Poll shows Americans are anxious about presidential campaign

Four days until Americans decide, most voters are feeling a lot of emotions heading into Election Day, but excitement is not one of them, a poll shows.

According to a new poll from The AP-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research about 7 in 10 Americans say they’re anxious or frustrated about the 2024 presidential campaign, and a similar say they are interested. 

However, only about one-third of Americans say they feel excited.

The poll of 1,233 adults was conducted Oct. 24-29, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population.

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The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

There’s a broad feeling of uncertainty hanging over the 2024 presidential contest during the last week of the campaign. 

The race is competitive nationally and in key swing states, according to recent polls, with neither Democrat Kamala Harris nor Republican Donald Trump showing a measurable advantage. 

At the same time, the candidates have offered closing arguments that are in stark contrast with each other, with Harris arguing that Trump is obsessed with revenge and his own needs, while Trump referred to Harris at a rally on Sunday night as “a trainwreck who has destroyed everything in her path.”

Some groups are even more anxious than they were four years ago, even though that election took place during a deadly pandemic. 

In 2020, an AP-NORC poll found that about two-thirds of Americans were anxious about the election, which is not statistically significant from the new result. But for partisans, anxiety is dialled a little higher. 

About eight in 10 Democrats say anxiety describes how they are feeling now, up slightly from around three-quarters in the last election. About two-thirds of Republicans are anxious, a moderate uptick from around 6 in 10 in 2020.

Independents, by contrast, haven’t shifted meaningfully, and they’re also feeling less worried than Democrats or Republicans. About half say they are anxious, similar to the finding in 2020.