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The race is tied in a two-way sample, and Trump is up one if you include third-party candidates. 

That’s the bottom line in the NYT/Siena Poll, and that is terrible news for Kamala Harris. 

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If you don’t know much about American politics, you would call this race a toss-up, and in a sense, it still is. Kamala Harris COULD win, even without cheating perhaps, but the odds are very much stacked against her. In recent decades, the Democrats needed a 2-3 point national popular vote lead to win in the Electoral College, and there is little reason to believe that this time is different. 

That’s because Democrat voters are more tightly packed than Republican voters. Massive numbers of them live in a few states, just as Democrats tend to congregate in deep blue cities while Republicans are more evenly distributed everywhere else. The less urban the area, the more Republican. 

Swing states are swing states because there is more of a balance between the deeper blue and deeper red voting areas. Small changes in turnout or party alignment can make a huge difference. 

So if Kamala Harris wins by 10 million votes in California, say, she gets the same number of EC votes as if she won by 10. This is the “inefficient vote.” 

Kamala is going to rack up big numbers in states she will win no matter what, but can’t afford to lose a vote in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Arizona. 

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Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump are locked in a dead heat for the popular vote, 48 percent to 48 percent, the final national poll by The New York Times and Siena College has found, as Ms. Harris struggles for an edge over Mr. Trump with an electorate that seems impossibly and immovably divided.

The result, coming less than two weeks before Election Day, and as millions of Americans have already voted, is not encouraging for Ms. Harris. In recent elections, Democrats have had an edge in the popular vote even when they have lost the Electoral College and thus the White House. They have been looking to Ms. Harris to build a strong national lead as a sign that she would do well in such critical swing states as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

[Nate Cohn evaluates whether Donald Trump could win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College.]

Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump remain effectively tied even after three of the most tumultuous months in recent American political history. A high-profile debate, two attempts on Mr. Trump’s life, dozens of rallies across seven battlefield states and hundreds of millions spent on advertisements have seemingly done little to change the trajectory of the race.

And all that assumes that there is no polling error, and there always is. Theoretically, the polling error should be randomly distributed, but in recent years polls have favored the Democrats by a huge margin. 

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At this point in 2020, the polling averages had Biden up by 8 points, and in 2016, Hillary was up by 5. Biden won the popular vote by half that margin.

Harris is tied in the Times/Siena poll and in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Ouch. 

It is possible that the polls have successfully corrected their errors since 2020–the 2022 polls were quite good, actually, but it is clear that Trump is an independent variable: he changes how people respond to polls. That is hard to correct. 

Then, of course, is the trend. The trend is not Kamala’s friend. Trump’s favorability has been moving up, while Kamala’s has been moving down. 

Ms. Harris’s position, if anything, may have declined among likely voters since the last Times/Siena College poll, taken in early October. At the time, she had a slight lead over Mr. Trump, 49 percent to 46 percent. The change is within the margin of error, but The Times’s national polling average has registered a tightening in polls over the past few weeks as well, suggesting at the very least that this contest has drawn even closer.

At the very least, it has drawn closer. 

We don’t have a window into the future, of course, but everything is going badly for Harris and Walz, and it shows. She has rebooted her campaign so many times that it seems like the operating system is Windows 3.0. There was Brat!, JOY!, Turn the Page, Same as Joe Biden, HITLERSTALINMUSSOLINI, and now they have thrown in a concert promoter. 

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Kamala is terrible at all of it, with the possible exception of BRAT! She did embody that aesthetic, at least until her campaign fell apart. 

“You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown. 

Nobody wants a “Brat” president, although going this direction did serve the purpose of rebranding Kamala. She was seen as a vapid cipher. Suddenly she was at least interesting. 

Until she wasn’t. TikTok trends have a half-life of Francium-223, which I found out is 22 minutes. 

Kamala Harris is just bad at this in a way that we haven’t seen in ages. She is perhaps one of the few people who makes Biden look smart.

Ironically, Democrats wanted to run against Donald Trump because he would be the easiest Republican to beat. They had a playbook, and it worked in 2020. And it’s true that the only reason Kamala isn’t down 20 points is that she is running against Donald Trump. 

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But it’s also true that if, as I expect, a lot more Republicans will turn up than expected, it will be because they are angered at how Donald Trump and, by extension, his supporters have been treated with contempt and hatred. 

The Democrats have made it clear that they intend to crush us by any means necessary, and we don’t want to be crushed. We have been subjected to so much hatred and contempt that our self-defense reaction is to fight back. Republicans aren’t demoralized; they are energized. 

That, too, is because of Donald Trump.