On November 5th, Americans will go to the polls to choose the next president.
In July, President Joe Biden backed Vice President Kamala Harris, ending his candidacy and throwing the election into disarray. Originally, the race was supposed to be a rerun of 2020.
Now everyone is wondering whether Donald Trump will earn a second term or if America will have its first female president.
The impact of the campaign on the presidential contest will be monitored by keeping an eye on the polls as election day draws near.
In nationwide surveys, who is now at the top?
The chart below shows that ever since Harris joined the race at the end of July, with the most recent statistics rounded to the closest whole number, she has been leading Trump in the national polling averages.
Just over 67 million people watched the televised debate in Pennsylvania on September 10th, when the two contenders faced off.
With her advantage growing from 2.5 percentage points on the day of the debate to 3.3 points little over a week later, most national surveys in the following week indicated that Harris's performance had helped her make some modest gains.
However, Trump's statistics were mostly responsible for that little rise. He had been seeing an increase in his average leading up to the debate, but it dropped by half a percentage point in the week after.
Below is a poll tracker graphic that displays these subtle shifts; the trend lines depict the evolution of the averages, while the dots display the specific polling results for each contender.
These nationwide polls may give you a good idea of how well-liked a candidate is in the nation overall, but they won't tell you who will win the election.
This is due to the fact that the United States relies on an electoral college system, whereby the number of votes allocated to each state is proportional to its population. A contender requires 270 electoral college votes to win, out of a total of 538.
There are 50 states in the US, but only a few of them really have a chance for both candidates to win since most of them vote for the same party. Battleground states, often called swing states, are where the outcome of the election will be decided.
At this point in time, there is a margin of just one or two percentage points between the contenders in the seven states that are seen as potential battlegrounds in this election.
There are seven states that count toward the electoral college, the most important of which is Pennsylvania since a victory there would increase the likelihood of receiving the 270 votes required to secure the presidency.
Biden was, on average, five percentage points behind Trump in these seven states when he dropped out of the race, a reflection of how the campaign has evolved since Harris became the Democratic candidate.
Keep in mind that each poll has a margin of error, so the results can be higher or lower than what we see below; also, there are currently fewer state polls than national ones, so our data is limited.
However, the states where Harris seems to have a greater lead, according to polling averages, may be better understood by examining developments since she entered the race.
You can see that Harris has maintained a lead in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan since the beginning of August in the graphic below.
Before Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, all three of these states were solidly Democratic. However, he turned them red. If Harris can repeat Biden's 2020 performance, she will have a good chance of winning the election.
