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Election 2024: The States You Should Be Watching (But Probably Aren’t)

What states could throw up a surprise on Tuesday night?

Tom Williams
4 min readNov 4, 2024

“The presidential race appears to be hurtling toward a photo finish”, that was the verdict of the New York Times as the final round of the publication’s swing state polls showed deadlocked races in Pennsylvania and Michigan. It’s also the message that anyone who’s turned on cable news for more than five minutes or so much as glimpsed at any newspaper front page has gotten over the last few weeks.

But as I wrote about a week ago, the polls being close doesn’t necessarily mean the final result will be close. A standard national poll that shows Trump and Harris tied has a margin of error that ranges from a 6% percentage point Harris win to the same for Trump. Moreover, as Nate Silver wrote about last week, pollsters are almost certainly fudging their numbers to make this race seem closer than it really is — meaning the chances of a systematic polling miss outside the margin of error are even greater. If that’s the case, a whole slate of states that were previously written off as either solid blue or solid red could be in play. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Don’t count out Harris here:

Texas

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Tom Williams
Tom Williams

Written by Tom Williams

Political analysis | Bylines: Rantt Media, Extra Newsfeed, PMP Magazine, Backbench, Dialogue and Discourse | Editor: Breakthrough

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