Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are in a dead heat for the popular vote, according to a new poll.
The survey by TIPP Insights, which was rated the most accurate pollster by The Washington Post in 2020, found Trump and Harris are tied at 48 percent with just over a week to go until Election Day.
The survey was conducted online among a sample of 1,333 likely voters between October 23 and 25 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
In a post on its website, TIPP Insights suggested that momentum was now favoring Trump, the Republican nominee.
"Trump isn't expected to win the popular vote—Democrats have a built-in edge with California and New York. Texas, the largest red state, only partially offsets those," Raghavan Mayur, the director of the TIPP Insights poll, said.
"National polls reflect this imbalance, packed with blue-state voters that skew the numbers in favor of Democrats. But the popular vote is irrelevant in the Electoral College."
Mayur also noted that Trump had lost the popular vote by 4.5 points in 2020, but came within 45,000 voters in three battleground states of winning reelection.
"Some media outlets ignore this crucial fact to sell the narrative that Trump can't win. The truth? The race is still razor-close," Mayur wrote.
As in 2020, the 2024 election looks set to be decided by extremely thin margins in swing states.
In worrying signs for Harris, she is far behind where President Joe Biden was at the same stage in the polls four years ago.
The RealClearPolling average of national polls shows Trump is +0.1 ahead as of Sunday, while Biden was in front of Trump by 7.4 percentage points on October 27, 2020. Hillary Clinton, was ahead by 5.6 points on the same day eight years ago.
Meanwhile, the RealClearPolitics average of polls in the top battleground states shows Trump leading by +0.9 points as of Sunday. On the same day in 2020, Biden was ahead by +3.5 and in 2016, Clinton was +3.8 in front.
Biden won both the popular vote and Electoral College in 2020. Clinton won the popular vote, but lost in the Electoral College to Trump in 2016.
The latest TIPP Insights survey comes after other recent polls found the race between Harris and Trump has further tightened in recent weeks, with several polls finding the electorate evenly divided.
Trump's chances of victory have also jumped on betting platforms like Polymarket and Electoral College models by FiveThirtyEight and Decision Desk HQ at The Hill favor Trump.
But analysts told Newsweek earlier this week that there was not much to read into the recent buzz around Trump.
"It's best not to put too much stock in short-term fluctuations in polling or to try to attach meaning to them because they're mostly random noise," D. Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky, told Newsweek.
English (US) ·