If the 2024 United States presidential election were held today, vice-president Kamala Harris would win by the narrowest of margins over former president Donald Trump, according to the latest poll by Mainstreet Research—a Canadian polling firm that teamed up with Florida Atlantic University’s Political Communication and Public Opinion Research Lab to monitor the coming Nov. 5 vote south of the border.
Their results released on Monday, Oct. 28 show a slim Harris victory with 48 percent of the vote, compared with 47 percent for Trump.
It’s the latest in a series of national U.S. election polls conducted by the cross-border collaboration since Toronto-based Mainstreet and FAU began to monitor voter sentiment earlier this year, in what Mainstreet vice-president Steven Pinkus describes as the closest race he has ever tracked on this continent.
Pinkus—who’s an insider with the Liberal Party of Canada—and his team focused on Harris’ efforts to win back more Black voters back to the Democrats, and on Trump’s courting of white, non-college-educated men.

The poll used text messaging, along with an online survey, to sample 937 registered voters lliving in the U.S. between Oct. 20 to Oct. 27, Pinkus told The CJN. (Since the poll was partially completed online, Mainstreet said a margin of error cannot be assigned, but normally it would have a margin of error of +/- 3.2 percent, with a 95 percent confidence level.
Ellin Bessner asked Pinkus to explain how the Jewish vote, and the Israel/Gaza issue factors into the U.S. election, and to discuss who is better for Canada, and outline why they won’t know the final results for some time after the polls close on Nov. 5.
(And stay tuned to The CJN Daily podcast for more coverage that’s uniquely catered to our audience in Jewish Canada.)
Mainstreet’s polling methodology
Steven Pinkus: I spend a lot of the winters in Florida, near Boca Raton and that’s where Florida Atlantic University is located. Back in 2016, I noticed that they were doing a little bit of polling. Being heavily involved in polling here in Canada, we had a lot of politicians here in Canada that were interested in what was going on. They were a little perplexed as to where a guy like Donald Trump was going to come up. So I just called the university and said, ‘Listen, I’m in the neighbourhood and we do polling in Canada and we have a lot of clients that are just trying to figure out what’s going on and they would like us to explain it to them.’ Fast forward eight years. We were looking at how to maybe collaborate on a project together, and then this political year came up and it was just irresistible. It’s so provocative. It’s so interesting. It’s unlike any other election year that we’ve seen, especially given the fallout of 2020. The interest is way off the charts. So we decided to collaborate. They’ve put together a political communications laboratory. They call it the PolCom Lab. It’s jointly branded as FAU and Mainstreet Research. We’ve got a half a dozen PhDs from their side, and all our people and our experience from our side. And it became a very, very interesting collaboration.
Ellin Bessner: What kind of surveys are they?
SP: It’s evolved over the years. We used to do all random dialling and landlines back in the day when everybody had landlines. Today, we’ve had to build up our databases of cell phones, and we do a combination of interactive voice responses. We record the questions and people can answer: Dial one, dial two, dial three, dial four.
Another way we do it, we now have added a component of texting, where we go by cell phones. It’s a lot easier to get responses, especially from young people. And we ask all kinds of questions that generate demographics, age, gender, race, always striving for the randomness and a proper distribution across demographics.
EB: The American system of elections is different from Canada’s. How do you measure an election in the U.S. when it has things like electoral colleges and major states?
SP: Well, it’s a challenge to be sure. It’s very, very different, but we have our friends at FAU who understand it very well. In Canada it’s riding by riding; in the U.S. it is state by state. Popular vote only counts for a little bit. In the United States it’s conventional wisdom that says the Democrats must win by four or five percent in the popular vote in order to have sufficient margins that they can carry a large enough number of states and electoral college votes, which vary state by state, right? So California has the most (electoral college votes). Vermont, North Dakota, all have a minimum of three. The (candidates) have to get 270 electoral college votes. That’s because there are 538 total votes and they need an absolute majority, 270. What it really comes down to, as odd as it may sound, is basically we all know how New York is going to go. We know how California is going to go. If you win California by one vote or by five million votes, the 59 electoral votes from California, they go. It’s all or nothing. Same with New York. Same with Florida. Same with all these states. So really, out of the 50 states, 43 of them are givens. When we’re polling, we have to see how seven states are going to go?
If you’re watching the media, they’re telling you there could be 75,000 votes distributed across those seven states out of a country of 350 million that are going to determine the eventual winner.
EB: What are the seven states?
