The polling results mark a surprising shift toward Trump despite a long over 12-year history of a majority of Notre Dame students preferring the Democratic nominee for president.

A 2020 Notre Dame Student Government mock election results showed that 66 percent of students favored Joe Biden for president while only 29 percent preferred Trump.

A 2016 mock election showed that 59 percent favored Hillary Clinton and only 24 percent selected Trump.

The poll demonstrated a gender divide among the student body between those supporting Trump versus Harris.

Fifty-seven percent of men chose Trump while 35 percent of men chose Harris. Likewise, 57 percent of women on campus supported Harris with only 38 percent supporting Trump.

Harris needs support from Catholic voters if she is going to win important swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

The poll of students at Notre Dame is different than slightly different than polls of American Catholic voters overall.

An EWTN/RealClearPolitics poll of Catholic voters showed that 50 percent of Catholic voters plan to support Kamala Harris for President, while 43 percent support Trump.

The poll featuring 1,000 Catholic voters was conducted August 28-30, 2024 with a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

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Donald Trump opens up big lead in our election model: Are Kamala Harris’ best weeks behind her and where are the 27,000 voters who could decide who wins?

Kamala Harris may have enjoyed her most successful campaign weeks, according to our J.L. Partners/DailyMail.com election model which shows Donald Trump opening up a 10-point lead.

The model crunches all the latest poll data, as well as decades worth of election results plus economic indicators, to calculate who has the best chance of winning the electoral college in November.

It still shows Harris with the best chance of claiming victory in the popular vote (it gives her 50.8 percent support now and a 65 percent chance of finishing with more votes in November).

But state-by-state numbers all show the Blue Wall of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan tilting towards Trump, giving him the overall advantage when it comes to winning the White House.

It gives him a 55.2 percent chance of victory. Harris is on 44.6 percent, with a very small chance of a tie.

The best way to understand what it all means is to imagine running the model multiple times with all the different permutations and combinations for all the different states. When all of those are run, Trump wins on average 55.2 percent of the time.

That is an increase of four points since Monday and nine points since his post-debate low.

Either way, it shows the race will be close despite the monumental events of the past two months or so, when President Joe Biden dropped out to be replaced by Harris, and Trump survived two assassination attempts.

Callum Hunter, data scientist at J.L. Partners, said a lot could happen between now and Election Day, but the current trend was clear.

‘Things are continuing to move against Harris,’ he said.

‘While September saw her gain ground as a result of the debate and changes in ballot access, things have started to settle back to where they were at the start of September.

‘If current trends continue (although these have only been in place for a week or so) then we may see Trump take a more concrete lead in the race over the coming few weeks.

‘September seems to have been Harris’ high point and trends suggest that this high has come to an end.’

Vice President Kamala Harris has fallen behind former President Donald Trump in our election model. But things are still tight and she is the favorite to win the popular vote in November

Harris enjoyed record-breaking fundraising immediately after entering the race. And her poll numbers boosted.

She also bested Trump, by most measures, in their debate earlier this month.

But the election model suggests that her advantage in the popular vote is balanced by Trump’s support in some of the states that will decide the outcome.

So the model suggests Pennsylvania has moved further into the Trump column. his probability of winning state is now 58 percent, an eight-point increase on where he stood immediately after the debate.

Trump’s probability of winning Pennsylvania has increased again and now stands at around 58% – an 8 point improvement on his post-debate low of 50%.

Yet as things stand, he leads by less than one-point of the vote in the state, or about 27,000 voters.

They could be the ones who ultimately decide who occupies the White House in January because if the model is tweaked to give Pennsylvania to Trump, then the former president wins election 100 percent of the time.

Other election models show things moving in Trump’s direction after a number of positive polls.

A national Quinnipiac Poll showed him one point ahead and a New York Times/Siena Poll gave him the lead in the critical Sun Belt states of Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia.

For now, the result is that Trump simply has more paths to power than his rival.