James Carville was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan recently when he kept being stopped by anxious New Yorkers begging the famed Cajun political sage for some kind of guidance about how the November election would turn out.
He had nothing for them.
“They firmly believed that I had some kind of secret knowledge,” said the veteran Democratic strategist. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to tell someone who thinks you’re omnipotent that you’re really not.”
The tough-to-swallow truth for anxious voters of all stripes is that no one can predict the future, especially in an election that right now feels like the closest in most Americans’ lifetimes, though the outcome could end up more definitive.
Just weeks before Election Day, the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is deadlocked, with polls showing razor-thin margins in key battlegrounds and nationally.
“The polls — public and private — are closer in this election than any I have ever seen,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former aide to Barack Obama. “Everything is within the margin of error, so we are at a point where polls are incapable of giving you much information about which way the horse race is trending.”
NBC News’ latest poll shows the race split exactly 48%-48% — a “dead heat,” according to pollster Jeff Horwitt, a Democrat who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff.
And the story is the same in other polls and polling averages, with Quinnipiac University pollster Tim Malloy saying the race “can’t get much closer.”
After polling misses in recent elections, few analysts today are willing to stake a bet. And there is zero expert consensus about the outcome, let alone the kind of consensus view that defined the final days of the last four presidential campaigns — in large part because much of that conventional wisdom ended up proven wrong.
A whole industry has emerged to parse the data and filter it through complex probabilistic mathematical formulas. But in a country balanced on a pencil tip, able to fall any direction with a proverbial gust of wind, all the data in the world still has analysts searching for synonyms for “toss-up.”
“It’s now literally 50/50,” Nate Silver wrote on X Tuesday. Republican pollster Frank Luntz summed up the election with a single gif: A coin flip.
The dynamic has Republican strategist Matt Gorman looking back to the 2000 election, which essentially came down to 537 votes in Florida and an overtime legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
“It’s going to be the closest since Bush v. Gore,” said Gorman, noting the likelihood of similar post-election legal fights. “There’s just so much more likelihood and political incentive for either side to drag this out.”
“Hope you’re ready to be eating turkey in Erie County!” he joked about journalists and campaign operatives decamping to the northwestern Pennsylvania battleground to watch ballots be counted during Thanksgiving.