538 politics podcast host gayen Dro for more on this gayen I'm so happy to have you here so uh look we know the 538 National polling average shows vice president KL Harris with this slight lead over Trump is that enough to Rattle the Trump campaign at all yeah I don't think either campaign can be confident in its position in the polls right now so yes nationally Harris leads by maybe about three points but the average National polling error in a presidential election is four points so that is well within the historical average error but of course elections are not decided on the national level they're decided in the Electoral College and if you look at the likeliest Tipping Point State which is in fact Pennsylvania where the debate will be held tomorrow night Harris only leads by about half a percentage point and half a percentage point I don't even think you could call a lead truly and so when you look at those Battleground States you see an extremely competitive election in fact as close as the 2020 and 2016 elections were the polls at this time in both of those election years were not this close so this is one of the tightest elections we have seen in a long time at this point in the race oh that's interesting so the Battlegrounds was sort of my next question there for you because there has been so much focus on the Battlegrounds from both of these campaigns I mean even during the Democratic National Convention KLA Harris went to Wisconsin right I mean just to show you how important it is but also as Sarah iser just brought up here earlier on the show The the polling didn't change that much even after the most recent debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden so what are you anticipating seeing are you in do you think you'll see that needle move enough after this to really you know get out of that margin of error you know I don't think so but what I will say is that we have some history to guide us here which is that after the first presidential debate historically and I think although this is not technically the first of the year it is the first between Harris and Trump so I think we can call it the first the polls nationally move on average two half percentage points so if they were to move that much in Harris's direction for example that would give her a clearer lead but the caveat there is that there would still be almost two months left on the clock until election day and the cycle will continue a pace lots of other things will happen and whether that bounce is durable is a real question and so these debates matter and they do often times move the polls I mean it's hard to make the argument that debates don't matter after Joe Biden literally dropped out as the result of his debate performance but will whatever bounce happens for either candidate endure or will other aspects of the campaign trumpet and just quickly if we can gayen we've been hearing a lot about these issues where Donald Trump is pulling better right immigration but what about some of these kitchen table issues do you think those will be addressed during this debate and will that resonate with voters yeah I think so I mean when you ask Americans first and foremost what matters to them in this election it's the economy that's no big surprise and so both candidates are going to try to position themselves as more likely to enact the policies that will help American families now folks are pretty split on this when you ask strictly about the economy who would you prefer Trump has the advantage by about 10 percentage points but when you ask a question like which candidate will enact the kinds of policies that will help you or your family Harris has the lead there and so when you look at the issues that's a little bit muddled there are areas where Americans clearly prefer Trump but there are also areas where Americans clearly prefer Harris and so it's the candidates job to try to raise the salience of the issues where they are performing the best and that's what they're going to be doing on stage tomorrow night all right gayen duw thanks for being here with us