With four weeks to go before Election Day, 2024 polls continue to show the presidential race remains on a knife-edge — well within the margin of error.

That’s true of recent national polls like NPR/PBS/Marist, which had Vice President Kamala Harris narrowly ahead of former President Donald Trump – 2 points among likely voters, 50%-48%, within the poll’s margin of error (plus or). . minus 3.7 percentage points).

This also applies to the polls in the contested states, which will ultimately decide the presidential election campaign.

Harris and Trump are essentially tied in the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, perhaps with a slight bias toward Trump. And while Harris has a slightly larger advantage in the Great Lakes states of Michigan and Wisconsin, those advantages are well within the bounds of possible polling error. And recent polls in key Pennsylvania – one of the most direct paths to 270 votes for Harris and Trump – appear to be a stepping stone.

What the surveys can tell us

Given polls’ tolerance for error, historically low voter response rates, and, yes, past polling errors, expecting precision from political polls has become a fool’s errand.

What we may However, public polling can be used to determine whether a race is close or not. And this race remains very close no matter how you look at it, with polls in all different states and nationally, including polls that have different assumptions about the 2024 electorate and use different weighting techniques.

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The surveys are also helpful in determining the trend of a breed. And this is a fundamentally different race than the one that existed before President Joe Biden abandoned his re-election campaign and endorsed Harris.

And the polls are useful for measuring a politician’s popularity: Most polls currently show Harris with more positive ratings than Trump, after her numbers rose sharply when she became a presidential candidate this summer.

That wasn’t the case when Biden was in the race.

What the surveys can’t tell us

But the polls can’t tell us whether a candidate will win a presidential race if he has a lead or a two-point lead in some polls, whether nationally or in key battleground states.

The 2024 race will ultimately be decided by voter turnout, final news events, how third-party/undecided voting differs, and other factors. Ultimately, it will come down to which candidate wins the key battleground states, which could amount to a difference of 10,000 or 20,000 votes – a margin too small to expect clear clarity in pre-election polls.