The US presidential election campaign enters its final weekend with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in a seemingly permanent deadlock and few clues as to which of them will prevail on Tuesday.

At the end of a chaotic week that started with Trump’s racially charged rally in New York and included celebrity endorsements and misogynistic comments, The Guardian’s 10-day polling average showed little change. Voter loyalty to candidates appeared largely unaffected by these events.

Nationally, Harris, the Democratic nominee, holds a narrow one-point lead over her Republican opponent, 48% to 47%, which is nearly unchanged from last week. This lead is within the margin of error for most polls.

Candidates in dead heat

In battleground states, the race is equally tight. Candidates are tied at 48% in Pennsylvania, considered a key swing state due to its 19 electoral votes. Harris leads by a point in Michigan and Wisconsin, while Trump holds a slight edge in the Sunbelt, leading by 1% in North Carolina and 2% in Georgia and Arizona. In Nevada, his average lead in the polls is less than one percentage point.

As of Friday, the latest polling comes amid record early voting, with about 65 million Americans having already cast their ballots across multiple states.

According to The Guardian, predicting future results from early voting is notoriously challenging. However, Politico reported that 58% of early voters in Pennsylvania aged 65 and over were registered Democrats, compared to 35% who were Republicans. Despite the two main parties having roughly equal numbers of registered voters among older adults in the state, about 53% of this demographic voted for Trump in Pennsylvania in 2020, even though he lost to Biden.

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Unlike four years ago, Trump is now encouraging his supporters to vote early, stated The Guardian. It said the higher turnout among Democrats could be a positive sign for them in this bellwether state, where analysts believe turnout will be crucial for the outcome, adding that Democratic strategists have claimed a 10%-20% lead in senior voter turnout across the three blue-wall states.

Trump 53%-Harris 47%: poll

On Friday morning, the polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight's simulator, which uses national and state data, predicted that Trump would win 53 times out of 100 compared with 47 times for Harris was, again, similar to a week before.

In a late positive development for Harris, a Marist poll on Friday suggested she could break the deadlock, showing her leading Trump by 3% in Michigan and Wisconsin and by 2% in Pennsylvania. Winning all three states would likely be her clearest path to the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency. However, these results remain within the poll's margins of error.

According to The Guardian, this consistent trend across multiple polls has raised suspicions among some analysts about potential "herding" among pollsters, who may be cautious about being wrong for a third consecutive time after significantly underestimating Trump's support in 2016 and 2020.

Harris, Trump head to head in polls

Of the last 321 polls in the battlegrounds, 124 - nearly 40% - showed margins of a single point or less, Josh Clinton, a politics professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, NBC's director of elections, wrote. Pennsylvania was the most “troubling” case, with 20 out of 59 polls showing an exact tie, while another 26 showed margins of less than 1%.

Clinton and Lapinski noted that this reflects "not just an astonishingly tight race, but also an improbably tight race," arguing that with so many surveys, one would expect to see a wider range of opinions, even in a close election, due to the randomness inherent in polling. Also, the lack of variation suggests that pollsters might be adjusting “weird” margins of 5% or more, or, more likely, there’s another explanation, reported The Guardian. 

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“Some of the tools pollsters are using in 2024 to address the polling problems of 2020, such as weighting by partisanship, past vote or other factors, may be flattening out the differences and reducing the variation in reported poll results,” they wrote.

Either explanation “raises the possibility that the results of the election could be unexpectedly different than the razor-close narrative the cluster of state polls and the polling averages suggest," they added.

Amid the uncertainty, The Guardian suggested, one thing is clear: despite pollsters depicting a close contest for the past several weeks, as Harris and Trump face off in the final days of this critical US election, something is expected to change.