With less than two weeks until the presidential election, most polls show a practically bound the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

At the same time, it’s clear that there has been a slight but not insignificant move toward Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, and a closer look at the numbers indicates that the former president is better positioned now than at any other time in at Harris. entered the race.

Several new national surveys — by Wall Street Journal, CNBC and Forbes/HarrisX — each finds Trump with a 2-3 point lead over Harris and the New York Times-Siena final study shows a dead heat at 48 percent. While these ranges are technically within the poll’s margin of error, the trend toward Trump since early September – of 4 points in Wall Street Journal survey – no. Rather, it suggests real movement towards him in the last few weeks.

On the surface, the survey in the all-important swing states is a mixed bag. The New York Times polling average has Harris in the lead Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsinwhile RealClearPoliticstotal has Trump ahead on all seven battlegrounds.

That being said, it is quite telling how the race has changed.

In the most important state, Pennsylvania, Trump took the lead FiveThirtyEightlast week’s poll total, which had Harris out just a few weeks ago. This aligns with the general shift in Trump’s direction in several swing states outlined in Nate Silver. Silver Bulletin averagewhich finds polls ticking in his direction in Michigan and Wisconsin as early as last month.

In particular, early voting statistics show that Republicans have narrowed the Democratic lead since 2020 as well. While early voting numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, they suggest high GOP voter enthusiasm and mark a clear reversal from four years ago, when Republicans avoided early voting.

In the 25 states that release party registration data, 41 percent of early votes were cast by registered Democrats and 36 percent by registered Republicans, according to University of Florida Election Lab. This 5-point advantage in early voting for Democrats is significantly smaller than their 14-point advantage just four years ago.

Beneath those surface-level polling and early voting numbers, demographic shifts in the polls — particularly by gender and ethnicity — point to additional problems for the Harris campaign.

Undoubtedly, the emerging story of this election is the gender gap, as men break decisively for Trump and women for Harris — and notably, Harris’ 12-point lead among women is smaller than Trump’s 14-point lead with men, according to the data. the mentioned New York Times-Siena POLL.

That said, it’s worth noting that women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election. since 1980which suggests that this split does not necessarily put Harris at a disadvantage.

One area where Harris is clearly down is among non-white voters. The most recent CNBC poll shows that while Harris has a 27-point lead with this group, her lead has dropped by 10 points since August. In swing states with large populations of non-white voters, this could prove decisive.

Of course, Harris’ deficits with this group are much more pronounced among men—indeed, while she leads Trump 56% to 37% among all Hispanic voters nationally, that lead shrinks to 3 points (48 % to 45%) among Hispanic men, according to the same New York Times-Siena POLL.

In Arizona and Nevada, two swing states with large populations of Hispanic voters, David Paleologos, director of Suffolk University’s Center for Policy Research noted that “Harris doesn’t touch the 24-26 point lead Joe Biden had with Hispanic voters”.

In 2020, Biden won both swing states by narrow margins, taking Nevada with 2 points and Arizona by less than half a percentage point. This was possible due to his large margins within this critical voting bloc. If Harris underperforms to the extent the poll suggests, Trump could win both battleground states, complicating his electoral map.

In the same vein, Harris’s numbers among black voters became less favorable. Same New York Times-Siena POLL shows that 81% of black voters and 70% of black men support her, meaning she is underperforming Biden’s margins in 2020 by 11 points and 17 points, respectively.

Given the battleground states, it is critical to note that Harris is not touching Biden’s margins among black voters by 13 points in Georgia and 15 points in Michigan.

Additionally, on voters’ top issues, which polls consistently rank as the economy and immigration, Trump maintains an edge over Harris. Harris certainly cut his deficit on the economy in half in recent months, but it remains deeply underwater especially on the southern border issue.

Conformable same CNBC pollTrump leads Harris by 2 points overall, yet he leads by 35 points among those most concerned about immigration and by 13 points among voters who prioritize inflation.

Harris’s struggle on this issue was reinforced by her performance in the CNN town hall Wednesday night, when she declined to say whether the Biden administration should have acted sooner to stop illegal immigration. Her answer was, as Democratic strategist David Axelrod Put La “word salad”.

That said, this presidential race is perhaps one of the closest we’ll see in modern history, and it could go either way. However, with just days to go, it’s clear that Trump is in a much stronger position than he was a few weeks ago.

Douglas E. Schoen and Carly Cooperman are pollsters and partners with the public opinion firm Schoen Cooperman Research based in New York. They are co-authors of the book “America: Unite or Die.”

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