Montana

On the first round of calls for our Montana poll something happened I've never seen before: the candidates were literally dead even on the raw counts.

In most states that would mean the Democrat is well ahead, because we usually have to weight our samples to bring up the black population. But I don't think that's an issue in Montana!

So basically that means the leader, at least based on this first round of calls, would hinge on what's bigger: the gender gap between the candidates or the age gap. We almost always have to weight our polls to make them more male: women are just more likely to answer the phone. That weighting benefits Republicans. But we usually also have to adjust our samples to make them younger, bringing up the 30 and under crowd and decreasing the share of senior citizens. That helps Democrats.

We'll be making callbacks throughout the weekend but the bottom line is that the state is really close.