On the eve of the 2024 presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris has a four-point lead over former President Donald Trump among likely national voters, according to the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll. Harris has the support of 51 percent of likely voters to Trump’s 47 percent — a lead just outside the poll’s 3.5-point margin of error.

Just over half of independents support the Republican candidate, a five-point lead over Harris.

“It was and remains a close election,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. “As far as the popular vote is concerned, it is hers to lose.”

The 2024 campaign was shaped by dramatic events unlike any other election year in modern American history: the incumbent president and presumptive Democratic nominee withdrawing from the race less than four months before Election Day; the first woman of color to be nominated as a major party candidate; two assassination attempts on the Republican candidate; and the same nominee convicted of 34 felony charges.

Despite all that, the voters surveyed in this poll likely look a lot like the 2020 electorate, which supported President Joe Biden with 51 percent of the vote to Trump’s 47 percent.

WATCH: Harris and Trump are addressing voters in completely different tones in the final days of the election

“We went through all of this to get back to … kind of where you ended up four years ago,” Miringoff said. “We’ll see if the Electoral College reflects that.”

Behind the top numbers, Miringoff noted some shifts at the margins, which explain why the coalitions are behind the two candidates and why the polls still show a close race.

Most strikingly, the gender gap halved in the last month of the campaign.

Trump has maintained his lead among men, but it has shrunk to four points from the 16-point lead he had over Harris in October. At the same time, 55 percent of women say they will support Harris in the latest poll. The vice president’s lead among women has shrunk from 18 points to 11 points since last month.

According to AP VoteCast surveys of the electorate, the gender split in this poll is nearly identical to that between Biden and Trump in 2020.

Images by Jenna Cohen/PBS News

However, when it comes to race, the latest poll shows that support for the two candidates has reshaped somewhat since the last presidential election.

Trump leads Harris 54 percent to 45 percent among white voters, but her 9-point deficit is a slight improvement over Trump’s 12-point lead over this group in 2020.

Harris has instead seen some erosion among Black and Latino voters, who together made up about 20 percent of the 2020 vote. Harris has the support of 83 percent of likely black voters and 61 percent of likely Latino voters — down 8 and 2 points, respectively. , of the share that supported Biden in 2020.

In the vice president’s closing arguments to voters in recent weeks, she has focused on reaching Republican voters disillusioned with Trump and tried to remind them of the chaos she said accompanied his time in the White House. Harris has campaigned in swing states with prominent Republican officials supporting her, including former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kingzinger. The PBS News/NPR/Marist investigation shows her efforts may be working.

Eight percent of Republicans say they will vote for Harris, a three-point increase from a month ago and a doubling of Democrats who say they will support Trump.

“In a close race that is potentially a big problem,” Miringoff said.

More than 78 million ballots have already been cast, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Fifty-five percent of likely voters in this poll report that they have already cast a vote. A third of voters say they plan to vote in person on Election Day, including 40 percent of Trump supporters.

Among those who have already voted, Harris leads Trump 56 percent to 42 percent. But among voters who have yet to vote, 53 percent plan to vote for Trump; while 45 percent support Harris.

WATCH: What early voting data points to this year’s election

Polls released in the final hours of the presidential election often receive outsized attention — including a Des Moines Register poll over the weekend that showed Harris with a three-point lead over Trump in Iowa, and a trio of Marist polls late last week which showed that found Harris leading Trump in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But both Democrats and Republicans are quick to point out that what matters is the results after voting ends Tuesday.

Miringoff offers a similar word of caution to poll-obsessed political observers.

“If you want to know who’s going to win and who’s going to take every state, that’s not what this is going to tell you. It just tells you it’s her advantage going in,” Miringoff said. “The polls continue to monitor how polarized the nation is.”

Preserving democracy and inflation are voters’ top concerns

One of the biggest differences between likely Trump and Likely Harri voters is their reasons for coming to the polls and beliefs about what will happen after voting ends.

A majority of Harris supporters (51 percent) say preserving democracy is their top priority when deciding who to vote for. More than a third list abortion as their second most important issue.

For Trump supporters, the biggest issues are inflation and immigration.

Accept election results

After voting ends and a winner is declared, 71 percent of likely voters say that if their chosen candidate is the loser, he or she should accept the outcome. Twenty-seven percent say the losing candidate should challenge the results in that scenario.

Trump has continued to spread baseless lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. He told the crowd at one of his final campaign rallies on Sunday in Pennsylvania that he “should not have left” the White House after his loss to Biden. He has similarly begun laying the groundwork to challenge the 2024 election results if he loses.

Forty-three percent of his supporters believe he should contest the election results if he loses. Thirteen percent of Harris supporters say the same.

In preparation for Election Day, fencing has been erected around the White House and the Capitol, and many commercial buildings in downtown Washington have been boarded up in anticipation of potentially violent demonstrations.

Seventy-two percent of likely voters are concerned about violence resulting from the election. That includes 85 percent of Harris supporters and 57 percent of Trump supporters.