It is generally believed that Americans only start to care about presidential elections one month before election day. Hence, it is only in the last month that polls become meaningful. If that is true, the polls don’t tell us too much yet.

Despite the fact that Donald Trump has become openly authoritarian and racist – promising to jail his “enemies” and referring to immigrants as “cannibals” – the race is still too close to call. Almost all national polls have Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in the popular vote, but the difference is mostly within the so-called “margin of error” – meaning, in essence, that the difference is too small to be certain. So what should we look out for in the coming weeks?

First of all, it is important to note that the US president is not directly elected. There is little doubt that Harris will win the popular vote – Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one of the presidential elections this century. But to become president, a candidate does not need to win the popular vote but the electoral college – ironically, given that the electoral college handed Trump the victory in 2016 and could do so again next month, the institution was introduced by the founders to protect the country from electing a “populist” president.

So, rather than focusing on the national vote, we should focus on polls in so-called “swing states”. For the 2024 elections, these are expected........

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