Election 2024: Where the Election Stands One Month Before Election Day

Election Day is just over a month away. After two national party conventions, two presidential assassination attempts, a presumptive nominee dropping out of the race for the first time in U.S. history, two presidential debates with different participants, and a vice-presidential debate, the presidential race remains where it started—neck and neck.

Just how close is the race? As of today, the 538 average of national polls has Kamala Harris up by 2.6 points over Donald Trump. The Real Clear Politics average of national polls has her up by 2.2 points. That might sound like a notable lead. But if 2020 is any guide, a two to three point lead in national polls gives a Democratic candidate only a 46 percent chance of winning. A look at the polls of battleground states shows why: Those poll results are closer than the national margin and within their own margins of error.

With the race going down to the wire, five questions stand out:

1. How accurate are the polls? Trump overperformed compared to the polls in both 2016 and 2020 as pollsters had difficulty in both reaching his supporters and determining whether they would vote. However, he underperformed his polling numbers in many primary races earlier this year. That underperformance may reflect the challenges of polling in low turnout primary races, or it may reflect shifting sentiments among Republican voters. We won’t find out which is the correct explanation until Election Day.

2. How good is each campaign’s “ground game”? When swing voters look to be in short supply, as looks to be the case today, the focus shifts to turning out one’s own voters. Democrats have invested heavily in their ground game, fueled by an influx of campaign contributions after Joe Biden gave way to Harris as the nominee. Meanwhile, there has been grumbling in Republican circles that the Trump campaign is relying too much on outside groups to turn out the vote. The Trump campaign, however, insists that its nontraditional approach is working.

3. Will third-party candidates swing the outcome of the election? No third-party candidate caught on with the voters in the 2024 election cycle. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came closest, but he left the race in August. While candidates like Chase Oliver of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party are barely registering in national polls, they—along with Kennedy in some cases—are on the ballot in critical battleground states. The votes they win could draw votes away from Harris or Trump, possibly changing the results in a battleground state, and if things are close enough, nationally as well.

4. Will America’s election infrastructure hold up under the stress of a close election? As I wrote last week, Election 2024 will test America’s election infrastructure. The director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said on Wednesday that the country’s voting systems are so secure that “malicious actors, even if they tried, could not have an impact at scale such that there would be a material effect on the outcome of the election.” (Fingers crossed that statement doesn’t make the list of terrible predictions.) However, the Department of Homeland Security worries about the security of election workers and officials. It warned this week that domestic violent extremists “will pose the most significant physical threat to government officials, voters, and elections-related personnel and infrastructure.” Efforts to disrupt voting and the vote count may not come just from people outside the process. One Christian nationalist group has been encouraging its followers to take positions as election workers as part of what the group’s founder calls “our Trojan horse” effort. It’s not an unthinkable threat. Just this week, an election-denying county clerk in Colorado was sentenced to nine years in prison for giving someone unauthorized access to the county’s election system.

5. Will Americans believe the results when they come in? Elections depend on trust. If voters don’t believe that votes have been counted fairly and accurately, a democracy breaks down. But just two out of three Americans are confident that the votes be counted accurately in November. The partisan split on that question is large: 90 percent of Democrats think the vote count will be accurate, while just 46 percent of Republicans do. Trump’s insistence that he won in 2020 and his refusal to say unequivocally that he will accept the results of the 2024 election explains that gap. A Trump loss next month could fuel another “stop the steal” movement. But if Trump wins in a close and contested fashion, it could be Democrats complaining about a stolen election. Neither outcome would be good for the health of American democracy.

I began this series of posts by predicting that Election 2024 could produce considerable turbulence. Eleven months later, that remains the case. So stay buckled up.

Campaign Update

The judge in the federal case against Trump for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election unsealed a 165-page brief submitted by special counsel Jack Smith. Smith’s brief was necessitated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in July that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for acts conducted as part of their official duties. Smith sought to show that much of the original indictment against Trump could survive the Supreme Court’s ruling because he was acting in his personal capacity and, as a result, his “scheme” to remain in office qualified as “a private criminal effort.” Trump blasted the decision to unseal the government’s brief:

The former president’s strategy of seeking to delay, if not prevent, the trial’s start is part of the reason that a detailed outline of the government’s case against him was released just a month before Election Day.

An estimated 43 million people watched JD Vance and Tim Walz square off on Tuesday night in the first, and likely only, vice presidential debate. That’s about a third fewer people than watched the Harris-Trump debate last month and about quarter less than the audience that watched Harris debate Mike Pence four years ago. Early polls suggested that the debate was a wash. Forty-eight percent of those who watched it deemed Vance the winner, while 46 percent gave the nod to Walz. Even if these numbers are off, the debate isn’t likely to change the course of the election. Vice-presidential debates seldom do.

Harris had a good week on the endorsement front. Most important—at least if you are old enough to remember receiving the October 27, 1975, issue of Time magazine in your mailbox or know immediately what song hails the “swamps of Jersey”—she got the endorsement of the one and only Bruce Springsteen. The Boss called Trump the most “dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime.”

