during his long and rambling campaign speeches – although he insists he does not ramble but employs a style of speech he calls “the weave”.
Donald Trump has implied that elections are rigged in blue states such as California and New York, falsely claiming that election officials will be executed if they ask to see voter ID.
“If we had an honest election in California, we would win California,” he said.
Speaking at his rally in Salem, Virginia, Donald Trump has denounced a trans woman who was allowed to join Roanoke College’s women’s swim team last year. He said that seven members of the college’s swim team had joined him backstage, before welcoming the teammates to the stage.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have advocated for and pushed for this anti-woman sex-based discrimination to continue all over this country,” swimmer Lily Mullens said. “We are so lucky to have a leader like Donald Trump with common sense,” she said, thanking the ex-president for “standing with women”.
Donald Trump takes the stage at a rally in Virginia
Donald Trump has taken the stage at his second rally of the day, this time in Salem, Virginia – a state that his rival Kamala Harris is leading by a wide margin.
“We win Virginia, we win the whole thing without question,” Trump said. “It’s very possible that without winning Virginia we’re going to win the whole thing too.”
Trump was introduced by Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, who led attendees in a prayer before the ex-president began speaking.
Campaigning in Scottsdale, Arizona, JD Vance has called on voters to “make this thing too big to rig”. He focused much of his remarks on immigration, an issue that is central to many Arizona voters.
In a new video, actor Harrison Ford has endorsed Kamala Harris.
“Look, I’ve been voting for 64 years. Never wanted to talk about it very much,” Ford said, before referencing the former Trump administration officials who’ve denounced the ex-president.
“I’ve got one vote – same as anyone else – and I’m going to use it to move forward. I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris.”
WATCH >> Harrison Ford lays it out
“The truth is this, Kamala Harris will protect your right to disagree with her about policies or ideas, and then, as we have done for centuries, we’ll debate them. We’ll work on them together, and we’ll move forward.”
