On November 5, voters in the United States will go to the polls to elect their next president.

The election was initially a rematch of the 2020 election, but everything was turned upside down in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.

The big question now is: Does the result mean a second term for Donald Trump or America’s first female president?

As Election Day approaches, we’re monitoring the polls and watching to see how major events like Tuesday’s presidential debate will impact the race for the White House.

In the televised debate on Tuesday evening in Pennsylvania, Trump and Harris met for the first time as candidates. Anthony Zurcher of the BBC said the Democrat emerged victorious from the heated debate.

But what do the polls tell us? We’ll have to wait a few more days for the larger national and state polls to reflect any changes, but we did get a limited snap poll immediately after the debate.

In a CNN/SSRS poll Of the 600 registered voters who watched the debate, 63% said Harris was the better candidate, while 37% supported Trump. Before the debate, those same voters were evenly split in their opinion of who would do best.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the vote will increase, however – only 4% said the debate changed their mind about who they would vote for – so we will have to wait and see how big an impact this will have on the polls in the coming days.

In the months leading up to Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, polls consistently showed him trailing former President Trump. Although it was only hypothetical at the time, several surveys suggested Harris would not do much better.

But once she entered the campaign, the race tightened and she opened up a small lead over her rival in national poll averages that she has maintained ever since. The most recent national poll averages for the two candidates are shown below, rounded to the nearest whole number.

In the poll tracker chart below, the trend lines show how these averages have changed since Harris entered the race, and the dots show the spread of individual poll results.

Harris received 47 percent of the vote during the four-day convention in Chicago. She ended the convention on August 22 with a speech in which she promised a “new way forward” for all Americans. Since then, her numbers have barely changed.

Trump’s average approval rating also remained relatively stable, hovering around 44 percent. Even support for Robert F. Kennedy, who ended his independent candidacy on August 23, did not bring any significant boost.

While these national polls provide a good indication of how popular a candidate is across the country, they are not necessarily a reliable way to predict the election outcome.

The reason for this is that the United States uses an Electoral College to elect the president, so winning the most votes may be less important than where those votes are won.

There are 50 states in the US, but since most of them almost always vote for the same party, there are actually only a handful where both candidates have a chance of winning. These are the places where the election is won or lost, and they are called “swing states.”

Right now, polls are very close in the seven swing states, making it difficult to know who is truly leading the race. There are fewer state-level polls than national ones, so we have less data to work with. Plus, every poll has a margin of error, meaning the numbers could be higher or lower.

Recent polls suggest that there are several states where the two candidates are separated by less than one percentage point, including Pennsylvania, which is a key state because it has the most electoral votes and therefore makes it easier for the winner to reach the 270 votes needed.

Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were all Democratic strongholds before Trump flipped them red on his way to the presidency in 2016. Biden took them back in 2020, and if Harris can do the same this year, she’s well on her way to winning the election.

A sign of how the race has changed since Harris became the Democratic candidate: On the day he dropped out of the race, Joe Biden was on average almost five percentage points behind Trump in these seven swing states.

The numbers we used in the graphs above are averages taken from Survey Analysis Website 538which is part of the American news channel ABC News. To create it, 538 collects data from individual surveys conducted by numerous polling institutes both nationally and in the swing states.

As part of their quality control, 538 only includes surveys from companies that meet certain criteria, such as transparency about how many people they surveyed, when the survey was conducted, and how the survey was conducted (phone calls, SMS, online, etc.).

You can find out more about the 538 methodology here Here.

Currently, polls suggest that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are only a few percentage points apart both nationally and in swing states. However, with a race this close, it is very difficult to predict the winner.

In both 2016 and 2020, polls underestimated support for Trump. Pollsters will try to solve this problem in a variety of ways, including by shaping their results to reflect the composition of the voting population.

It’s difficult to make such adjustments properly, and pollsters still need to make educated guesses about other factors, such as who will actually show up to vote on November 5.

Written and produced by Mike Hills and Libby Rogers. Design by Joy Roxas.