Comparison of the 3 main polling conglomerates current election predictions (From left to right in more ways than one: Five Thirty Eight, The Hill Decision Desk HQ, and Real Clear Politics)
538 predicts a 2020 sized Harris victory, Georgia and North Carolina flip.
THQ predicts a tight Harris win, mostly in the Rust Belt & maybe a NC grab?
RCP predicts a tight Trump victory via Pennsylvania.
All 3 agree on Georgia going red and Michigan and Wisconsin going blue. Those states have held their colors firm for quite some time.
I do find it interesting that despite the usual narrative and older polls, North Carolina is very widely being put to the left of Georgia in many recent polls. I also find it interesting that according to this, it might be less red than somewhere like Nevada(which is very odd indeed as North Carolina went red both times for Trump and Nevada went blue both times).
The governor is a popularly elected position; parties can't gerrymander their way out of that. Roy Cooper--the governor of NC--is a Democrat. So even if the Republican party can gerrymander the shit out of the state to keep control of the legislative body, they can't take the governor's position.
OTOH, Kemp annihilated Stacy Abrams twice in a row. The first time it was a little close. This last time it wasn't.
As always with polling predictions, it's a big if. So, if the elections were to happen right now and Nate Silver's model is completely accurate (it's obviously not; no model is) then the results would be 303 Kamala Harris to 235 Donald Trump.
Personally, Morris’ model at 538 had such a questionable take on Biden vs Trump it shook my faith in it. I still think it’s good as a polling aggregator, and its tools (such as the interactive map) are pretty solid, but I decided that $10 per month was acceptable to get access to a model I think has a more realistic take on the election.
538’s new model is untested, and for all I know it could be accurate. However, it still has some takes I find extremely unlikely.
Nate Silver’s model (in my opinion) paints a more realistic picture of what to expect; despite Harris’s qualifications and Democrats extremely high enthusiasm, it remains an uphill battle because of the electoral college.
Mostly what I've heard, though 538 tends to scew slightly blue overall (a half a point off in 2018, obviously off in 2016 and 2020. Favored them in 2022 though), RCP the opposite, and The Hill RRQ is one of the most neutral options. (Albeit they don't update as often as I wish they did so they aren't as good moment to moment).
Georgia is the only state they all agree going red so yeah. The Hill and RCP have straight up never put it blue, 538 did for one day about a week and a half ago by 0.2 and then undid it the next day (just poll drop timing).
FiveThirtyEight was one of the few outlets reporting that Trump had almost a 40% chance of winning going into the 2016 election, while most other outlets were predicting a landslide for Clinton. Keep in mind that saying someone has a 62% chance of winning doesn't mean they will win; it means that it's basically a coin flip. And Clinton won the popular election (by a lot!), but lost in key states to lose in the electoral college. So, IMO, they didn't get it wrong, but people misinterpreted what they said.
(The moral there is that even if Harris ends up favored to win, 6:4, fuckin' VOTE like your civil rights depends on it!)
Given that Kemp handily beat Abrams for Governor, and Governor is a popular vote, it's a pretty good indicator that the state as a whole still strongly skews Republican. (And why oh why did Dems nominate her a second time, when Kemp beat her the 1st time? The voters already told Dems they didn't want her, so why run her again...? Fucking stupid.)