Former President Trump and his team are entering the final stretch of the White House campaign with confidence he is on the precipice of winning a second term.
Public polls show Trump in a stronger position than at the same point in his previous two campaigns, including in 2016, when he was victorious. And sources close to the campaign have described a mood of “cautious optimism” within Trump’s orbit, citing strong internal data.
Trump, who is known to be superstitious, has been careful not to get ahead of himself for fear of jinxing an Election Day victory. Yet the overall mood in Trumpland has a notably more upbeat note compared to some of the hand-wringing among parts of the Democratic Party.
“The difference between 2020 and 2024 among people in the president’s orbit is, in 2020, people were searching out for any tidbits of good news,” one Trump ally said. “In 2024, people are searching out any tidbits of potentially bad news, because they almost can’t believe how good the data is looking.”
Less than two weeks before Election Day, polling shows an extremely close race. A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll published Wednesday showed Trump and Vice President Harris separated by no more than 3 percentage points in any of the seven battleground states expected to decide the election.
A Decision Desk HQ/The Hill average of polls shows Harris leading Trump by 1 percentage point nationally. Trump lost the popular vote by 2 points in 2016 even as he won the White House, and he lost the popular vote by 4 points in 2020.
Decision Desk HQ averages show Trump and Harris are virtually tied in the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which represent Harris’s clearest path to victory, while polling averages show Trump with narrow leads in North Carolina and Georgia.
While polling results have almost universally been within the margin of error and mostly serve to underscore the closeness of the race, they are also looking better for Trump than at the same time four years ago, when he narrowly lost to President Biden.
A RealClearPolitics average of polls showed that around the same time in 2020, Trump was trailing Biden by 5 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 9 points in Michigan and 6 points in Wisconsin. He was also down 2 points in Arizona, and the candidates were neck and neck in Georgia. Trump ultimately lost each of those states in close races.
Early voting has surged in states including Georgia and North Carolina, both key battlegrounds, as Trump and top Republican officials have urged supporters to embrace the concept despite the 45th president's previous attacks on mail-in ballots.
Jon Ralston, a longtime Nevada politics reporter, has noted in recent days that Republicans have outpaced Democrats in terms of early voting in the state.
“Controlled optimism is how I would put it,” one Republican strategist close to the Trump campaign said. “They think they should win, but you never know with the ground game. ... Further, we are talking about very tight margins in states that all have very different rules about ballot collection and ballot tabulation.”
Another source close to the Trump campaign argued the vice president’s shift in her media strategy over the past two weeks is a sign that her team is aware they need to change the trajectory of the race.
After Harris spent the first two months of her campaign largely limiting her press availability, she has changed course in the final weeks of the campaign, appearing on Charlamagne tha God’s radio show, Fox News, NBC News, Telemundo and a CNN town hall and more, and delivered impromptu remarks twice this week to attack Trump as unfit for office. The CNN town hall took place after Trump refused to accept another debate with Harris.
Trump himself has boasted at rallies that he is up in the polls, disparaged Harris’s intelligence and her quality as a candidate and touted the enduring strength of his support over the past nearly 10 years.
“We’re wrapping up something that has been incredible,” Trump said Tuesday during a rally in North Carolina. “There’s never been anything like this: the rallies, the size of them, the enthusiasm. And we have more enthusiasm now than we did for 2016 or 2020.”
A Trump victory on Election Day is far from assured. Some Republicans are still skittish about the campaign’s ground game, which is relying more heavily on outside groups, including one backed by Elon Musk, to connect with voters in battleground states.
The former president has also spent considerable time appealing to young men, a demographic that could provide him a boost but that historically is less reliable at turning out to vote.
Harris herself has spoken repeatedly about being the underdog in the race and knowing she has to earn the vote of every American. She also has the help of prominent surrogates such as former President Obama and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama.
For all the anxiety on the Democratic side about Harris’s slippage in the polls, there is an argument from some of her supporters that her strength with women in particular — a reliable voting bloc that makes up a majority of the electorate — could put her over the top.
“I think certainly that in this election, it’s going to be so tight, just from everything we’ve seen from polling, so it’s understandable both sides are a little nervous. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous,” said Sarah Matthews, a former Trump aide who is backing Harris.
“But the one thing that gives me some hope is I think Kamala will be pushed over the finish line by women,” she added. “There are a lot of disaffected Republican women and independents who are concerned by Trump's character and see JD Vance as a scary continuation of this.”