President Biden’s historic decision to withdraw from his re-election campaign upended the 2024 race less than four months before polling day.
Kamala Harris, the vice-president, is almost certain to replace him as the Democratic nominee for the White House against Donald Trump, who is running for a third time and was confirmed as the Republican nominee at the party’s national convention in July.
Harris, 59, was endorsed by Biden and she has secured the support of enough Democratic delegates to become the party’s nominee at its convention in August.
The victor on November 5 is likely to depend on two big factors: which way swing voters move on the margins in a handful of battleground states, and which party can best turn out its core support.
It is also possible that independent and third-party candidates could play a role: they include the environmental lawyer Robert F Kennedy Jr, the veteran Green Party campaigner Jill Stein and the left-wing academic Cornel West.
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Trump had led in the polls against Biden for most of the year and has a loyal and enthusiastic base of diehard supporters. The election was his to lose — but has the entry of Harris turned the tables?
How does the electoral college work?
Rather than going by who wins the national popular vote, the US uses an electoral college to pick the president, assigning a certain number of electors to each state based on the size of its population.
California has the most electors, at 54, one fewer than last time based on a redistribution that affected 13 states using new data from the 2020 census.
Texas has the next highest with 40 electors (up two), followed by Florida 30 (up one) and New York 28 (down one). Pennsylvania, which was vital to Biden’s victory in 2020, has 19 (down one). The redistribution slightly favoured Republican-voting states by a net gain of three electors.
Who will win the 2024 US election?
Trump held a small lead over Biden for much of 2024 but extended his advantage after the president’s woeful performance in a TV debate on June 27, which fuelled concerns about his age and ability to serve a second term.
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Harris’s elevation to frontrunner for the Democratic nomination re-energised the party after Biden’s decision to step aside. But the long-term political fallout among voters remains uncertain.
The vice-president’s approval rating has generally lagged below even Biden’s throughout the administration. A Politico/Morning Consult poll in June found that only a third of voters believed she would win a presidential election; only 42 per cent of voters saw her as a strong leader, including three quarters of Democrats but only a third of independents.
That poll, however, was looking at her as a potential Democratic leader into the 2028 election. The short sprint to November 2024 and the urgency of beating Trump felt among Democrats — and many independent and moderate Republican voters — could serve her well.
A national survey by YouGov for The Times shortly after Biden’s withdrawal suggested that Trump, 78, led Harris by two percentage points.
The same poll identified Trump having an edge over Harris on several important campaign issues, in particular the economy and immigration, while the Democrat was more trusted to handle abortion and the environment.
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Elsewhere, a snap Reuters/Ipsos poll showed the vice-president leading Trump by 44 per cent to 42 per cent, while another by Morning Consult had Trump leading by 47 per cent to 45 per cent. A YouGov survey for The Economist on July 27-30 also suggested Harris had a national lead of 46 per cent to 44 per cent.
• Can Harris beat Trump? A pollster’s view
Underscoring how dramatically Biden’s decision has changed perceptions of Harris — among Democrats at least — the Morning Consult poll found that 65 per cent of Democratic voters supported her to lead the party’s ticket. That was more than double the level of support she had as a hypothetical candidate when voters were asked the same question after the Trump-Biden debate.
How Harris performs on the biggest stage, how she carries the fight to Trump and weathers Republican attacks, and whether ingrained racial and sexist prejudices are a factor among voters will emerge in polls over the coming weeks.
Which swing states could decide the US election?
In truth, nationwide polls can be of limited value in predicting the result. In some states, like California, Harris will win comfortably, while the reverse will be true in others such as Alabama or Louisiana. It is in the handful of swing states — those that tend to change their mind — that the election will be decided. No Democrat since 1948 has won the White House without picking up Pennsylvania on the way, for example.
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The most closely watched states will be those that essentially decided the 2020 election by flipping from Trump in 2016 to Biden. Alongside Pennsylvania they are Arizona (11 electoral college votes), Georgia (16), Michigan (15) and Wisconsin (10).
Other battleground states will be keenly fought over because they were close in 2020, notably North Carolina (16 electoral votes) and Nevada (six).
Another Times/YouGov poll, which surveyed voters in each of these seven states at the start of July, found that Trump was ahead of Biden in all of them, with leads ranging from one to seven percentage points.
A Morning Consult survey of the swing states for Bloomberg suggested that Harris was ahead in Michigan and Arizona but trailed in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, with the candidates polling evenly in Georgia and Nevada.
Presidential elections always throw up surprises but Biden’s late decision to step aside is unprecedented in modern times. There are plenty of other potential banana skins coming over the next few months — the performance of the economy, US involvement in the war in Gaza, changes to abortion laws and developments at the southern border will all play a role.
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Read more about the election:
• What will happen if Trump wins?
• What does Harris plan to do as president?
One factor that it is known about is Trump’s criminal cases — in particular, the Stormy Daniels hush money trial, in which he was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records, making him the first former president ever convicted of a crime. Before that verdict, 53 per cent of voters in the crucial swing states said they would not back Trump if he were found guilty, including 23 per cent of Republicans.
Meanwhile, his criminal case in Florida, where he was accused of mishandling classified documents, has been dismissed by the judge.
Could third-party candidates decide the US election?
Another unpredictable factor in the 2024 election will be the role played by third-party candidates, especially Kennedy, who has drawn support in excess of 10 per cent in some national polls.
When voters are asked whether they have a favourable or unfavourable view of Kennedy, a majority are in the former camp.
Third-party candidates have played important roles in close American elections, notably in 2000, when Ralph Nader of the Green Party took votes from the Democrat Al Gore, including in the vital state of Florida, allowing George W Bush to claim the White House.