SP: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. And then to that, we’ll add Arizona and Nevada. North Carolina and Georgia. And now as we’re getting closer, it’s coming down to the key three, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.
EB: What are the issues that people are telling you are important, that will be the game changers for this election?
SP: I think that not only in the United States—but we’re seeing it in Canada, we’ve seen it in Europe—a lot of the incumbent leaders have been really socked by inflation. And voters go back and they look at four years ago under Trump, when it wasn’t like that. But under Biden, it is. It’s not really the fault of any of the incumbents. It’s just that they had to make people survive the pandemic that year and a half, two years, and they pumped all this money into the economy and inflation ensued.
You can draw a direct correlation between the pandemic, when governments all over the Western world pumped huge amounts of money into the economies to basically allow people to survive when they couldn’t go to work. And people had it, strangely enough, economically, they had it pretty good, right? They didn’t have to go to work or they worked from home. They didn’t go out to restaurants. They didn’t have to entertain their families.
They didn’t pay as much for gas for their cars. So even though their net income was reduced by about 20 percent, their expenses were reduced by even more.But pumping that much money into the economy, in the U.S., and in Canada, what happened was that there was a direct cause and effect and inflation ensued. And then you had the impact on supply chains, which also forced prices up.
So now wages are trying to keep up with the cost of living, but people are unhappy because they go to their grocery stores every week and they say “My God! Look at the cost of beef, look at the cost of eggs, look at the cost of milk, look at the cost of everything!’
EB: Affordability is a huge issue. What’s the second one?
SP: Housing. Which is the same thing.
EB: What about immigration?
SP: That’s interesting. You’d think that the Hispanic population, for example, would be very sympathetic to those migrants. Not really so. When you look at the demographics in the U.S., Blacks tended to vote Democrat. But when you look at Hispanics, there is a wide range of Hispanic populations. So Cubans are not Mexicans, are not Puerto Ricans, are not Colombians, are not Venezuelans. You can’t say, ‘Hispanics go in a certain direction.’
For example, South Florida has a lot of Cubans. A lot of Cubans came in the 1960s and ‘70s. They felt that they’ve earned their place in American society. They see themselves as Cubans, but Americans. And if you ask them how they feel about all this immigration, they’re against it. They’re saying, ‘Why should these people come in and get all the benefits? I worked hard. I have a house. I put my kids to college. I make a good living. I’ve achieved the middle class lifestyle. I like where I am, but I worked hard to get it. Why should all these people come from across our borders and try to get the same things that I got?’
To say that Hispanics would be in favor of all these other Hispanics coming into the country. It’s not really true.
EB: So you have been polling the U.S. since when?
SP: For the U.S. national elections and states—we’ve done some states too—we got seriously into it for this election cycle, probably in January.
EB: The latest polls that your company has show Kamala Harris with a 55 percent probability of winning. It’s very close to a toss up. Why is it a toss up? Why is it so close?
SP: It’s so close because as I said, 43 of the states, the outcomes are given. And it’s those seven states and really those three states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, where it seems to be always sort of devolving to those three states. The big fight in 2020 was Trump yelling at the people in Georgia saying, ‘Find me 11,000 votes.’ He lost Georgia by 11,000 votes. Some of the states were closer. So when we look at Pennsylvania, as of today, it’s seven-tenths of 1 percent for Harris.
If we look at Michigan, seven-tenths of 1 percent for Harris and Wisconsin, half a percent.
Harris had a lead three or four weeks ago, substantially more than that. She was up two and a half points, sometimes more, depending on the state. And now the race has narrowed significantly.
Election evening anxieties
EB: In Canada, you usually know within a couple of hours who’s won. The same day the polls close. Is that the case in this coming election in the U.S.? How long will it take, do you think? And then there’s the whole other factor of if the loser will capitulate…
SP: It’s 50 separate elections. Each state is run autonomously. They have a whole election apparatus. And so the rules are different for every state. So if you look at California, they close later. But on the other hand, it’s a runaway win, usually for Democrats. But they may not know the results in Pennsylvania for a couple of days.
EB: Do any of the convictions that Trump has had in the courts, his tax evasion, his Jan. 6 riots, his impeachments, does anyone care about that now?
SP: They care. I would say this. Given what we talked about in terms of inflation, cost of housing, immigration, if anybody else was running for the Republicans, they’d probably be winning by a much more comfortable margin. Trump is so off the wall and he’s saying such crazy things that a lot of people are reticent to vote for him because they worry, and they worry about Jan. 6, and they worry about a lot of other things and yet he’s still that close and that’s because of the antipathy not to Harris necessarily but to the incumbency and things are just tougher. I’ve heard it so many times ‘I know he’s crazy. I know he’s this, I know he’s that.’ I won’t use the words they’re using. They know, but not everybody’s a sophisticated economist where they connect the dots between the money that was pumped in to support people during the pandemic and the inflation that it caused. And there is that famous question in politics, ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ Most people think they’re not.
