Kamala Harris continues to gain momentum in the US presidential election, with national and battleground state polls showing her widening her lead or even overtaking Donald Trump.
FiveThirtyEight, a major polling and analysis site, announced on Friday morning that Harris, who is considered the near-certain Democratic presidential nominee, is 2.1 percentage points ahead of her Republican rival nationwide.
In the battleground states where control of the White House is at stake, Harris has a 2-point lead in Michigan, 1.1 points in Pennsylvania and 1.8 points in Wisconsin. Trump has a lead of less than half a point in Arizona and half a point in Georgia.
In battleground states where there aren’t enough polls to average, Trump has about a 3-point lead in North Carolina and the two candidates are neck and neck in Nevada, where Harris has a 2-point lead in a recent CBS/Bloomberg poll.
The 59-year-old US vice president has been shaking up the race since mid-July, when Joe Biden, 81, finally followed his party’s pleas to step aside for a younger candidate to run against Trump, 78. Biden has endorsed Harris to top the Democratic Party’s nominee list for November for the remainder of his term.
On Thursday night, Amy Walter of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report told PBS that before Harris entered the race, Biden was “significantly behind not only in the national popular vote but also in battleground states, including by nearly 6 points in Georgia and Nevada.”
“Since Harris entered the race, support has shifted significantly in her favor by 4 to 5 percentage points in battleground states, consistent with trends seen in national polls.”
“But that doesn’t mean that states that were favorable for Trump have shifted to favor Harris. It just means that the race is not as skewed in Trump’s favor as it was in, say, late July. That’s why I say the race is 50-50.”
On the same day, the Cook Political Report changed its assessment of three Sun Belt battleground states (Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada) from “Republican advantage” to “close race.”
Sabatos Crystal Ball, another analysis site based at the University of Virginia, changed Georgia from leaning to close, and in the north, Minnesota and New Hampshire, where Trump made gains while Biden was leading the Democratic field, were changed from leaning to likely Democratic.
Harris’s running mate of choice is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, whose impact on the polls has yet to be felt, but some observers have expressed surprise at Harris’ pick of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a key battleground state.
Others disagreed. Joel K. Goldstein of Sabatos Crystal Ball wrote that Shapiro and fellow front-runner Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona “both come from battleground states that accounted for a significant portion of the Democrats’ 306 electoral votes in 2020,” but by choosing Waltz, “Harris has once again demonstrated that the vice presidential pick depends on factors other than overblown local advantage criteria.”
“Walz also has the most experience (17 1/2 years) in the traditional vice presidential positions (senator, governor, representative, federal official), in contrast to Republican Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, who has very limited experience (1 1/2 years).”
In a separate widely watched poll, Ms. Harris topped the poll for the second week in a row in an Economist/YouGov survey, maintaining a two-point lead. According to Reuters/Ipsos, Ms. Harris rose five points, 42% to 37%, up two points from the last similar poll conducted shortly after Mr. Biden withdrew. Ipsos also found a separate poll showing Ms. Harris leading Mr. Trump, 42% to 40%, in seven battleground states, but said it was “not releasing individual state results.”
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A national poll from Marquette University in Wisconsin showed Ms. Harris with 53 percent of likely voters, six points ahead of Mr. Trump’s 47 percent. Ms. Harris maintained her lead when other candidates were included. Leading independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had 6 percent support. Mr. Kennedy’s approval rating has fallen six points since July to 4 percent in the Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The Marquette University poll contained more good news for Harris, suggesting she is gaining energy as the race draws to a close: An 11-point increase in respondents saying they are very enthusiastic about voting in November.
“We’ve seen a big increase in enthusiasm among Democrats and a small increase among Republicans,” Marquette University pollster Charles Franklin wrote. “Previous polls have consistently shown Republicans to have an enthusiasm advantage over Democrats, but that trend has now all but disappeared.”
It wasn’t all good news for Harris and the Democratic Party: A CNBC poll released Thursday put Trump in a solid two-point lead among candidates voters think will make them better off financially.
Micah Roberts of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican pollster who worked on the survey with Democratic pollsters, said the election was “more of a head-to-head contest between the two candidates than a referendum on Trump.”
Roberts said Harris “remains a huge burden on the (Biden) administration. She has to take on that responsibility and hold herself independent. That’s a big burden to bear against a mature Trump campaign, with a deadline looming.”
