Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump stayed deadlocked to the finish in the final New York Times/Siena College polls of the 2024 presidential election, though there may be a hint that she has ticked up in the final stretch.

The race remains essentially even across the seven states likeliest to decide the presidency.

The final Times/Siena battleground poll results indicate:

Arizona: Trump +4

Georgia: Harris +1

Michigan: Trump +1

Nevada: Harris +3

North Carolina: Harris +3

Pennsylvania: Even

Wisconsin: Harris +3

Usually, the final polls point toward a relatively clear favorite, even if that candidate doesn’t go on to win. This will not be one of those elections.

While the overall poll result is largely unchanged since the previous wave of battleground polls, there were some notable shifts. The long-standing gap between the Northern and Sun Belt battlegrounds narrowed considerably, with Harris faring better than before among young, Black and Hispanic voters, while Trump gained among white voters without a degree.

Harris led Black voters, 84% to 11%, up from 80-14 in the last wave of Times/Siena state polls. Similarly, she led among Hispanic voters, 56-35, up from 55-41.

The overall effect of these swings is somewhat contradictory. On average, Harris fared modestly better than in the last round of surveys of the same states, but her gains were concentrated in states where she was previously struggling. Meanwhile, the “blue wall” (Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) does not look quite as formidable of an obstacle to Trump as it once did. As a result, Harris’ position in the Electoral College isn’t necessarily improved.

The survey does offer a clue that voters have been shifting down the stretch. Voters were asked when they decided to support their candidate. Among those who said they decided over “the last few days,” Harris had a 58-42 lead — including leading, 66-34, among late deciders in the Sun Belt, while Trump led, 60-40, among late deciders in the North.

A word of caution: Hypothetically, many of these “late deciders” might have told a pollster earlier that they were Harris voters — if only they had been called at the time and asked to formulate an opinion they hadn’t yet made. As a result, the responses to this question don’t necessarily explain the shift in the polls — even if they do align with the trend in this case.

That said, if the race did shift toward Harris, it wouldn’t be hard to explain. The news over the past two weeks hasn’t been great for Trump, from his former chief of staff John Kelly saying he meets the definition of a fascist to a speaker at Trump’s event at Madison Square Garden calling Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.”

In an election when a sliver of voters are torn between two candidates they see as having major weaknesses, it can be a big deal when the news focuses them mostly on one side’s liabilities.

One of Harris’ best results among battleground polls: a 3-point lead in Nevada.

Of all the key states, Nevada has arguably produced some of the worst Times/Siena poll results of the cycle for Democrats. Before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, polling had him losing to Trump by double digits.

More recently, Nevada has given Democrats some of their most disappointing numbers in early voting, with Republicans leading in the one state where early voting has tended to be a useful indicator of the outcome.

The Times/Siena poll does reflect the Republican advantage in early voting. Republicans have a 2-point edge by party registration among early voters in the Times/Siena poll in Nevada, but early voters overall nonetheless say they back Harris by 5 points, as she has a wide lead among unaffiliated voters who cast early ballots.

The voters who remain to vote are better for Trump, but there are plenty of Democrats who seem likely to vote as well. Many say they have done so; perhaps their outstanding mail ballots — everyone in Nevada is sent one — are sitting on the kitchen table or somewhere in the postal system.

The pattern is fairly similar across the battlegrounds: Democrats lead in early voting; Republicans lead with what remains, and in each case it’s not by the sweeping margins of four years ago, when the pandemic upended the usual early voting patterns.

To some extent, the diminished Democratic early voting edge can be interpreted as a return to the preelection norm, but in many places — like Nevada — Republicans seem to be doing even better.