The New York Times and the New Yorker also endorsed Harris. The Times called her the “only patriotic choice for president,” while the New Yorker said she “has displayed the basic values and political skills that would enable her to build on the successes of the Biden Administration and to help end, once and for all, a poisonous era defined by Trump.” Meanwhile, two dozen Wisconsin Republicans, including a sitting Republican district attorney, released an open letter declaring their support for Harris.

Harris, however, did not pick up a hoped for endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters. The union, which represents more than 300,000 fire fighters and emergency responders and which was the first union to endorse Biden in 2020, said that its leaders decided “by a margin of 1.2%” against picking a candidate. The union’s decision to sit on the sideline was a surprise given that its members booed JD Vance when he spoke at its annual conference this summer.

Trump did not go empty-handed on the endorsement front this week. More than three hundred Republican luminaries, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, former Attorney General William Barr, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, endorsed Trump. Their joint letter called Trump a “peacemaker” and argued that the Biden administration had “imperiled our national security.” Barr had previously warned of “chaos” if Trump returned to the White House, while Haley has called Trump “unhinged,” “diminished,” and “not qualified to be the president of the United States.”

Republican Party efforts to encourage Republican voters to vote by mail may not be working, at least in Pennsylvania. Trump blamed his 2020 election loss on mail-in ballots, and earlier this year he told a rally in Michigan that "mail-in voting is totally corrupt.” Trump has since tempered his complaints, going so far as to urge his supporters to take advantage of it. The Republican Party has prioritized mail-in voting in Pennsylvania. However, despite spending millions on the effort, Republican voters don’t appear to be answering the call. Data from the Pennsylvania secretary of state’s office shows that 881,000 registered Democrats have requested mail-in ballots, while just 373,000 registered Republicans have done likewise.

What the Candidates Are Saying

Harris on Tuesday denounced Iran as a “dangerous and destabilizing” force in the Middle East after its ballistic missile attack on Israel. She added that “I fully support President Biden's order for the U.S. military to shoot down Iranian missiles targeting Israel."

An escalation of fighting in the Middle East likely would complicate Harris’s presidential run. She could expect to hear complaints that she should be back in Washington rather than campaigning. Perhaps more important, an expanded conflict would help make Trump’s case that global disorder has grown on Biden’s watch.

Speaking of growing global disorder, Trump said that Iran’s missile attack on Israel was evidence that “the world right now is spiraling out of control” and that we “are very close to global catastrophe” because “we have a non-existent president and a non-existent vice president.”

Trump raised the topic of global disorder at a subsequent press conference. He said that “there’s a big chance of a world war. We have two hotspots, and we’ll have probably have a third.” Ukraine, the Middle East, and Taiwan were the hotspots Trump had in mind.

Trump went on to add that if he had continued in office as president that “everyone including Iran would have been in the Abraham Accords” and that the fundamental cause of conflict in the Middle East was “a lack of respect for the United States.” The former seems highly unlikely. The latter exaggerates the sway that the United States has, and has had, in the Middle East.

What the Pundits Are Saying

Michael B.G. Froman, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued in Foreign Affairs that the next president needs to think long and hard about whether and how to continue the current trend toward valuing resilience, diversification, and national security over competitiveness, efficiency, and growth in U.S. trade policy. Thinking systematically about policies such as export controls, investment restrictions, and tariffs “means understanding their limitations, developing principles to guide their use, and grappling fully with the tradeoffs they involve. Otherwise, these tools of economic statecraft are likely to be applied on an ad hoc basis and in response to special pleading. That, in turn, would run the risk of endless expansion with limited effectiveness—and too little consideration of their costs.”

The New York Times explored the heavy investment that the Trump campaign and related groups are making in challenging voting laws around the country. So far, roughly three times as many lawsuits have been filed as at this time four years ago. “The volume and last minute timing of the cases,” write the Times, “along with statements from party officials and Trump allies, suggest a broader aim behind the effort: Laying the groundwork to challenge results after the vote. The claims in the lawsuits may well be revived—either in court or in the media—if Mr. Trump contests the outcome.” Democrats, meanwhile, aren’t sitting idly by. They are contesting the Republican lawsuits and filing some of their own.

What the Polls Show

The Institute for Global Affairs released a detailed report on how Harris and Trump voters see the world. The report’s topline finding is that “nationally, Kamala Harris is seen as the candidate more likely to pursue a foreign policy which ‘benefits people like you,’ improve America’s international reputation, be a strong leader who advances America’s interests internationally, and less likely to send US troops to an unnecessary war. In swing states, however, Donald Trump has the edge on each of these.”

The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which are both located at the University of Chicago, released a poll this week on how the U.S. public view the Israel-Hamas conflict a year after the October 7 attack. The overall finding was that “many public attitudes toward the conflict have remained relatively stable.” Support for a two-state did rise slightly, from 22 percent to 29 percent. However, 49 percent of respondents said they neither favored nor opposed the idea.

The Campaign Schedule

Election Day is thirty-two days away (November 5, 2024).

Electors will meet in each state and the District of Columbia to cast their votes for president and vice president in seventy-four days (December 17, 2024).

The 119^th U.S. Congress will be sworn into office in ninety-one days (January 3, 2025).

The U.S. Congress will certify the results of the 2024 presidential election in ninety-four (January 6, 2025).

Inauguration Day is 108 days away (January 20, 2025).

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this post.