With just over two months left until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris has taken a slight lead over former President Trump in national polls and has made advances in several swing states that previously seemed locked up for Trump.
Poll after poll shows the race essentially tied, with leads for either Trump or Harris often within the margin of error.
Harris would take 45% of the nationwide vote, compared with Trump’s 41%, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll of registered voters, released Thursday. Her margin widened to 13 percentage points over Trump among women and Hispanic voters, the survey found.
Harris leads Trump 48% to 47% in a head-to-head matchup, according to a Thursday poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal, which noted the vice president holds a 2-point lead when independent and third-party candidates are factored into the survey.
And in a USA Today/Suffolk University survey, also released Thursday, Harris holds a 48% to 43% lead over Trump.
The spate of new polls released after the pro-Harris blitz at the Democratic National Convention wrapped up, reflects a dramatic shift in the state of the race since President Biden dropped out just over a month ago.
The Trump campaign anticipated the post-DNC bump of support for Harris, saying in a statement before her acceptance speech Aug. 22, “These bumps do not last.” The campaign noted that it had also predicted a “honeymoon” period of positive polling and good press after Harris’ nomination, adding that it blamed the media which “decided to extend the honeymoon for over 4 weeks now.”
Narrow margins in swing states
Both the Trump and Harris campaigns have been zeroing in on the swing states which are likely to determine the election. Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, campaigned in Georgia and North Carolina this week, and announced a “reproductive freedom bus tour” across several battleground states, beginning next week. Meanwhile, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, visited Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that Trump led Harris 45% to 43% among registered voters across the seven battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and Nevada. But a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll showed Harris either leading or tied with Trump in the same states.
A Fox News poll conducted over the weekend showed Harris leading by 1 percentage point in Arizona, and by two points in Georgia and Nevada. Trump was up one point in North Carolina, according to the Fox News poll.
The Fox News polling finds Harris keeping pace with the support that won President Biden the election in 2020; he eked out leads in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada while Trump won North Carolina. Trump had previously held a commanding lead in the four Sun Belt states before Biden dropped out, according to Fox News polls conducted earlier this year.
Harris maintained a 1-point lead across the four states even when third-party candidates such as Chase Oliver, Jill Stein and Cornel West were included, the Fox News survey found.
Issues voters care about
More Americans trust Harris on the issues of abortion, healthcare, uniting the country, fighting for the people and bringing needed change, according to the Fox News poll. But Trump is the go-to candidate for border security and immigration, the economy and the Israel-Hamas war, it found.
Voters who spoke to Reuters/Ipsos pollsters agreed that Trump would have a better approach to managing the U.S. economy — 45% compared to 35% for Harris. But they preferred the vice president at a 47% to 31% advantage on the issue of abortion policy.
On the topic of democracy and election integrity, 68% of voters in a poll conducted by ABC News/Ipsos said that Harris was likely to accept the election results, compared to just 29% who said the same about Trump. As for the voters themselves, 81% said they would accept the outcome, no matter who won.
Pro-Palestinian voters continue to show discontent
Harris’ numbers are not all so bright, however. The Council on American-Islamic Relations found in a poll released Thursday that 29.4% of American Muslims intend to vote for Harris — nearly tying with their support for Green Party candidate Stein at 29.1%. The findings reveal that American Muslims continue to press their complaints about the Biden-Harris administration’s policies on Gaza.
Trump voters made up 11.2% of those polled with small percentages for West and Oliver. About 16% said they were undecided.
During the spring’s Democratic primaries, many Muslims and pro-Palestinian voters showed their discontent for Biden by casting ballots for “uncommitted.” This was especially true in Michigan, a swing state where Biden won by less than 3% of the vote in 2020 and home to the largest population of Arab Americans in the nation. More than 13% of voters cast ballots for uncommitted in the state’s February primary.
Stein, a longshot third-party candidate, frequently runs in presidential elections without notching much support countrywide. But CAIR’s survey shows that she provides an outlet for disgruntled Americans to register their discontent. Still, Harris’ prospects among American Muslims are an improvement over Biden’s. In a previous survey of 2,500 Muslim Americans, CAIR found that they supported Biden at 7.3%, compared to Trump at 4.9%. Overwhelming support went to third-party candidates Stein, at 36%, and West at 25.2%.
The RFK Jr. effect
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race last week and endorsed Trump, pundits were aflutter with questions about how his decision would affect the leading two candidates. Early polling shows that the remaining support for Kennedy — which had diminished after Biden dropped out and Harris became the Democratic nominee — is turning toward Trump.
The Fox News poll found that three of four voters who had a favorable view of Kennedy now support Trump.