The final Marquette University Law School poll before Election Day shows Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by just 1 percentage point among likely Wisconsin voters.
That equates to a dead heat when considering the poll’s margin of error. The survey also found 5 percent of respondents are still undecided six days ahead of the conclusion of the race.
The Marquette University poll found 50 percent of respondents said they plan to vote for Harris while 49 percent plan to vote for Trump. That suggests a tighter race than what showed up in the law school’s last survey, released Oct. 2, which showed Harris leading Trump 52 to 48.
During a presentation, Wednesday, Marquette University Law School Pollster Charles Franklin said Wisconsin’s presidential election is essentially a coin flip.
“It should not surprise anyone if Donald Trump wins and it should not surprise anyone if Kamala Harris wins, because the polling, both ours and the polling averages for the state, which is under a 1 percent average margin right now, are just so close that polling is not going to help us at all to have confidence in who’s the likely winner,” Franklin said.
The survey found that third party candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, received around 9 percent. The share of respondents who said they would vote for Kennedy actually increased from 3 percent in late September to 5 percent in late October.
Kennedy suspended his campaign on Aug. 23 and endorsed Trump. He filed a lawsuit in Wisconsin aimed at removing his name from state ballots, which was rejected by the state Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court also rejected a petition from Kennedy to have his name removed from ballots on Tuesday.
Franklin said “one of the serious uncertainties” in the presidential race is whether that 9 percent of respondents favoring third party candidates stay the course or cast ballots for either Trump or Harris on election day.
“They could so easily tip this race one way or the other,” Franklin said.
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Wisconsin US Senate race tightens in final days of campaign
Like other Wisconsin surveys in recent weeks, Marquette’s latest poll shows a closer race between Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Republican banking executive Eric Hovde than polling suggested earlier this year.
Among registered voters, 51 percent said they plan to vote for Baldwin and 49 percent plan to vote for Hovde. The latest results show a marked shift the last Marquette survey which showed Baldwin leading Hovde by 7 percentage points.
Franklin said 7 percent of respondents remained undecided about who they would vote for in the Senate race, but when pushed to chose the group slightly leaned in Hovde’s direction.
Gender gap ‘a huge thing’ in presidential race
The Marquette poll results show a 26-point gender gap in the state’s presidential contest. Overall, men favored Trump by 12 percentage points and women favored Harris by 14 points.
Franklin said an interesting pattern arises when considering education levels as well. He said overall, non-college-educated men “very heavily” favor Trump, while non-college-educated women are about evenly split on Trump and Harris. However, Franklin said college-educated men were about evenly split on the candidates, while college-educated women are “very heavily pro-Harris.”
The Marquette Law School surveyed 834 registered voters in Wisconsin between Oct. 16 and Oct. 24. The poll has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
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