With a whopping 19 Electoral College votes, Pennsylvania boasts the largest portion of electors for any battleground state. It also represents the shortest path to either candidate earning the 270 votes needed for the presidency. The time and treasure being expended by both the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigns in the Keystone State swamps the spending in other battlegrounds; yet the outcome remains a mystery. There are, however, a few clues worth examining.

Forget the Headlines

The Fourth Estate is treating polls like a kid at Christmas who discovers his stocking filled with candy: It is gorging. And, like that greedy youngster, it is making itself nauseated. With double-takes and head spins as each new survey puts one candidate or the other in the lead, it seems that a proper analysis of the data is either beyond the media’s capability or deemed damaging to headline generation.

Indeed, it seems apparent that the constant back-and-forth between the two candidates provides rich fodder for the news media, but missing is any concrete information. So, what do we know for sure? There are three key areas where we can drill down into what’s happening in the battleground states, and more specifically, Pennsylvania: cash, people, and filtered polling. Let’s consider each in turn.

Show Me the Money!

As far as clues go, cold, hard cash often wins the day. We can divide the dollar question into two neat parts: what the campaigns are spending and what the money bettors are laying out.

Campaign Cash: According to The New York Times, the Harris and Trump campaigns are spending a total of $350 million in television ads alone to shore up support in Pennsylvania. That’s more than double the combined total spent on the next largest recipient, Michigan. But TV is just the tip of the iceberg.

Online ads and Super PAC funds are also part of the heady mix. Thanks to a rule change by the Federal Elections Commission in June, a torrent of work dollars are flooding the streets of the Commonwealth. As Liberty Nation News recently reported:

“Traditionally, campaigns would pay staff or rely on volunteers to pound the pavements and speak to voters in key neighborhoods … What this [rule change] means in practice is that outside groups can spend their own time and treasure hitting the sidewalks, freeing up resources for campaigns to spend elsewhere. And that’s precisely what is happening now.”

Elon Musk’s PAC is currently offering $47 to people for each registered swing-state voter they refer to an online petition. “This program is exclusively open to registered voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina,” the PAC said. The petition in question asks folks to affirm that they support the First and Second Amendments. The PAC’s stated goal is to “get 1 million registered voters in swing states to sign in support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”

With PACs on both sides of the contest unshackled to spend their cash in new and innovative ways, Pennsylvania is ground zero for the fiscal tsunami.

Betting Markets: It is no secret that folks trust the betting markets a lot more than polling. For one reason, it takes commitment to make a cash bet on an election; for another, it’s a marker of confidence.

The odds for each contender have flickered back and forth since Harris became the nominee, but recent betting action suggests that all the momentum is with the former president. As reported by USA Today, “The Trump campaign appeared to get an additional boost during the weekend after Trump returned to Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman tried to assassinate him in July. As of Wednesday (Oct. 9) at 12 p.m. ET, bettors on Polymarket gave Trump a 53.2% chance of winning the election, his best odds since early August.”

The outlet even identifies the primary driver behind this recent surge: an “influx of bets that raised the probability of Trump winning Pennsylvania.”

Pennsylvania People

Perhaps even more important than dollars spent on the trail is how a campaign uses its most valuable assets: people. Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have expended considerable time in Pennsylvania, as have their surrogates. Even before President Joe Biden quit the race, he and 45 were becoming regular visitors.

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is reportedly spending more time in the Keystone State than in any other swing state. It also seems that Musk will be devoting his own time and treasure to setting up camp in PA, presumably to continue his advocacy that began in earnest at the rally marking Trump’s return to the scene of the first assassination attempt in Butler County.

Harris, according to The Times, spent one-in-three September days in the Commonwealth; it was also the location of her VP announcement. And, notably, it will be the scene of Barack Obama’s first campaign rally for the current vice president.

Cliff Maloney, leader of a Republican outreach effort, said, “It’s the center of the universe.” And with all the cash and big names flying in and out, it seems a fair assessment of the electoral landscape. So why is reliable poll data so hard to find?

Parsing the Polls

With polls swinging back and forth depending on the pollster, the day of the week, and seemingly the direction of the wind, figuring out trends is often a fool’s errand. Yet homing in on core factors within defined parameters may offer a clearer picture than the scattergun approach favored by the media.

Currently, an average of polls across the seven key swing states shows Trump with a razor-thin +0.2% advantage over Harris; he leads in four states, she in three. Should we filter the battleground polls, we can arrive at a clearer and potentially more precise picture.

For this analysis, we counted only polls conducted from the beginning of September onward and those that had a margin of error of 3% or lower and did not include polls with fewer than 600 respondents.

Here are the results:

• Georgia – Trump +1.0%
• North Carolina – Trump +0.3 %
• Pennsylvania – Harris +0.6%
• Michigan – Trump +0.75%
• Wisconsin – Tie
• Arizona – Trump +0.4%
• Nevada – Harris +0.4%

Notably, fine-tuning the polls results in a flip to Trump in Michigan and puts Wisconsin out of Kamala’s hands into a tie. Also, both Trump’s lead in Arizona and Harris’ lead in Nevada shrunk by roughly a point each.

There are, of course, many ways to filter polling, and certainly a number of ways one could do so to arrive at a desired conclusion. For example, one could count only polls from the last three weeks using the same filters, and the result would be six states for Trump and just Nevada for Harris.

All this to say, the polling race remains close, and it will be the efforts on the ground in Pennsylvania that ultimately determine who wins the state. And perhaps the presidency.