Shawdesh Desk:

Election forecasters, pollsters, and the media’s best-known number crunchers all have one final message the day before Election Day 2024: the race is a historically close toss-up.

CNN’s data guru Harry Enten broke down the final polling data of the cycle on Monday and declared, “It’s historically tight and we have no clue who is going to win.”

NBC News’s Steve Kornacki joined the Today Show and broke down the network’s final poll in the race, which found Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump tied at 49 percent each. Kornacki also ran through the swing state numbers, which showed Trump leading in Arizona, North Carolina, and Georiga. He noted that the poll also showed Harris winning Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada – an Electoral College victory.

Kornacki concluded his analysis by discussing the bombshell Ann Selzer Des Moines Register poll out of Iowa that showed Harris up 4 points on Trump in a state he was tipped to comfortably win. “It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said Selzer of her poll, which is considered one of the most reliable polls in politics. Kornacki noted that Selzer has “an excellent track record in Iowa of coming in at the very end and nailing what the final result is.” He added that the poll showed Harris is gaining votes with a “massive gender gap” particularly among “older women.”

Cook Political Report Editor in Chief Amy Walter also weighed in on the Selzer poll, writing, “NYT/Siena swing state and Selzer IA polls give us a “choose your own adventure” ending to an unprecedented election. IA poll suggests Harris strength w/ white voters (esp. women, indies + seniors) can help her keep Blue Wall even if Sun Belt slips. BUT, NYT shows opposite. She’s slipping in Blue Wall w/ white voters, as Black voters come home in GA/NC and even as AZ slips away, NV comes back into play, suggesting muted loss among Latinos.”

“At the end of the day, we don’t need a major party coalition realignment to have huge impact on the outcome. Move women, Latino, white college just a couple points one way or the other and the race tips,” Walter concluded.

Andrew Ross Sorkin noted in his Monday Dealbook newsletter from the New York Times that Selzer isn’t the only pollster out there sounding the alarm for Trump with older women, particularly white women – a key GOP voting bloc. “ Michael McDonald , a politics professor at the University of Florida who runs a vote-tracking site, pointed to similar dynamics in a recent Kansas poll,” noted Ross Sorkin, adding that the poll has shifted the vibes in the race:

However, Nate Cohn wrote in the New York Times on Monday that Republicans too have reason for confidence. “Across these final polls, white Democrats were 16 percent likelier to respond than white Republicans. That’s a larger disparity than our earlier polls this year, and it’s not much better than our final polls in 2020 — even with the pandemic over. It raises the possibility that the polls could underestimate Mr. Trump yet again,” wrote Cohn.

“Ms. Harris led Black voters, 84 percent to 11 percent, up from 80-14 in the last wave of Times/Siena state polls. Similarly, she led among Hispanic voters, 56-35, up from 55-41,” added Cohn of the final NYT poll. Many pundits and observers have argued that the Trump rally remark calling Puerto Rico “garbage” may have shifted the Hispanic vote away from Trump.

Enten noted in his analysis that the likelihood that the polls have undersampled one side or the other is over 60 percent, meaning that its likely either Harris or Trump could score a 300 electoral vote win on Tuesday – despite the razor-thin polling.

“If you were basically to model this out as a bunch of folks do, will the 2024 winner get 300 plus electoral votes? A majority chance of yes, they will get at least 300 electoral votes, a relative blowout in today’s day and age,” Enten said on CNN Monday, adding:

The minority is at 40% know that well that the winner will get less than 300 electoral votes. How the heck is that possible? Well, essentially, if you look back at swing state polling averages since 1972, the average error in the swing states is 3.4 points. And of course, all of the seven closest battleground states are within three points. So if you get an average error and it all goes in one direction, well then lo and behold, you will in fact get a blowout in the electoral college of the winner getting at least 300 electoral votes.

Below are some of the latest forecasts and final polling maps from various pollsters: