Harris currently has some tangible momentum in the race. Polls have swung her way the last several days. I would rate her as a slight favorite as of today.
Me too.
Not sure how accurate the polls are this year. They undervalued Trump in key swing states 2016 and 2020, but I they are all working on correcting those errors. There are three distinct possibilities, all with an equal chance in my mind:
1) They are still undervaluing his support and he wins without much drama.
2) They are much more accurate this year and the race is a coin flip, but I'd give the slight edge to Harris.
3) They've overcorrected to try and capture Trump support that isn't really there this year and Harris wins without much of the expected drama.
I know number 3 might be the most controversial, but here's my reasoning:
Many pollsters have started doing a weighting on their sample to previous known election results. That is, in order to capture the "shy" Trump voters they keep missing, they overweight the responses of people who say they previously voted for Trump in proportion to his actual vote share from 2020. That way they can account for the missing Trump voters in years past.
But doing that effectively ensures that your poll results for 2024 look an awful lot like final election results from 2020, and makes it harder to pick up on any real shifts in the electorate. Lo and behold, polls are basically predicting 2020 results within the margin of error.
It's actually generally considered a poor practice to weight with previous results, but they are bound and determined to not whiff on him again. If Trump supporters turn out in similar numbers and proportions to 2020, they'll look like geniuses. If his support has actually waned, they could miss badly in the opposite direction as 2016/2020. It's also possible his efforts to gain new voters from groups that don't traditionally show up at the polls are working and they whiff yet again on him and he outperforms.
But yeah, I dunno. If you take them at face value, then I think Harris has a slight edge, but I wouldn't bet money on it either way.
