In a bitter and hostile US presidential contest even the pollsters are struggling to predict the outcome. Foreign Editor David Pratt examines just how close it really is

If former Tory politician Rory Stewart’s take is anything to go by, then the outcome of the US presidential election is in little doubt.

“If I had to bet, I think Kamala Harris will win comfortably,” Stewart, now turned broadcaster, recently opined on social media and in a radio interview.

While admitting that making predictions a few weeks out “is a real way to humiliate myself,” Stewart’s assessment is based on what he believes to be flawed polling data and a broken business model for polling companies.

This and the fact that pollsters failed to predict the result in 2016, means they have added a percentage to Trump’s vote to try and reinforce themselves and are now “sticking together as a herd,” Stewart went on to explain.

“None of them wants to be probably what I’ll be in a few weeks times, someone who predicted a Kamala Harris victory and got it wrong,” he observed wryly.

Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump departs after speaking at a Turning Point Action campaign rally at the Thomas & Mack Center on October 24, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada (Image: Getty Images) While there are others who undoubtedly share the former diplomat’s view that Harris will win fairly easily, such people tend to be thin on the ground right now. For with barely ten days to the vote, most of the signs currently point to a presidential contest that’s set to go down to the wire.

In fact, ever since the advent of modern polling in the mid-20th century, the presidential polls have nearly always projected a winner by this point in the campaign cycle.

The one important exception was the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore and few of us who were around at that time will forget the Florida recount that was ultimately ended by a controversial Supreme Court ruling.

Those though were more politically tranquil days compared to the supercharged and polarised political climate of America today, where if such dubiety over results were to occur now, then it would come as no surprise to see armed militias mustering in disputed neighbourhoods.

But if most observers are of the view that the November 5 ballot is going to be close, just how close is close, and what then can we take from the latest polls?

Well, if we begin with the US national picture, then according to the final national poll by The New York Times and Siena College, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are locked in a dead heat for the popular vote 48 percent to 48 percent.

This stability of the current race is in itself remarkable say analysts. To take historical comparisons for example, the polls moved over 30 points in the 1976 election between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford; in August 1988, Michael Dukakis led the election by 17 points before losing the presidency to George H.W. Bush.

Today’s contest could not be more different, says Jeremy Shapiro, Research Director of the US Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

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