Kamala Harris and Donald Trump feud with the 'most accurate pollster'

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are in a dead heat in the popular vote, according to a new poll.

The TIPP Insights survey rated the most accurate by pollsters The Washington Post In 2020, Trump and Harris were found to be tied at 48 percent just under a week before Election Day.

The poll was conducted online between Oct. 23 and Oct. 25 among a sample of 1,333 likely voters and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.

“Almost all reputable polls show a tie race, especially when margins of error are taken into account. The same is true for most contested states,” said Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University Newsweek on Sunday.

“The election will likely depend on how those votes are ultimately distributed in the key states that will decide the outcome.”

In a post on its website, TIPP Insights suggested that the momentum is now in Republican candidate Trump's favor.

“Trump is not expected to win the popular vote — Democrats have a built-in advantage over California and New York. Texas, the largest red state, only partially offsets this,” said Raghavan Mayur, the head of the TIPP Insights survey.

“National polls reflect this imbalance, as there are many voters from blue states, skewing the numbers in favor of Democrats. But the popular vote plays no role in the Electoral College.”

Mayur also pointed out that Trump lost the popular vote by 4.5 points in 2020, but narrowly missed re-election by 45,000 voters in three battleground states.

“Some media outlets are ignoring this crucial fact to sell the narrative that Trump can’t win. The truth? The race is still razor thin,” Mayur wrote.

As in 2020, the 2024 elections are likely to be decided with an extremely narrow majority in the swing states. What makes Harris worrisome is that she is far behind where President Joe Biden was in the polls four years ago.

The RealClearPolling average of national polls shows Trump leading Trump by +0.1 points as of Sunday, while Biden was ahead of Trump by 7.4 percentage points as of October 27, 2020. Hillary Clinton was ahead by 5.6 points on the same day eight years ago.

Meanwhile, the RealClearPolitics average of polls in the most closely contested states shows Trump leading by +0.9 points on Sunday. On the same day in 2020, Biden was ahead by +3.5 and in 2016, Clinton was ahead by +3.8.

Biden won both the popular vote and the Electoral College in 2020. Clinton won the popular vote but lost to Trump in the Electoral College in 2016.

The latest TIPP Insights poll comes after other recent polls showed the race between Harris and Trump has continued to tighten in recent weeks, with several polls showing the electorate is evenly divided.

Trump's chances of winning have also increased in favor of Trump on betting platforms such as Polymarket and FiveThirtyEight's Electoral College and Decision Desk HQ at The Hill.

But analysts said Newsweek Earlier this week, there wasn't much to be seen in the recent furore surrounding Trump.

“It's best not to place too much emphasis on short-term fluctuations in polls or try to attach meaning to them because they are mostly random noise,” said D. Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky Newsweek.

Update 10/27/24, 9:10 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with comment from Costas Panagopoulos.