With less than a month to go before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, some polls show the race is essentially neck-and-neck for both candidates. Although Vice President Kamala Harris is consistently polling ahead of former President Donald Trump in the national popular vote, those same polls show the two candidates effectively tied in the seven swing states which will decide the election in the Electoral College: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
It is at this point that public trust in polling itself begins to break down. If an observer assumes that current polling as a science is basically reliable, one can look at rigorous probabilistic forecasts at sites like Fivethirtyeight.com or The New York Times, both of which currently project Harris eking out an electoral college victory of 276 to 262. Yet in the last two presidential elections, polls have made small but crucial errors that undercut their accuracy. Given that on both occasions the errors understated Trump's support, the Republican nominee and his backers often accuse the pollsters of having a deliberate bias.
