Hillary Clinton at Mikey Likes It Ice Cream, in Manhattan, on Monday. New York has had its most hotly contested primary in decades, but the chance of an upset in either party appears slim. Photograph by Justin Sullivan / Getty

On the final day before the New York primary, the candidates from both parties were busy campaigning across the state. Hillary Clinton ate ice cream in the East Village, drank bubble tea in Flushing, and gave a speech at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue. Bernie Sanders held an election-eve rally in Long Island City. Donald Trump flew to Buffalo, where he had an event scheduled for the evening. Ted Cruz was in Times Square for an appearance on “Good Morning America.” John Kasich held town-hall meetings in Syracuse and Schenectady.

The campaigns have been this busy since Sanders and Cruz won the Wisconsin primaries, two weeks ago. It has been the mostly hotly contested and closely watched New York primary in decades. The Times, the Post, and the Daily News have given it the full treatment. So have the cable networks and local radio and television stations. From what I’ve seen, many ordinary New Yorkers have been caught up in the campaign, too. They’re attending rallies and other events in large numbers, commenting on social media, and talking about the election with friends and colleagues.

From that perspective, it has been a healthy campaign in a state that often feels as if it doesn’t get to participate fully in Presidential primaries. But what impact will all of the speechifying, advertising, Facebook sharing, and kibitzing have on the outcome? Obviously, we won’t know until Tuesday night. If the opinion polls are to be believed, though, the stark reality is that the answer might be “not much.”

Two weeks ago, according to the survey data, Trump had a huge advantage in New York over his Republican rivals, and Clinton was leading Sanders by double digits. Today, the picture is virtually the same. According to the RealClearPolitics poll average, Trump is currently leading Kasich by about thirty percentage points, and Clinton is ahead of Sanders by twelve points. As the following charts demonstrate, this situation hasn’t changed much over the past few weeks: the lines showing the candidates’ poll numbers are basically flat.

SOURCE: REALCLEARPOLITICS

SOURCE: REALCLEARPOLITICS

How can this be explained? One possibility is that the polls are wrong. After the Michigan Democratic primary, on March 8th, this hypothesis cannot be entirely discounted. Heading into the vote that day, the RealClearPolitics poll average showed Sanders trailing Clinton by 21.4 points, and the Huffington Post’s had him behind by 18.3 points. When the votes came in, Sanders had won, 49.8 per cent to 48.3 per cent.

I have yet to see a full explanation of how the pollsters went awry in Michigan. But their failure seems to have gone beyond the standard complaints—that they didn’t rely on large-enough samples, and that they missed people who only have cell phones. The bigger problem appears to have been that pollsters relied on flawed turnout models to weight their raw numbers. Turnout in pro-Sanders areas and among pro-Sanders demographics was much bigger than expected, and that proved enough to swing the election his way.

The larger question posed by the two charts is whether there’s any chance the results on Tuesday will disrupt the recent pattern. Certainly, the Sanders campaign is hoping for an outcome in New York similar to the one in Michigan. In his stump speeches, the Vermont senator has been saying that if turnout is large, he will win. What he means, of course, is turnout among young people and progressives, particularly the former. Historically, the proportion of young people who show up at voting stations is much smaller than the proportion of older people. If voters under the age of forty-five, and particularly under the age of thirty, cast ballots in much larger numbers than usual, it could certainly affect the result.

The Sanders campaign can point to one recent hopeful poll: in an automated telephone survey conducted in the middle of last week, the research firm Gravis Marketing found that forty-seven per cent of likely voters in the Democratic primary supported Sanders, compared with fifty-three for Clinton, a gap of just six points. On the other hand, eleven surveys have been carried out by other polling organizations in the past two weeks, and all have shown Clinton with double-digit leads. Moreover, there are a number of reasons to believe that polls here are more accurate than the ones in Michigan.

First and foremost, only registered Democrats can vote on Tuesday, and the deadline for changing party affiliation—from independent to Democrat, say—was last October. These restrictive rules are clearly to Clinton’s advantage. In Michigan, which had open primaries, any registered voter could participate, regardless of affiliation. Sanders attracted a lot of independents in the final weeks of the campaign there, which proved decisive. According to a CNN exit poll, more than a quarter of the voters identified themselves as independents, and Sanders carried them by a margin of almost three to one. Among voters who identified themselves as Democrats, Clinton won by a double-digit margin.