Nearly every major poll has the 2024 presidential race in contention with just over a week until Election Day, which looks like good news former President Donald Trump Chance to return to the White House

There are three important reasons:

• Trump wiped out Harris’ lead in the poll.
• National polls have never shown him this close ahead of Election Day.
• He votes ahead by the smallest margin in each swing state.

Of course, back-and-forth votes show that the election could still go either way. But these factors point to Trump regaining momentum as Americans vote early in record numbers, fill out mail ballots and prepare to head to the polls on Election Day.

Even in the polls where Trump is trailing Vice President Kamala HarrisThere seems to be a clear trend of Harris gaining momentum in her constituency while her numbers are declining.

Harris currently trails Trump among likely voters by a margin of 50 percent to 49 percent. In the battleground states, they are evenly split at 50% each. According to a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday.It had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

But critically, this signals a 1-point gain for Trump in battleground states from two weeks ago, or an erosion of Harris’ advantage over Trump.

Harris was ahead by as much as 4 percentage points in national polls after the candidates’ only debate on September 10.

At the beginning of October, Harris held a two-point advantage over Trump. RealClearPolitics The sum of the multi-candidate national votes. Now Trump is ahead by 0.1 percentage points – within the margin of error.

Considering that Republicans haven’t won the popular vote in two decades, Trump’s lead in even the aggregate national polls is remarkable.

At this point, Trump was trailing President Biden by 7.4 percentage points in RCP’s 2020 total and Hillary Clinton by 5.6 percentage points in 2016.

In both races, the actual results were much closer than the polls: Trump won in 2016, trailing Clinton by just 2.1% in the popular vote. He was 4.5 points behind Biden in 2020.

“Trump may finally have his great white whale,” CNN political data guru Harry Enten said in a recent broadcast. “The bottom line is there’s a very, very tight race in the plebiscite that we haven’t focused on yet.”

Polls still differ slightly. from someone ABC News/Ipsos It gave Harris a larger advantage among likely voters, 51% to 47%, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 points.

Among the most popular surveys New York Times/Siena College poll It found Trump sending Harris 47% to 46% among likely voters.

Battleground states tilt toward Trump

Of course, the popular vote won’t put Harris ahead of Trump in the Oval Office; It will be seven major battleground states that will do this.

And here too Trump has the slimmest advantage.

Currently, Trump is on the RCP’s Electoral College map; this map makes a call based on the most accurate polling in every battleground state. He is currently on track to win the Electoral College 312 to 226. For context, in 2016 he won by 304 to Clinton’s 227. Biden won 306 to Trump’s 232.

Trump is ahead — albeit narrowly in some cases — in the RCP’s polls combined in all seven battleground states. Pennsylvania leads by 0.6, Wisconsin by 0.2, Michigan by 0.2, Arizona by 1.5, Nevada by 0.7, Georgia by 2.2 and North Carolina by 0.8.

Many of these swing states have also seen key Senate races tighten in recent weeks. For example, the Cook Political Report recently broke down the Senate race, even though incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.) was long favored to win.

With battleground state numbers, it’s still anyone’s game. But Harris faces other obstacles as well.

For example, Michigan is struggling with reactions to the Israel-Hamas war. Michigan has the largest Arab-American population in the country, and Trump began exploiting that potential weakness, attacking her for campaigning with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), whom he described as a “Muslim-hating warmonger.” .”

He also needs to overcome voters who are skeptical of his backtracking on supporting a fracking ban in Pennsylvania.

Why is Trump so imposing?

Like Biden and Clinton, Harris has vastly outperformed and outspent Trump. His ground game is also believed to be much more solid than his.

Still, Trump appears to be tapping into some degree of nostalgia among voters who generally give the former presidential administration higher marks than they did then.

Considering his economic performance, 62 percent of registered voters thought the Trump years were “good,” while 32 percent described them as “bad,” according to a CBS News poll.

As for the Biden years, 32% marked them as “good,” while 61% called them “bad.”

Polls have long shown the voter dissatisfaction the country has endured in the post-pandemic years under Biden and the resulting border crisis.

Biden’s approval rate was 40.8 percent, while the disapproval rate was 56.6 percent. According to RCP.

Harris began working to send a message to voters that she would not be a carbon copy of Biden if he wins on Nov. 5, but the Trump-Vance campaign quickly responded with ads linking her to him.

Beyond critical issues like the economy, Trump has apparently succeeded in mobilizing a subset of Americans who don’t vote often. A related risk is that not enough candidates will show up on Election Day.

Harris has described herself as the “underdog” in the race, and internally her campaign sees the final stretch of the election season as critical to her chances of winning.

“My gut vote is my instinct. I let the campaign staff handle all the other stuff. “I’m responding to what I see,” Harris told reporters Sunday when asked what her internal poll numbers say about the state of the race.

No one knows for sure how Election Day will turn out. Polls are believed to have underestimated Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

But at the same time, many Democrats took solace in the belief that they were outperforming the polls in the 2022 midterm and 2023 off-year elections. There is still hope on the left that the polls may systematically underestimate Harris this time.