(The Center Square) – With early voting beginning in Georgia on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump is continuing to widen the polling gap between himself and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump is leading the Project 538 polling average in the state by 1%. While this is still a small margin and within most sampling’s margin of error, it is a switch from Harris’ polling lead in early September.
Georgia will be a critical swing state in the 2024 election. As one of seven consensus battlegrounds, Trump’s polling average is better than the same point four years ago.
In 2020, President Joe Biden began leading Trump on Oct. 1. By Election Day, he was 1.2% ahead of Trump. The winning difference was about 11,000 votes, or just 0.23%, out of the more than 5 million cast.
Since 1980, 2020 was only one of two times that the Republican presidential candidate lost in Georgia.
Ninety-three electoral college votes ride on the swing states of Pennsylvania (19), North Carolina (16), Georgia (16), Michigan (15), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10) and Nevada (six).
Trump is leading in North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. In the other four, Harris is leading by less than 1%.
Not only is Trump closing the margin in many of those states, he is greatly outperforming this election cycle compared to the same time in the 2020 election cycle when he lost to Joe Biden.
While recent nonpartisan polls have had Trump leading by between 1% to 3%, a Trump-campaign funded poll has the Republican leading by 5%.
His campaign is not taking Georgia for granted. Trump and his vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, senator from Ohio, will be making appearances in the state this week.
With 22 days until Election Day, Democrats are also pulling out all stops with on-the-ground campaigning in Georgia, even bringing in former President Bill Clinton on Sunday to rally Black voters for Harris. Before Biden’s 2020 win, Clinton was the last Democrat to win Georgia in 1992.
Both parties have said the stakes of this election are extremely high.
“This whole election and the future of the country is turning out to be what people who were sort of on the fence about voting are going to do in the next three and a half weeks,” Clinton said. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Outside of polling, multiple models have also predicted Trump will win Georgia, partly based on polls, but also based on other factors.
Polymarket, a cryptocurrency gambling website, predicts that Trump currently has a 64% chance of winning Georgia.
This is in line with The Hill’s prediction, in conjunction with DecisionDesk HQ, that Trump has a 63% chance of winning.
In both models, Trump’s chances have remained fairly steady over the last few months.
