The New Yorker:

Nate Cohn, the New York Times’ chief political analyst, breaks down Kamala Harris’s performance in the battleground states and how we should think about polling error.

By Isaac Chotiner

On Saturday, the New York Times and Siena College released their latest round of swing-state polling on the Presidential race. It showed Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by five points in Arizona and by two points in North Carolina, while trailing Trump by a point in Nevada and by four points in Georgia. (In 2020, Joe Biden edged out Trump in all of these states except North Carolina.) The cumulative results show a very slight Harris edge. Coupled with the previous set of Times/Siena polls—which had Harris leading Trump by four points across three battleground states in the Rust Belt (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan)—the over-all picture of the race has transformed since President Biden stepped aside from contesting the Democratic nomination in July. Harris is narrowly ahead.

To talk about what it all means, I recently spoke by phone with Nate Cohn, the Times’ chief political analyst who also oversees the paper’s polling. (Full disclosure: Cohn and I worked together at The New Republic, and are friends.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the surprising ways in which Harris’s coalition appears to differ from Biden’s in 2020, how to think about the Sun Belt versus the Rust Belt, and the prospect of a third straight Presidential election with serious polling error.

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