Two big newspapers, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, which have long endorsed the incumbent for president, are sitting this one out-this year, in a break from tradition: neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor former President Donald Trump.
Two separate polls that came out Friday had them tied.
The Times poll had them both at 48 percent, though Harris' 3 percent lead in a poll earlier this month had vanished, though that was - like the latest - within the margin of error.
The Times ominously analyzed the poll, writing: "The result, coming less than two weeks before Election Day, and as millions of Americans have already voted, is not encouraging for Ms Harris."
They were knotted at 47 per cent, said the CNN poll. The authoritative poll aggregator RealClearPolling showed Harris' lead shrink to 0.2 percent on Friday from the 2 percent on October 1.
Tellingly, the Times opinion section, which is tilted toward Harris, ran an essay by the highly regarded election statistics analyst declaring that his "gut" feeling is that Trump is going to win.
Nate Silver, who runs the FiveThirtyEight website that was with the Times and is now in the ABC News stable, wrote, "My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats."
He added the caveat, "In an election where the seven battleground states are all polling within a percentage point or two, 50-50 is the only responsible forecast."
If the polls are correct – a big IF given their failure in 2016 when they predicted a Hillary Clinton victory – it would appear that neither Harris nor Trump have managed a breakthrough with their intensive campaigns.
Polls showing a setback for a candidate can also have the effect of the base redoubling its efforts and making a late-hour impact.
Harris calling Trump a "fascist" and a threat to democracy, and hammering away on his age, his character, his lies, and his instability has not yet really made an impact.
Neither had her stand on nationally legalising abortion or her moderating her policies moving toward the centre shown an effect yet.
The star power — Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Leonardo DiCaprio among others — she has deployed hasn't yet turned things around.
Trump portrayed her as a "Communist" and also an enemy of democracy, tarring her with President Joe Biden's failures and nagging on illegal migration and inflation did not seem to shift the needle much.
Except for the two newspapers, Teamsters, the mighty transport workers union with 1.4 million members refused to endorse either of them, despite the majority of the workers favoring Trump in an internal poll.
The Washington Post had been highly critical of Donald Trump and has endorsed his opponents: Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.
"We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates," publisher Will Lewis wrote.
The paper probably did not issue endorsements until 1952, when it supported Dwight Eisenhower, and began endorsing routinely only since 1976, when it supported Jimmy Carter.
Lewis said the move was not a "tacit endorsement" or a "condemnation" of either candidate, adding: "We also see it as a statement in support of our readers' ability to make up their own minds."
The paper's union blamed the Post's billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon, for the decision.
"According to our reporters and Guild members, an endorsement for Harris was already drafted, and the decision to not publish was made by The Post's owner, Jeff Bezos," it said in a post on X.
The Los Angeles Times is owned by another billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiong, a pharmaceutical inventor and founder of a network of medical and Artificial Intelligence startups.
He said he had asked the Editorial Board to write an editorial giving "side-by-side" analysis on the candidates' positions but it hasn't followed up.
The newspaper's union criticized the decision and observed that Soon-Shiong was unfairly putting the blame on the editorial staff.
Both the newspapers are privately held by businessmen who had swooped in with their hundreds of millions to save foundering newspapers.
Since their primary interests lie elsewhere, there have been conflicts of interests allegations.
Columbia Journalism Review Executive Editor Sewell Chan summed it up that they are "trying to hedge their bets out of fear that their business interests could be harmed during a second Trump presidency."
But that only makes the case stronger that Trump is winning.
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