Less than a fortnight before polling day, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are locked in a nail-bitingly close US presidential election race, triggering pessimism among Democrats and confidence among Republicans – even though polls suggest both candidates have a near equal chance of entering the White House.
The Guardian’s 10-day polling tracking average shows Harris, the Democratic nominee and US vice-president, maintaining the single-point advantage over her Republican rival she had a week earlier, 47% to 46%.
Surveys for the seven battleground states are equally cliffhanging and provide little obvious clue as to who will reach the threshold of 270 electoral votes essential for victory.
According to poll averages, Harris leads by a single point in Michigan and by less than 1% in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump has a two-point lead in North Carolina and a one-point lead in Arizona.
Taken at face value, the figures are no disaster for Harris and hardly represent a triumph for Trump. If they match the outcome on 5 November, Harris will win a majority of votes in the electoral college.
But you would never know this from the jarringly different moods in the two camps.
Amid increasingly apocalyptic warnings from Harris that Trump represents fascism and dictatorship-in-waiting, her Democratic supporters have emitted an air of panic in recent days.
“A growing number of top Democrats tell us privately they feel Vice-President Kamala Harris will lose – even though polls show a coin-toss finish 11 days from now,” Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei wrote in Axios on Friday.
“Our private conversations with Democrats inside and outside her campaign reveal broad concern that little she does, says – or tries – seems to move the needle. Democrats are already starting to point fingers at who’d be more responsible for a Harris loss – President Biden for dragging his feet, or Harris herself. ‘Going down?’ a top Democratic official texted.”
The Trump campaign, meanwhile, appears “shockingly confident”, talking in “granular detail” about White House posts and policy playbooks for next year.
Buoying them is evidence that the former president’s support level appears unaffected by his ominous campaign rhetoric in which he has threatened to jail his opponents, or by what should have been damaging revelations from his former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, that he repeatedly praised Hitler when he was in the Oval Office.
Yet the conflicting moods are not justified by the numbers, some pollsters say.
While fresh polls have shown Trump closing the gap on Harris’s previous lead and even edging ahead in some cases, Harris supporters still have reasons to be reasonably cheerful.
The latest data from the polling organisation FiveThirtyEight showed that Trump’s recent surge – where his chances of winning overtook Harris’s – may have peaked. The site’s latest odds in favour of a Trump win, based on a collection of nationwide and state data, was down from 53% on 21 October to 51% against 49% for Harris by the evening of 24 October. An Economist forecast also showed a dip in Trump’s chances from a Wednesday peak of 56% to 53% the following day
CNN’s polling expert, Harry Enten, put the gap between perception and reality bluntly in a midweek segment on the network.
“Kamala Harris, based upon … polling data … has a very clear path at this particular point, just based upon [battleground] states, to 270 electoral votes,” he said. “The bottom line is, I don’t understand the Democratic panic right now, because the path is clear.”
The key to that panic may lie in the motivation factors of Harris supporters, among whom the prospect of a second Trump presidency provokes alarm.
Some 52% of Harris voters said they would be angry if Trump wins, according to data cited by Enten, while just 42% of the Republican nominee’s backers said they would feel the same way about a Harris victory.
“I think Democrats feel like there’s a lot more on the line in this election, and that’s why they’re panicking,” said Enten.
A poll conducted by Morning Consult of more than 4,500 voters from the seven swing states tended to support that conclusion.
While consistent with other surveys that the two candidates were neck-and-neck, it showed that pro-Harris voters in all states are more strongly against Trump than the former president’s supporters are against her.
In a sign that Harris’s characterisation of Trump as “unhinged and unstable” may be resonating, the poll showed that 49% of battleground state voters believed the Republican nominee to be “dangerous” – compared with 34% who said the same about her. Harris also heavily outscored Trump in categories of “too old”, “mentally fit”, “honest” and “cares about somebody like me”.
Trump, who is 78, was rated “too old” by more than half of the voters, 51%, compared with just 5% who said the same of Harris. The vice-president, who celebrated her 60th birthday this week, was elevated to the top of the Democratic ticket following concerns about the advanced age and mental acuity of Joe Biden, prompting the president to stand aside as the party’s candidate in July.
