US election: Polling experts and campaign veterans in the dark as America decides between Trump and Harris

Election Day has arrived in America. A date towards which the United States has been hurtling with alternating moods of dread, joy, and confusion, with the refrains of “Fight!, Fight!” and “We’re not going back” echoing through an exhausting campaign and, most of all, with a stunned sense of a country split down the middle by a poisonous ideological divide. It has arrived and there is no turning back.
Polling stations across the United States open on Tuesday with all polling experts and campaign veterans and the campaigns themselves utterly in the dark as to whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be sworn in as 47th president in January.
For weeks, the aggregate polling depicted a presidential race that has become indecipherably close in the seven battleground states which both parties have a strong chance of winning. While Harris holds a slender majority in national polls, with a 48 per cent to 46.9 per cent advantage over Trump and is hoping to turn North Carolina in her favour, the Republican candidate has eaten into the slender lead she held in Pennsylvania. Both candidates visited the Keystone State once more on Monday, making 11th-hour pleas to voters here.
The election mood in Pennsylvania may well presage turbulent days and weeks ahead, with multiple lawsuits filed alleging election fraud and interference. In his recent rallies in the state, Trump has repeatedly hinted at nefarious practices, despite the assurances of Al Schmidt, secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and himself a Republican.
“I have investigated hundreds of allegations of voter fraud and that’s why I feel I can speak with some degree of authority and knowledge of when it occurs,” he said in a weekend interview.
“And allegations of widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania are completely and totally unfounded. People should have confidence that we will have a free, fair, safe, and secure election in 2024.”
Trump visited Pennsylvania for the final with a lunchtime rally in Reading and would close his campaign with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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Harris was in nearby Allentown on Monday as preparations continued for a sunset concert outside the Philadelphia Art Museum featuring, among others, Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey. That extravaganza was designed to enhance the projection of Harris as the “joyful warrior” — a mantra she inherited after sensationally replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate in July.
That summer decision revived a flatlining Democratic campaign. Until Biden’s withdrawal, it appeared that nothing — not even the assassin’s bullet which grazed Trump’s ear in a July rally in a field in western Pennsylvania would stop him in his attempt to reclaim the White House.
Since then, the race has not so much tightened as formed a vice-grip around the collective consciousness of the nation. Both candidates have argued their cases along the sweeping theme of democratic principles and the kitchen-table economic realities of food and gas prices. While Harris has been strong on women’s reproductive rights, the Trump campaign has laid the blame for the border crisis at her door, often using disturbing and inflammatory language to describe undocumented migrants.
In Pennsylvania, Democratic congressman Brendan Boyle, whose father is from Donegal, predicted in a CNN interview that his state will “likely determine the election”.
“It was the case in 2016 when it was just a half percentage point margin; it was the case in 2020 when it was just a 1 per cent margin,” he said.
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Boyle said that while he was encouraged by the fact that in all local elections since 2022 Democratic candidates have outperformed polling, he is also concerned by the fact that in “2016 and 2020, those pollsters missed that in-Trump vote, because he seems to draw out this small percentage of people who have just proven impossible to poll, who don’t come out for any other elections that don’t have Trump’s name on the ballot”.
It’s an observation that reinforces the incendiary influence of Trump on American politics. He has waded through a slew of legal cases and shook off a 34-count guilty finding in New York, issuing dark hints that an electoral loss could only occur if the process is rigged.
To more than half the electorate, he represents a nightmarish figure and a lightning rod for potential civil unrest and violence. But to the other half, he stands as a unique saviour; a figure capable of saving America from the ruinous present — and future — inflicted by Democratic administrations.
There is no question but that the country wants this to be over. Late momentum hints at a historic night, with Harris becoming the first woman president of the United States. But although Tuesday has been billed as the night that America Decides, the great fear is that nothing will be resolved.