The presidential race is tied. Whoever has the better ground game will win the White House.

With less than a month until Election Day, neither Harris nor Trump feels confident about their chances.

Sometimes, I look back on my days at the stock trading desk with dread, but other times, I appreciate the valuable lessons I learned. Higher highs. Lower lows. Ceilings at the top. Floors at the bottom.

In the end, the numbers always reveal the truth. You can hide them for a while, but not forever. As long as you’re willing to leave your biases at the door and see the numbers for what they are, more often than not, you’ll stay closer to reality.

From the start of this presidential race, I marked Wisconsin as the state to watch. Not because of its 10 electoral votes or Kamala Harris’s strategy to secure 270 electoral votes through Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, but because the state represents a microcosm of the entire country. If Harris can win Wisconsin, it means she’s able to turn out the right demographics needed to win the country and gain an edge in battleground states.

“Wisconsin’s electorate is whiter, has fewer residents with a four-year college degree, and is more rural than the rest of the country”.

If Kamala Harris can win Wisconsin, the odds are very strong that she will win the White House. This is why I have kept a close eye on Wisconsin since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee. Her lead in Wisconsin has narrowed a bit from where it was a month ago — shrinking from nearly a 3-point lead in early September to just half a point in mid-October.

The odds are that if Wisconsin is tightening, Michigan and Pennsylvania mus be following the same trend. But they are not. The trajectory in Wisconsin is moving against Harris, but Donald Trump has not taken the lead in the state for over two months. Harris still holds the lead in the state. In the next week, we’ll see if Trump has hit a ceiling in Wisconsin or if he’s able to break through.

There’s nothing unusual about polls fluctuating. The media has been portraying Trump’s lead in Arizona as something like an impenetrable wall, while quickly highlighting the movement against Harris in Wisconsin. But things haven’t been stable in Arizona either.

Every time Harris caught up with Trump, he pulled ahead again. The reality, as it stands today with less than a month until the election, is that neither candidate has a decisive lead in any of the seven battleground states, including Georgia.

Why this keeps happening is a question I desperately want to wrestle with, but now is not the time. We can address that a few days after the election.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching U.S. elections over the past eight years, it’s this: Americans don’t want to be taken for granted by either party — Republicans or Democrats. That’s one reason they elected a Republican governor in Virginia, one year after sending Biden to the White House. It was a strong message to the Democrats to get their act together.

But then the Republicans overreached after their win in Virginia, trying to politicize a bipartisan effort to expand medical coverage for veterans. They made several missteps before the 2022 midterms, and they paid a heavy price for it.

The GOP should have won the House in 2022 with a comfortable majority, but the voters denied them that. I’m not at all surprised to see the Presidential race entering the final stretch in a dead heat.

I expected Pennsylvania to remain extremely tight until Election Day. Surprisingly, Harris is doing reasonably well there, better than I anticipated. I believe this is largely due to down-ballot support in Pennsylvania.

Wisconsin Senate race is getting tight

But PA race is not.

Is this good or bad?

It’s actually good.

The reason things started to shift in Wisconsin is because Republicans have poured an inordinate amount of money into the state over the last two weeks.

When you pour $100 million into a state, something is bound to happen. It definitely put a dent in the Democrats’ lead in Wisconsin. But if all you can manage is a 1-point deficit after unleashing that kind of spending, you’re not in great shape.

The GOP can keep the race tight if they maintain their spending spree, but the Democrats have the funds too. Unfortunately, Wisconsin is about to see a surge in spending, and for no real reason. The GOP’s Senate spending strategy has been all over the map this year. Their decision to ramp up spending in Wisconsin may have been influenced by their inability to crack Bob Casey’s stronghold in Pennsylvania. They’ve tried and poured money into the Keystone State for months, but Senator Casey is a tough nut to crack. His victory in Pennsylvania is nearly assured at this point.

It’s a similar situation with Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio. With two of their target states slipping out of reach, the GOP has shifted its focus to Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin.

The Democrats were slow to respond to this GOP spending surge, which was a mistake. They should have anticipated it and ensured Tammy Baldwin stayed slightly ahead of Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde on the financial front.

Right now, the GOP has slightly pulled ahead of the Democrats on the spending front, but I expect the Dems to ramp up their response. We’ll see the results in a week. I’m still not too concerned about Wisconsin or Michigan, but I’m keeping a cautious eye on Pennsylvania and Nevada.

As a result, there’s no update to my 2024 race forecast:

- Presidential Race: Kamala Harris wins 
- Senate: Gop win by 1 seat (Nebraska can throw a spanner into this)
- House: Democrats win by 5 to 10 seats