The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell 9/10/2024 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱🅲 BREAKING NEWS Today September 10, 2024

voters in the US go to the polls on November 5th to elect their next president the election was initially a rematch of 2020 but it was upended in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed vice president Kamala Harris the big question now is will the result mean a second Donald Trump term or America's first woman president as election day approaches we'll be keeping track of the polls and seeing what affect big events like Tuesday's presidential debate have on the race for the white house but the race tightened after she hit the campaign Trail and she developed a small lead over her rival in an average of national polls that she has maintained since the latest National polling averages for the two candidates are shown below rounded to the nearest whole number in the pole tracker chart below the trend lines show how those averages have changed since Harris entered the race and the dock show the spread of the individual poll results Trump's average has also remained relatively St hovering around 44% and there was no significant Boost from the endorsement of Robert F Kennedy who ended his independent candidacy on August 23rd while these National polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole they're not necessarily an accurate way to predict the result of the election that's because the US uses an electoral college system to elect its president so winning the most votes can be less important than where they are won there are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning these are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as Battleground States who is winning in Battleground States right now the polls are very tight in the seven Battleground states which makes it hard to know who is really leading the race there are fewer State polls than National polls so we have less data to work with and every poll has a margin of error that means the numbers could be higher or lower