Yesterday, after church, I couldn’t resist the temptation to take a peek at the latest surveys and what the pundits were gleaning from them.

Pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris retained her microscopic 0.9 lead in the popular vote, although former President Donald Trump is up (by an equally small number) in five of the latest eight polls.

Mr. Trumps leads in all seven of the top battleground states—Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia—by an average of one point.

How about the results on Monday?

USA Today/ Suffolk has Harris up by one point in the popular vote, raising her “lead” from 0.9 to 1. Trump is ahead by the same 1 point in the top battleground states. Close anyone?

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Over at the Wall Street Journal  Mark Penn, chairman of the Harris Poll and a pollster and a former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has an opinion piece headlined “Donald Trump Has the Edge for Now: Voters think he did a better job on the economy and foreign policy. But don’t count Harris out.”

He writes

The reason Mr. Trump has a slight edge is straightforward: He dominates on the core issues that people say they care about most. He holds a 12-point lead over Kamala Harris on which candidate would do a better job on immigration, and a 4-point lead on both inflation and crime, according to the October 2024 Harvard CAPS/Harris poll. Such core domestic issues are usually what determines who gets elected, and Mr. Trump leads in all three of this election cycle’s top concerns.

The second reason for Mr. Trump’s advantage is that voters have more confidence in him on the issues of war and peace. Seventy percent of voters believe he has sufficient experience in foreign affairs, and he leads significantly in polling about which candidate would do a better job on the war in Ukraine, relations with China, and the war between Israel and Hamas.

Mr. Trump also has an edge over Ms. Harris because he has reduced the Democrats’ lead among black and Latino voters, especially among men. He has adopted a successful strategy of finding niche issues in key swing states—no tax on tips in Nevada, fracking in Pennsylvania and saving auto-manufacturing jobs in Michigan. Latino voters have particularly high levels of concern about the economy, and Mr. Trump has closed the electoral gap from a 25 point Democratic advantage in 2020 to just 12 points averaged from the past two months.

Nate Silver is always closely watched—he is “a renowned polling expert, statistician, and author of the ‘Silver Bulletin,’” according to Brian Stelter, writing at Vanity Fair.

Under the headline, “24 reasons that Trump could win: If there’s a second Trump term, we won’t lack for explanations,” Silver began

This election remains extremely close, but Donald Trump has been gaining ground. One of my pet peeves is with the idea that this is Kamala Harris’s election to lose. I could articulate some critiques of her campaign, but if you study the factors that have historically determined elections, you’ll see that she’s battling difficult circumstances

I’ll just list a few, although it is very much worth taking the time to read them all.

#1&2:

“Harris is the favorite to win the popular vote, but the Electoral College bias favors Republicans by about 2 percentage points. In an era of intense partisanship and close elections, this is inherently difficult for Democrats to overcome.

“Inflation hit a peak of 9.1 percentage points in June 2022. It has abated now, but prices remain much higher than when Biden took office, and voters are historically highly sensitive to inflation. Democrats can also plausibly be blamed for it given intensive increases in government spending during COVID recovery efforts.”

A big part of the reason Democrats usually win the popular vote is they have gigantic majorities in blue states such as New York and California. Trump has taken the time to campaign multiple times in both states. As for inflation, that is a killer, as anyone who shops for groceries knows.

#3-5

Illegal/unauthorized immigration increased substantially during the first few years of the Biden/Harris administration amid a rising global backlash to immigration.

Harris ran far to her left in 2019, adopting many unpopular positions, and doesn’t really have a viable strategy for explaining her changing stances. …

Democrats’ dominance among Black voters and other    racial and ethnic minority groups is slipping.

Harris is on the wrong side of most of the major issues—and by a wide margin.

#6-8

The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has become a huge Trump fan and is doing everything in his power to tip the election to him. ….

Trump was very nearly killed in an assassination attempt, and then there was a second one against him. The first attempt was closely correlated with an increase in favorability ratings for Trump, and polling shows he’s considerably more popular and sympathetic than in 2016 or 2020.

Harris has been running on vibes and has failed to articulate a clear vision for the country. It might have been a good strategy if the “fundamentals” favored her, but they don’t.

Musk’s contributions cannot be overstated, particularly opening up Twitter/X.

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.