A heated election season hangs over the Supreme Court’s new term: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.

In today’s edition, senior Supreme Court reporter Lawrence Hurley looks at how the upcoming election is looming over the high court as justices return for a new term. Plus, senior political editor Mark Murray breaks down the state of the polls four weeks out from Election Day.

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The threat of election chaos looms as the Supreme Court returns to action

By Lawrence Hurley

The Supreme Court returned from its summer break Monday with a new slate of cases to decide, but an issue not even on the docket yet is at the center of attention: the presidential election.

The prospect that the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three justices appointed by former President Donald Trump, could be asked to weigh in on cases before and potentially after the election is high. It happens during every election.

But whether such disputes will be blockbusters like the 2000 Bush v. Gore case, which effectively decided the outcome in favor of George W. Bush, or duds, like the various attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s win in 2020, remains to be seen.

Unlike lower courts, the justices decide what cases they hear, and in most situations, as with Trump’s efforts in 2020, they decline to intervene. 

“There’s going to be something,” said Nate Persily, an election expert at Stanford Law School and an NBC News contributor. “I don’t think they are going to hear a case before the election, but there will be attempts to draw them in.”

The new nine-month Supreme Court term officially started Monday, with all nine justices appearing in the courtroom to hear oral arguments in two low-profile cases. It was the first time the justices have been seen in public together since the previous term ended with a series of rulings in early July, including one that handed Trump a big win in his federal criminal case related to his effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

The court also issued a long list of cases it declined to hear ahead of the new term, including an abortion-related dispute between Texas and the Biden administration and an appeal brought by Elon Musk’s X over the election interference investigation of Trump. 

That followed action on Friday, when the court announced 13 new cases it will decide in the coming months, including a bid by gun companies to throw out a lawsuit brought by Mexico seeking to hold them accountable for violence there.

Read more from Lawrence →

⚖️ Not just a football school: Lawrence also looks at how the University of Notre Dame Law School — which counts Justice Amy Coney Barrett among its former faculty — is increasingly exerting conservative influence on the Supreme Court. Read more →

What the 2024 polls show with four weeks to go

By Mark Murray

With four weeks to go until Election Day, the 2024 polls continue to show a presidential race that remains on a knife’s edge — and well within the margin of error.

That’s true for recent national polls like NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College, which found Vice President Kamala Harris with a narrow edge against former President Donald Trump — 2 points among likely voters, 50%-48%, within the survey’s margin of error (plus or minus 3.7 percentage points). 

It’s also true in the polls of the battleground states that will ultimately decide the presidential contest.

Harris and Trump are essentially tied, perhaps with a slight lean toward Trump, in the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. And while Harris has a slightly greater advantage in the Great Lakes states of Michigan and Wisconsin, those advantages are well within the boundaries of potential polling error. And the recent polling in all-important Pennsylvania — part of the most direct paths to 270 electoral votes for both Harris and Trump — appears to be a jump ball.

What the polls can tell us

Given polls’ margins of error, historically low response rates when reaching voters and, yes, past polling misses, it’s become a fool’s errand to expect precision from political polls.

What we can conclude from the public polling, however, is whether a race is close or not. And this race remains very close no matter how you look at it, across polls in all different states and nationally, including surveys that have different assumptions of the 2024 electorate and that use different weighting techniques.

The polls also are helpful in determining a race’s trend. And this is a fundamentally different race than the one that existed before President Joe Biden stepped aside from his re-election campaign and endorsed Harris.

And the polls are useful in measuring a politician’s popularity: Most surveys right now show Harris with higher favorable ratings than Trump, after a sharp upswing in her numbers when she became a presidential candidate this summer. That wasn’t the case when Biden was in the race.

What the polls can’t tell us 

But the polls can’t tell us if a candidate is going to win a presidential contest if they’re ahead or behind by 1-2 points in a few surveys, whether nationally or in key battleground states.

The 2024 race, ultimately, will be decided by turnout, concluding news events, how the third-party/undecided vote breaks and other factors. Ultimately, what will matter is which candidate wins the important battleground states that could come down to a difference of 10,000 or 20,000 votes — margins too small to expect unambiguous clarity from pre-election polls.

That’s all from the Politics Desk for now. If you have feedback — likes or dislikes — email us at [email protected]

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