The São Paulo, Brazil-based data analytics and polling firm AtlasIntel has released its latest national popular vote poll for the upcoming US presidential election. In their last survey release in mid-September, Former President Donald Trump was leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 2.9 points. That was significant because the polling industry as a whole showed a major shift towards Harris since she became the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, while AtlasIntel showed the exact opposite.

AtlasIntel was the most accurate pollster in terms of the national vote in the last two election cycles, 2020 and 2022. They overestimated Joe Biden by 0.2 points in 2020, then overestimated the Republicans by 0.3 points in 2022.

Their latest poll came out this weekend, 19 October. In their head-to-head match-up, Donald Trump is still leading Kamala Harris in the popular vote, by 2.7 points this time.

That is a slight movement toward Vice President Harris’ direction, which again goes against the industry standard, which has shown a major shift toward President Trump in the same period. However, the 2.7-point victory still would be the biggest margin for Republicans in a presidential election since 1988; and would guarantee a decisive victory in the Electoral College as well.

AtlasIntel’s swing state polling is less favourable to President Trump. However, national polling is almost always more accurate than state polling given the larger sample size.

In the firm’s statewide polling, President Trump leads in Michigan by 2.9 points, in Pennsylvania by 2.5 points, and in Georgia by 1.7 points. Arizona and Nevada are essentially tied with a 0.1-point Harris lead; while the current Vice President is ahead in North Carolina by 1.7 points and in Wisconsin by 0.6 points.

If AtlasIntel were 100 per cent on the money, that would result in an Electoral College tie (the second in US history after 1800), which would throw the election to the state caucuses in the House of Representatives. However, given Donald Trump’s significant lead in the popular vote with the pollster, and the fact that when third-party candidates are also polled, Trump takes the lead in Arizona and Nevada, he is highly favoured to win according to the latest AtlasIntel release.

‘AtlasIntel was the most accurate pollster in terms of the national vote in the last two election cycles, 2020 and 2022’

It is not certain if the #1 polling firm will be releasing any new surveys before the election. Even if they will, President Trump has been constantly in the lead by 2.1–2.9 points in their last three national polls released over the course of the last three months, so a massive shift towards Harris is very unlikely.

AtlasIntel has also put out a batch of Senate polls, in which the Republican candidates are leading in Michigan and Pennsylvania, while the Democrat candidates are leading in Nevada, Arizona, and Wisconsin. Interestingly, they did not even ‘bother’ surveying Ohio, where polling aggregates show a very tight race with a slight Democrat advantage, but conventional wisdom suggests that Republicans will be able to win another Senate pickup in the state given President Trump’s popularity there.

So, if AtlasIntel is correct with their Senate race projections, Republicans would go into 2025 with 54 Senate seats. All analysts agree that the two Democrat seats in the deep red states of West Virginia and Montana will flip to the GOP.

As for national polling as a whole, Vice President Harris’ lead in the RealClearPolitics aggregate has been cut down from its peak of 2.2 points to just 0.9 points. That is great news for Trump for two reasons. First off, at this point into his last two election cycles, he was underestimated in the RCP aggregate by 3 points in 2020 and 4.1 points in 2016. Two, even if Harris were to win the popular vote by less than a point, Trump would still likely win the Electoral College, and thus the election.

And the betting markets seem to agree.

On Polymarket, the world’s most popular decentralized prediction market, traders give President Trump a 61.4 per cent chance to win, as of the time of writing this.

All major bookmakers also offer odds with Donald Trump as the clear favourite. It seems that Donald Trump is well on his way to becoming the second President in American history to serve two non-consecutive term after Grover Cleveland.

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