I have to admit, I laughed when I saw that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were tied at 48 to 48 among likely voters in the final New York Times/Siena College national poll. Despite untold sums spent on advertising, a cavalcade of wild events — from felony convictions to assassination attempts to the incumbent president withdrawing from the race — here we sit, right on a razor’s edge.

Over the past few days, other national news outlets have released polls telling the same story. CNN (where I am an on-air contributor) also had the race tied at 47 to 47 among likely voters. CBS News polling shows the contest effectively even, favoring Ms. Harris 50 to 49 among likely voters. (An exception to the pattern, polling by ABC News was a bit more bullish on Ms. Harris, at 51 to 47 among likely voters.)

And yet these polls actually don’t tell the same story. Though several of them show a dead heat, beneath the surface, they diverge in how they arrive at that result.

Let’s take two possible theories for how this election might unfold. The first theory, which I’ll call “the realignment,” is that political divides like race and economic class are being replaced by divides like gender and education level. As the Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria writes: “We are seeing a realignment in which the old categories of economic status and race are giving way to new categories such as social status and cultural divides around gender. We are likely at the beginning of this transformation of the political landscape.”

To my eye, the Times/Siena poll is the most closely aligned with the theory that this election will see a widened gender gap even as the divides between white and nonwhite, or old and young, are more muted. If you believe Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are realigning the electorate, with Democrats shedding some young voters and Latinos even as they run up the score with women and the college-educated, this is the poll for you.

Among the three deadlocked polls, The Times’s finds the largest gender gap, with women favoring Ms. Harris by a 12-point margin and men choosing Mr. Trump by 14 points. The Times also finds Ms. Harris crushing Mr. Trump among white voters with college degrees by a 16-point margin.