Last minute polling seems irrelevant to the current status of the race.

I think we know at this point that polling only suggests that the race will be tight and come down to few states

For the past three-four weeks there has been a slow movement in the polling towards Trump. According to prognosticators Trump has gone from about a 44-47% projection underdog to being slightly favored more in the 51-54% range.

Meanwhile, Trump is still favored by the betting Markets by 23%, which is slightly down from the 28% he was at earlier in the week. Perhaps that is just some settling down after some overreacted, but he is still heavily favored in the betting lines and not too far off from where Biden was favored in 2020.

According to Silver, Trump has shown polling improvement nationally and in every battlegrounds state over the past month by about 1.6% on average and has improved in every state but Wisconsin (-0.2) and Michigan (-0.4) over the past week. I would argue that Wisconsin and Michigan were both skewed by the CNN/SSRS polling that came back with Harris winning by five and six points, and sans that poll, he still might have improved in every state. Yet in spite of this, these same projectionists have been moving the needle towards Harris this week (as discussed in a previous post), albeit not enough to show her ahead.

Many pollsters are done, although I would expect at least one more round from Atlas, and we may still see some final polls from NYT/Siena and Bloomberg (which will likely fire up Harris supporters). Make no mistake, these last minute polls will likely look much like their previous polls, but the last minute nature is why some will overreact and demand that the race might be shifting.

But at the end of the day, I think we have enough polling and no reason to believe that there was any sort of October surprise that actually changed anything or created any sort of big momentum heading into the election. There is nothing polling wise between now and Tuesday that would convince me otherwise. If this is a vibe election as argued by Harris herself, that vibe has changes over the past few weeks.

If you look at the two candidates, Trump seems relaxed and confident, while there appears to be more urgency and nervousness surrounding the Harris campaign. Trump appears to be staying on message and thinking on his feet (eg: garbage truck), whereas Harris keeps upping the rhetoric without changing the message as if turning it up to 11 might change momentum. Biden demanding that Trump supporters were "garbage" in a manner to react to a comedian telling a joke might be the best example of turning the rhetoric up to 11. Of course these are not just my observations, but the observations of many pundits on both sides of the aisle. Meanwhile, the leaks we have gotten from the Trump camp suggest that Trump and his team are not just confident, but possibly "overconfident". Leaks from the other side are suggesting that the Harris team and Democratic insiders are already starting to point fingers in anticipation that she might lose. There has been plenty of buzz that the Harris team believes she might be down in many of the battlegrounds states even from their own internal polling.

Moreover, the registration, party affiliation, and early voting numbers from the GOP trump anything that a poll might suggest about enthusiasm. It's clear that the GOP is fired up and that Democrats seem to be lagging behind where they were in 2020 in the tangible acts that come from having enthusiasm.

So will this be a close election as the polls describe or is there reason for Trump and the GOP to be fired up, and reason for Harris and the Democrats to be nervous and pointing figures? We will know in just a few days.