10 Days Out: Election Day draws near in tight race
(The Center Square) – Former President Donald Trump and Vice president Kamala Harris are locked in a too-close-to-call race for the White House with just 10 days until Election Day.
The final New York Times/Siena College poll was released Friday, showing Trump and Harris in a dead tie nationally at 48%. The tie could signal good news for Trump, who was actually trailing Harris by 2 points in the same poll earlier this month.
On top of that, Democrats can and have won the national vote without winning the Electoral College.
“Trump Leads Among Men, White Voters, Midwest and South,” Siena College said in its release. “Harris Leads Among Women, Non-white Voters, Northeast and West.”
In the seven closest swing states, the races all remain basically within the margin of error, although Trump does hold a very narrow lead in all seven states, according to Real Clear Politics’ aggregation of recent polling.
Formerly competitive swing states like Florida and Ohio have gone for Trump by wide margins while Minnesota, New Mexico, and Colorado are in Harris’ camp in the latest polling.
FiveThirtyEight, another poll aggregator and analyzer, found Trump either tied or slightly ahead in the seven closest states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Joe Rogan, who hosts the most popular podcast in America, is expected to release a taped interview with Trump. Those interviews often last 3 hours and will provide an unusually long conversation with Trump in a time when candidates are often protected by aides from invasive questioning.
Rogan has expressed mixed political opinions in the past. Rogan’s podcast is most popular among men, a demographic Harris is struggling to court.
Harris participated in a CNN Town Hall this week, where she attacked Trump on a range of issues including not joining her on CNN for a second debate.
Trump reportedly wanted a debate on Fox News.
Harris herself though faced pushback from CNN’s Anderson Cooper during the Town Hall and critics afterward for refusing to directly answer questions.
Longtime Democratic strategist and key staffer in the Obama administration David Axelrod critiqued Harris for her “word salad” answers.
“When she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word salad city and she did that on a couple of answers,” Axelrod said on the CNN panel following the town hall. “One of them was on Israel. Anderson asked a direct question: would you be stronger on Israel than Trump, and there was a seven-minute answer, but none of it related to the question he was asking.”
Harris previously took fire for her lack of media interviews. Now, she is taking fire for her answers. Several media reports have indicated Democrats are worried that Harris has slipped from her momentum weeks ago.
“There is no joy left in the Democrat Party in the final week of the campaign,” Republican strategist Nate Brand told The Center Square. “Desperation has set in for Kamala and the left. At this point in the race, the winning team is normally the one having the most fun. From McDonald’s to Madison Square Garden, clearly Trump is having a good time. Bodes well for Republicans on Election Day.”
