What to watch for in the post-Labor Day campaign sprint

For the first time in two months, the presidential election is actually set.

There are sure to be lots more surprises — and nail biting — to come, though.

Here are five themes and questions to think about for this fall:

1. Don’t stress about the polls

This is the time of year when people who already know who they are going to vote for begin to get nervous and start becoming amateur horse-race poll watchers.

Stop it.

Survey research exists, and it’s largely pretty good. NPR keeps an eye on it and even conducts our own to get a better sense of how people are feeling about the candidates, policy, politics and society. But what all the polls show are two things:

1. Harris is performing better than Biden was just before he dropped out of the race. She’s gained on average anywhere from 4 to 6 points in swing-state polls, boosting her in the big seven swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (in the so-called Blue Wall), and has drawn support even in the Sun Belt states of North Carolina and Georgia in the East and Arizona and Nevada out West.
   
2. The race is very close, and that’s not likely going to change.

That’s all, for now, that anyone needs to know about the candidates’ standing in the polls. No one knows exactly who is going to show up, the polls you see aren’t meant to be predictive, and they all have margins of error of about 3 to 4 points, meaning results could actually be about 3 or more points lower or higher.

That’s a 7-to-8-point potential swing in good surveys, so if things are this close, realize that the game isn’t played on your computer screen looking at polling aggregator sites or reading data geeks’ interpretations of the crosstabs. It’s about activism, mobilization, and, frankly, how Harris performs —