The Polls Are Tied. Whoever Wins, the Explanations Are Starting to Become Clear.

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

71% : Voters generally found Harris to be smart and trustworthy, and although her favorability rating overall is an evenly polarized one, it was still easily higher than Trump's.
47% : Is it possible that Trump has achieved a realignment of the national electorate under our noses -- organizing a multiracial army of younger and male-skewing working-class voters who like his blunt manner of speaking and buy into his Apprentice-era reputation as a business mastermind?
46% : Hypothetical No. 1: The Story if Donald Trump WinsDespite lagging rally attendance and small-donor enthusiasm -- and the persistent belief of many Americans that he is a reckless and untrustworthy figure -- Trump was able to take advantage of swing voters' unhappiness with inflation and undocumented immigration to again win the presidency.
44% : Here's what that would look like:Hypothetical No. 2: The Story if Kamala Harris WinsOver the past few years -- especially in the 2022 midterms -- we've seen this story play out several times: A Democrat who portrays themself as sensible and mainstream defeats a Trump-aligned candidate who comes off as extreme and divisive.
44% : One who apparently did not was the Des Moines Register's Ann Selzer, who delivered a shocker the weekend before Election Day showing Harris leading Trump by 3 points in a state Trump won by 8 points in 2020.)
42% : While Trump largely avoided mainstream media interviews and declined to debate Harris a second time, he made a point of appearing on a number of podcasts popular with young men, ultimately winning record totals of their votes and polling better with younger Black and Latino voters than any Republican in a generation.
42% : In the end, polls underestimated Trump's chances for a third straight time, as "low-propensity" voters -- including many who skipped the 2022 midterm, causing MAGA Senate candidates to underperform -- turned out to support the GOP with Trump atop the ticket.
40% : Conversely, while voters reported that they did not feel favorably about Trump as a person, they remembered his presidency as a time of relative economic prosperity.
36% : For Trump to win, swing voters would have to care so much about those issues that they're also willing to overlook the fallout from the Dobbs decision, and the sort of extreme rhetoric -- regarding the 2020 election, among other subjects -- that they penalized MAGA candidates for in the 2022 election.
33% : Harris, meanwhile, was on the whole viewed more favorably than Trump by the electorate, but had trouble making up for her late start on the campaign trail; voters often told members of the press that they didn't feel that they knew enough about who she was or what her plans were for the country.
31% : (Some suspect that pollsters wary of underestimating Trump for a third time actually went too far with "weighting" assumptions favorable to him.
24% : For one thing, the issues that Trump would win on, in Hypothetical No. 1 -- crime, immigration, and inflation -- peaked as problems, statistically speaking, two years ago.
17% : The last couple of news cycles before the election were tough for Trump: His former chief of staff described him as a "fascist" and one of his supporters called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage" at a rally in Madison Square Garden.
14% : And now it's happened in the presidential election, with Kamala Harris defeating Trump himself.

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