Old and busted: Can Kamala Harris win without Pennsylvania? New hotness: Can she win without Michigan?

We may be about to find out, according to the very latest poll to emerge out of the Wolverine State, as well as some other interesting data, both direct and indirect. Insider Advantage shows Donald Trump with a one-point edge over Harris in a poll conducted over the weekend. Trump leads 48/47 among 800 likely voters, and the same poll shows the open US Senate seat in a dead heat. 

Right now, the pollster has yet to produce any analysis of their data -- and their website is having trouble handling traffic, too. However, this lines up with the trending we have seen in RCP's aggregation for Michigan in the last couple of weeks. The last iterations of Bloomberg and Quinnipiac polls showed Harris leading by three and four points respectively, but six other polls in October show Trump ahead (including an earlier Quinnipiac iteration at Trump +4) and two others tied. The trends clearly seem to favor Trump, especially if one looks at late September as a starting point, when Trump led in half of the polls in the final week of that month. 

At the moment, Trump has a 0.1 point advantage in the RCP tracking, which is a measure of how impactful the Quinnipiac and Bloomberg results are on the aggregation. Nevertheless, don't forget that RCP's aggregation had Hillary Clinton ahead by seven full points on this date eight years ago and she still lost by 0.3 points. Four years ago, RCP had Biden up 8.6 points and only won the state by 2.8. Trump vastly outperformed the polling in both cycles.

Will that happen this time? Nate Silver also looks at Michigan today, which he acknowledges should be Harris' strongest blue state. Even in his weighted aggregation -- which doesn't include today's Insider Advantage results -- Michigan remains "barely better than a coin flip" for Harris:

Here’s why Democrats are understandably feeling insecure. Michigan remains Harris’s best swing state, and yet it's only barely better than a coin flip for her.

With that said, Michigan is traditionally the bluest of the Blue Wall states, and it’s one where some of the higher-quality pollsters have (with the exception of highly-rated AtlasIntel) shown Harris with some semblance of a real lead instead of a tie. It’s also had some of the more consistent polling throughout the cycle: Harris emerged with a lead in Michigan almost immediately after replacing Biden and has never relinquished it in our polling average.

Polls show Arab American voters, typically a Democratic group, instead splitting their votes about evenly between Harris and Trump. (Undoubtedly this reflects their critiques of Biden/Harris on the Israel-Palestine war.)  That’s more of an issue in Michigan which has the country’s largest share of Arab American residents. 

Maybe not, but as this interactive chart shows, Silver's data shows Trump with the momentum in his aggregation in all of the battleground states over the past month, including significant gains in Michigan. Trump also has the momentum over the past week in all of the battleground polling, save Wisconsin:

So how reliable is all of this data? One can assess it by seeing where Harris will spend her time on the day before her "closing argument" on the National Mall in Washington DC:

On Monday, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will be in Ann Arbor for a joint rally and concert series featuring a performance by singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers. Ahead of the rally, the vice president will be in Saginaw and Macomb, Michigan.

Harris' visit to Michigan will be her tenth since becoming the party's nominee. The state is still scarred by the loss of over a third of its auto-related jobs since 1990 and backed Trump in 2016, while Biden won by less than three percentage points in 2020.

The Democratic presidential campaign has over 375 staff members in the state, nearly four times Trump's, yet a FiveThirtyEight compilation of polls shows Harris has less than a one percentage point edge over the former president in the state.

It's desperation time. And keep this in mind, too -- time spent in Michigan is time not spent in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. At this stage of the campaign, those choices matter.