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I'll tell you what, folks, it is close.

The US presidential election of November 2024 is on a knife edge.

I'm recording this with a few days to go, and it is a coin toss. There are seven states in the

union that will decide who the next president will be, the so-called swing states. Those few

states are the only ones that can

realistically be expected to go either way. Alaska, New York, South Dakota, not in play. They're

predictable. We know how they're going to vote. But those seven, they could vote for Trump,

they could vote for Harris. And in all seven, with a few

days to go, as of this recording, the poll suggests the two candidates are running within two

percentage points of each other, inside the polling margin of error. So unsurprisingly,

people are calling this the closest election ever, and perhaps they're right.

But we history lovers. Whenever we hear the word ever, our history spider senses fire off,

don't they? Ever? Ever is a long time. In US terms, ever means we're going to reach back to the first

contested presidential election

in 1796. There have been 57 since then. So if this is going to be the closest, well,

we've got a pretty large data set to compare it to. And sure enough, when we do so,

...