EB: He’s lying about a lot of things. He talks about crime being up. It’s not. And he talks about how he was the best president they ever had. No. And COVID and all these crazy wacko theories and nobody seems to care. And look what’s going on with the recent hurricane response. What are they saying about the hurricane?
SP: It’s unbelievable. People are buying into it. You know, he’s said the government response has been inadequate. They’re telling people the FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) will come and they’ll give you $750 and that’ll be it. And then they’re going to come and seize your house, and people are buying it in rural North Carolina.
North Carolina was very much in play before Hurricane Helene. It was very, very close.
He had a crazy Republican running for governor that was probably going to drag Trump under. It’s no longer the case. You know, you don’t hear about Mark Robinson anymore. He is running for governor (against Josh Stein, former attorney-general). Robinson is a Black man saying he’s in favor of slavery. I mean, seriously? But it’s not a factor anymore. I mean, he’ll lose his election, but it won’t affect Trump.
There’s a lot of things being said and done in this election that would kill any other candidate and Trump is rising above it. If it was Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley or a couple of other Republicans running instead of Trump, they’d be way ahead because of economics, because of inflation, because of housing, because of immigration. Those issues would resonate a lot more.
Meanwhile in Canada… and Israel
EB: Trump said to the U.S. Jews, if you vote for the Democrats, then you’re traitors. How is the Jewish question and Israel question polling in your results so far?
SP: Well, we haven’t specifically polled Jewish voters in the U.S. But the one state where the Arab vote is a big factor is Michigan. So it’ll be interesting to watch that. One of the Trump campaign’s political action committees—is running ads in Dearborn and other Arab areas to the effect that (the current Second Gentleman) Doug Emhoff is Jewish, and therefore Kamala Harris is going to be more favourably disposed to Israel and to the Jewish vote.
EB: And you think that would be against the against the Republicans because they’re for Israel and pro-Israel?
SP: No. They’re running it in the Arab neighborhoods to upset the Arabs.
EB: But Trump is more pro-Israel than she is! That’s the perception.
SP: No, it’s true.
EB: OK, fine. You know, Trump is a better friend to Netanyahu than Biden.
SP: Yes, that’s true. He is certainly more friendly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They asked Harris directly, ‘Is Netanyahu an ally?’ She said ‘Israel’s an ally’.
EB: Who’s better for Canada? Is international relations with Canada at all an issue?
SP: No. But it depends. Justin Trudeau is the prime minister right now. You’d think that he would be more naturally inclined to work with a Democratic administration. Is he going to be prime minister in January? Unlikely.
EB: So you ask: how will the dynamic work between potentially Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump next year? Trump barely came here when he was elected. We were the one of the last state visits. He did not get along with Justin Trudeau. He went to Mexico first.
SP: And I don’t see that that would be any different. Now, we’re not on their radar.
EB: Except that Trump wants to rewrite the USMCA, the old NAFTA (Free Trade agreement)
SP: And they will to the Canadian detriment. Well, we’ll see. If there’s a better dynamic–and I’m not suggesting that people should vote one way or the other—but if there’s a better dynamic because politically, Pierre Poilievre is better aligned with Donald Trump, it might make it easier. If on the other hand, Poilievre is up against Kamala Harris, who knows?
EB: Are you seeing from your polling a general trend towards away from ‘wokeism’. Do people want to go back to ‘the way things were’?
SP: You’ve got a lot of whites who yearn for the days where they were really in control. They miss the days when they were the dominant political force, which in the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s was the case. Not so much anymore. Because now if you take the aggregate of all the minorities, they outnumber the whites. They’re not monolithic, but there’s that. And Trump speaks very much to them. People scratch their heads and say he’s only playing to his base. And then he talks to the middle-class Black voter who’s having trouble making ends meet. Young people are going for Trump in far greater numbers. Why? They can’t buy their homes. They want to buy their homes. They remember four years ago they could. Now they can’t. Inflation’s gotten away from them. Yeah, the market’s doing well. The job market is doing well. But for the average white working-class guy, who is 30 or 35 years old, which is right around the time when he should be owning his own home, and this is out of reach for them. And that’s a big, big factor in what we’re seeing.