CNN
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The 2024 presidential election remains the closest election of the century. In fact, it is the closest race for the White House in the last 60 years.

Polls since the September 10 debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris show that while the vice president has opened up a slight lead over her Republican rival, their race is still within the margin of error and too close to predict a winner, especially when looking at the Electoral College.

Consider the CBS News and NBC News polls released Sunday. Their polls were among Harris’ best yet, and yet she is only ahead by 4 and 5 points, respectively. The Democratic candidate’s largest leads in the CBS News/YouGov and NBC News polls in 2016 and 2020 were at least twice as large as Harris’ lead today.

To put Sunday’s new polls in better context, let’s look at all the national polls conducted since the debate. This includes the polls mentioned above, as well as surveys from ABC News/Ipsos, Fox News and The New York Times/Siena College. On average, Harris is ahead by three points, according to the latest CNN survey of pollsters.

This is consistent with what we have seen all year: Neither candidate has been able to build a lead of 5 points or more in the national polls, including during the period when President Joe Biden was the likely and then presumptive Democratic nominee.

The fact that no one has led by at least 5 points this election cycle is notable because it’s incredibly rare. Even in races that end up being very close, a candidate almost always builds a significant lead at some point. This year, most voters seem to be set.

Even Harris’ dominating debate performance against Trump only made the difference by a few percentage points, according to voters.

You would have to go back to the 1960 election to find a campaign in which the major party candidates were only five percentage points apart in the average national polls. In every presidential election year since then, there have been at least three weeks in which one candidate was ahead by five or more percentage points.

A three-point lead in the national polls is far from certain for Harris. Since 1948, the average difference between polls on the eve of the election and the result on Election Day has been three points. In some years, like 2020, the margin of error is even higher.

(This long before the election, the average difference between the polls and the final result would – unsurprisingly – be larger.)

Perhaps the more important reason why this election is so close that it is impossible to predict is that this is not a national election. Rather, it is a race for the 270 electoral votes awarded in the Electoral College.

Because of his coalition, Trump is likely to have a better position in the Electoral College than in the popular vote (ie, white voters without college degrees are overrepresented in the important swing states). According to an estimate by my old colleague Nate Silver, Harris would have to win the popular vote by more than 3 percentage points to be considered the clear favorite in the Electoral College.

She’s not here yet.

In fact, neither Harris nor Trump have a large lead when looking at the state-level data. According to CNN’s latest race ratings, Harris starts with 225 electoral votes to Trump’s 219. Seven states and the one electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District are still up for grabs.

Harris appears to be doing slightly better than Trump in three of the seven states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This northern swing rank is similar to what Biden’s campaign was aiming for in the spring.

But when I say Harris is doing “slightly better” than Trump, the emphasis is on the word lightHarris is about 2 points ahead of Trump in all polls.

We are talking about races where the margin for error is much higher and where there is no clear leader.

In two of those states, Trump is doing slightly better than Harris: Arizona and Georgia. But as with Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin for Harris, Trump is doing one or two percentage points better than Harris on average in the polls in those two states.

If the electoral votes were allocated to the candidate who has a lead of more than one percentage point in the poll at that point, Harris would get 269 and Trump 246.

Nevada and North Carolina are within a point and far too close to predict a win, as are the other five states. But for this exercise, let’s give Trump North Carolina, a state he has won twice before and where the former president is polling averages and only a few decimal places ahead of Harris. In this scenario, he would have 262 electoral votes.

What little data we have on Nebraska’s 2nd District suggests Harris has the advantage there. (The Cornhusker State is one of two states, along with Maine, that apportion a portion of their electoral votes by congressional district.) Biden would have won the current incarnation of the 2nd District.^and District by 6 points in 2020 – a much larger margin than in the seven swing states this year. Most models and betting markets have Harris ahead in this Omaha-area district.

A victory in Nebraska’s 2nd district would probably give Harris, along with Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, exactly 270 electoral votes. She’s unlikely to get through that!

However, there is a catch. At Trump’s urging, some Republicans in Nebraska want to change the method for allocating electoral votes in the state and introduce a “winner-takes-all” procedure.

No Democrat has won the presidential election in Nebraska since 1964.

If such a last-minute rule change were to occur, Trump would have 263 electoral votes to Harris’ 269, and the election would then come down to Nevada and its 6 electoral votes. The last published poll that meets CNN’s publishing standards was our own poll, conducted by SSRS last month, which showed Harris at 48% and Trump at 47%, well within the margin of error.

In other words, a Trump victory in Nevada is quite plausible and would result in a 269-269 tie.

This would move the presidential race to the U.S. House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote. Trump would likely have the advantage in this scenario, as Republicans will likely continue to have more delegations in the U.S. House of Representatives than Democrats in January.

Regardless of who wins in Nevada, we may still have to wait a while for the votes to be counted in the Silver State. And given how long that has taken in close elections in the past, we could be waiting days with the presidency hanging in the balance.

The bottom line is that this year’s presidential campaign is as exciting as it can be, and a tiny shift in one direction or the other could make all the difference.