Journamalism: Dan Drezner is very smart and very reliable. He writes:

Dan Drezner: What if October is... Boring?: ‘It's been a fat-tailed presidential election so far…. An awful lot of Big Events that transformed the 2024 U.S. presidential election…. There has been an awful lot of speculation about which October surprises could tip the election one way or another. This New York Times story by Shane Goldmacher and Reid Epstein <270towin.com/2024-count… from 48 hours ago represents the perfect distillation of this genre <270towin.com/2024-count…> of <270towin.com/2024-count…> story:

“Vice President Kamala Harris has cast herself as a candidate of the future, but she has been yanked back by the problems of the present… war… strike… hurricane… combined to knock Ms. Harris off a message that has been carefully calibrated…”.

You get the idea…. maybe—just maybe—it’s time… to take a breath…. Look at that FiveThirtyEight chart. Even with all of the shocks of August and September, there wasn’t a lot of movement in either direction… <danieldrezner.substack.…>

Now do not get me wrong. The election is almost certainly not close. If we knew everything about the state of the electorate right now, we would almost surely judge the probabilities as putting it 80% in the bag. But we do not know everything, and in particular we do not know where the systematic polling error lies, and how large it is.

But Dan is right. From our ignorant perspective, it is very close to a tossup, and will probably stay that way down to close to the wire.

Nate Silver and Eli McKown-Dawson right now have it thus:

Nate Silver & Eli McKown-Dawson: Silver Bulletin 2024 Presidential Election Forecast: ‘1:30 p.m., Friday, October 4. Another day… still very little change…. Harris… has a 56 percent chance of winning the election to Trump’s 44 percent chance… [with] a 21 percent chance Harris wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College… <natesilver.net/p/nate-s…>

That is all the time you need to spend on the polls. Maybe come back and revisit <natesilver.net/p/nate-s…> for five minutes in two weeks, or one week if you have anxiety disorder. Otherwise go do other, productive things.