The national picture: It’s a neck-and-neck contest.
The latest NBC survey depicts a 49-49 tie in a head-to-head matchup between the Democrat and Republican nominees, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
An ABC News-Ipsos poll places Harris at a 49 to 46 percent advantage, while the final poll from Rasmussen Reports gives the exact same edge to Trump.
But the keys to the Oval Office will be won in the battlegrounds, and that’s where the state of the race is less clear.
Morning Consult’s final election survey shows Vice President Kamala Harris with a 2-point lead over former President Donald Trump nationally. But it also shows Trump leading Harris in North Carolina and Georgia by 2 points and Wisconsin by 1 point, with the pair tied in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Related Story
The only swing state where the former president is trailing is Michigan, where he is down 1 point, according to the pollster.
The final New York Times/Siena opinion poll shows the two candidates leading in different battlegrounds but with all results falling within the margin of error.
The poll puts Harris ahead by 3 points in Nevada, 2 points in North Carolina, 2 points in Wisconsin, and 1 point in Georgia. Trump is shown to be leading Harris by 3 points in Arizona and tied with her in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
But one standout poll from Atlas Intel has Trump winning across the board in all seven swing states, with the margins ranging from 1 point in Wisconsin to as many as 6.5 points in Nevada.
A model produced by poll analyst Nate Silver, who used to operate the FiveThirtyEight website, gives Trump a 53.8 percent chance of winning over Harris’s 45.8 percent.
Silver has accused some pollsters of putting their “finger on the scale” and lying to keep the race close in polls.
As of Sunday morning, more than 75 million people had voted early across dozens of states, with early in-person voting accounting for most of those votes.
Registered Democrats held a slim 1.7 percent lead over registered Republicans overall for the two dozen states that report early voting by party affiliation.
Three battleground states do not report by party affiliation: Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
—Samantha Flom, Jack Phillips, and Jacob Burg
Epoch Times photographer Madalina Vasiliu (L), snaps a selfie as Epoch Times reporters Emel Akan (C), and Janice Hisle (R) make their way toward a campaign event in THIS city on THIS date. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
MEMORABLE MOMENTS FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
A long and intense campaign season will soon come to an end as the candidates wrap up their speeches and wait for America’s final verdict.
For stump speeches, protests, the crowning of nominees, and even whizzing bullets, The Epoch Times was there to cover it all.
Here are some of the most memorable moments our team of reporters experienced in their travels.
Janice Hisle, our resident Trump campaign reporter, experienced perhaps the most haunting moment of the entire election season—the moment a shooter opened fire at a rally for former President Donald Trump.
“The pop-pop-pop of the three initial gunshots aimed at the former president on July 13 will always ring in my head,” Hisle recalls. “Those three little pops left permanent impressions on my soul.”
She writes of the “shock, terror, and confusion” that swept the crowd in the moments that followed and her feelings upon her later return to the site of the attack.
Weeks later, reporter Nathan Worcester was outside the Israeli consulate in Chicago when he found himself at the center of what he describes as “a human explosion.”
A group of pro-Palestine demonstrators marched straight into a line of Chicago police. Worcester got caught between the two, “a few feet from where cardboard signs made contact with Kevlar.”
The two camps clashed, jolting the surrounding throng of observing journalists. A photographer yelled, “Hold on!”
“As bodies tumbled to the ground, I snapped pictures on a cellphone camera,” Worcester writes. “Documenting the action is a reporter’s instinct even when danger looms.”
On top of other standout moments from the primaries and conventions, reporters also shared their top takeaways from their experiences.
While covering the Iowa caucuses, reporter John Haughey found that America “still exists” beyond all the politics and rhetoric.
And as a newcomer to America from Romania, photographer Madalina Vasiliu observed the election’s many twists and turns through a unique lens that doesn’t come with any camera.
“It’s been a hectic pace,” Vasiliu writes. “But it’s also brought opportunities for self-improvement, meeting interesting people, seeing new places, getting to know fellow photographers and reporters, and making unique memories. And it’s given me a first-row ticket to witness history in the making.”
—Samantha Flom, Nathan Worcester, Janice Hisle, John Haughey, Madalina Vasiliu, Emel Akan, and Lawrence Wilson
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES DIVIDE ON TRANSGENDERISM
The differences between the two leading presidential candidates are many, but their divide on transgenderism may well be the deepest.
People who identify as transgender make up about 1.6 percent of the U.S. population, the Pew Research Center found in 2022. But, questions about their participation in sports and which restrooms and locker rooms they should use have dominated the national political conversation in recent years.
As the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris has downplayed transgender issues despite previously describing herself as a staunch advocate for transgender individuals.
In a 2019 interview with the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund, Harris boasted about using her former office as California attorney general to advance “the agenda” of the “movement.”
As an example, she cited one case where she “worked behind the scenes” to help get one incarcerated individual a sex-reassignment surgery.
Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly vowed to “keep men out of women’s sports.” He has also stated his opposition to “transgender insanity” being taught in schools.
The former president butted heads with Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine in 2023 over DeWine’s veto of a law banning sex-reassignment surgeries for children.
Trump wants a federal law passed to prohibit the practice, which he calls “child sexual mutilation,” in all 50 states.
The Biden–Harris administration’s implementation of pro-transgender policies has been the subject of much political controversy.
Multiple states sued to block the administration’s changes to Title IX, which expanded the law’s safeguards against sex discrimination to include gender identity as a protected category.
The change is currently blocked from enforcement in Kentucky, Indiana, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
State laws barring transgender medical and surgical procedures for minors have likewise been fiercely contested in the courts.
—Samantha Flom, Janice Hisle, Darlene McCormick Sanchez
BOOKMARKS
Tariffs have become a focal point of the presidential race, though voters have mixed views as to their benefits. Former President Donald Trump has long championed the use of tariffs for negotiating fair trade.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live may have violated a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule, an FCC commissioner warned Saturday. The rule requires broadcasters to provide equal air time to opposing candidates.
A majority of Generation Z is now eligible to vote for the first time. The Epoch Times spoke to dozens of the nation’s youngest voters to capture the pulse of their generation headed into the 2024 election.
California’s decision to pour millions of dollars into destigmatizing fentanyl use is raising questions and brows. The deadly drug is the leading cause of death for adults ages 18 to 45 and kills roughly 73,000 people annually.
Market analysts say that the 2024 election is likely to have little impact on market performance. An October survey found that a majority of investors felt differently.
