Stop stressing about the polls. Watch these four indicators in the election

For the first time in two months, the presidential election is actually set.

There are sure to be lots more surprises — and nail biting — to come, though.

Here are five themes and questions to think about for this fall:

1. Don’t stress about the polls

This is the time of year when people who already know who they are going to vote for begin to get nervous and start becoming amateur horse-race poll watchers.

Stop it.

Survey research exists, and it’s largely pretty good. NPR keeps an eye on it and even conducts our own to get a better sense of how people are feeling about the candidates, policy, politics and society. But what all the polls show are two things:

1. Vice President Harris is performing better than President Biden was just before he dropped out of the race. She’s gained on average anywhere from 4 to 6 points in swing-state polls, boosting her in the big seven swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (in the so-called Blue Wall), and has drawn support even in the Sun Belt states of North Carolina and Georgia in the East and Arizona and Nevada out West.
2. The race is very close, and that’s not likely going to change.

That’s all, for now, that anyone needs to know about the candidates’ standing in the polls. No one knows exactly who is going to show up, the polls you see aren’t meant to be predictive, and they all have margins of error of about 3 to 4 points, meaning results could actually be about 3 or more points lower or higher.

That’s a 7-to-8-point potential swing in good surveys, so if things are this close, realize that the game isn’t played on your computer screen looking at polling aggregator sites or reading data geeks’ interpretations of the crosstabs. It’s about activism, mobilization, and, frankly, how Harris performs — because views of former President Donald Trump are pretty locked in.

2. Does Harris continue her momentum and hold steady, or does something change the dynamic?

The Democratic convention is over and, with it, Harris’ acceptance speech. That address is a pillar moment in any presidential campaign.

Harris then passed a key, basic test last Thursday with her first interview since getting into the race five weeks ago. So far, she’s had about as good a rollout as she could have hoped for. Until the interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, though, almost everything she had done was highly scripted.

Now that the introductory period is over, there is going to likely be increased scrutiny on Harris’ record and policy proposals. The next big test will be the Sept. 10 debate with Trump. Part of her task in the next two months is to keep her base intact and fired up — and to target the middle. So far, she’s done that.

Republicans have been critical of positions Harris has taken in this campaign that are at odds with her presidential campaign in 2019, when she was trying to win over progressives on things like fracking, immigration and more. She has to figure out the best ways to explain her change, which she started to do in her interview Thursday. We’ll see how crisp she is in talking about them at the debate.

Will any of those attacks stick? That will be clearer a couple of weeks after the debate when views settle again. But they’d have a better chance of landing with voters if she weren’t running against Trump, who has been all over the map on multiple issues.

3. Who does best in the debate(s)?

The first debate will likely be a pretty big audience, likely one of the largest of the campaign, and perhaps very consequential. Consider that the debate between Trump and Biden effectively ended Biden’s candidacy for reelection.

While the debate brings increased scrutiny on Harris’ policy positions and her proposals, it also presents considerable risk to Trump.

Trump, in that first debate against Biden, meandered and told a raft of lies. But Biden’s poor performance overshadowed all that, and Trump largely escaped scrutiny.

At Trump’s press conference in early August, NPR found 162 lies or distortions in 64 minutes, more than two a minute. Harris, on the other hand, made a dozen statements during her 40-minute Democratic convention acceptance speech that were either misleading or lacking in context.

If Harris has a solid debate, the focus could be on Trump in a way he doesn’t want.

4. Who has the better turnout operation?

The campaigns have spent more than $1 billion on ads already and have knocked on millions of doors to talk with people about who they might prefer and trying to convince them to vote for their candidate.

But now, after Labor Day, is when it becomes all about mobilization. Early voting begins in a few weeks, and the campaigns will be urging their most reliable voters to go vote early to bank their support. Then, they will shift to targeting their moderately reliable voters and ones maybe leaning in their direction to try to get them to cast their ballots up until Election Day.

Democrats feel like they have an advantage over the Trump team because some of the GOP turnout effort is being outsourced to Turning Point USA, a group with very limited experience or success in doing this. Turning Point’s tactics have had some professional Republicans operatives irritated and nervous.

5. What issues motivate voters — or do they, at the end of the day?

Will views of the economy improve? Do abortion rights drive Democrats to the polls? Will immigration and crime break through for Republicans in the suburbs?

These are all valid and important questions, but some wonder how much policy will actually matter, considering this is a race involving Trump, who is such a polarizing figure.

As Biden likes to say, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” That’s certainly true in U.S. politics, which largely presents binary choices.

For as much as Trump ran as an outsider in the 2016 campaign, he’s now been on the political scene for almost a decade, and he’s 78 years old.

This election will likely come down to this:

Whether Republicans are able to home in on their advantages on the economy and immigration, or whether Harris can fire up voters angry with Trump over abortion and democracy and truly grab the mantle of change, despite being a sitting vice president.

“What we don't know about this election is whether any of these issues really matter,” said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist who worked in the White House for Harris for a year. “What might be true is that this is really an election about change versus more of the same. And if it's a change election, Harris is the candidate of change, and it's going to be hard to get people to move off of that.”