A spate of opinion polls carried out since Joe Biden abandoned his presidential campaign last Sunday show the vice-president, Kamala Harris, closing the gap on Donald Trump but still narrowly trailing in a tight race.
While still often narrowly behind, the ability of Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, to gain ground on her Republican opponent suggests her elevation to the top of the ticket has reset the presidential race, pollsters say, especially after weeks of plummeting Democratic poll numbers under Biden.
Fresh surveys carried out in battleground states show Trump ahead mostly within error margins in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, while one survey showed the two are tied in Wisconsin at 47% apiece.
Similarly tight margins have been reported in national polling, with Trump ahead by one point among likely voters, 48 to 47, in a New York Times/Siena poll released on Thursday - a stark contrast with the six point lead the Republican nominee held over Biden in the same poll at the beginning of July.
Trump is ahead by two points in a Quinnipiac University survey already begun before Biden withdrew, one point in another from Marist College, and three points in a CNN/SSRS poll conducted over two days.
Another poll from Ipsos/Reuters showed Harris with a two-point lead, 44% to 42%, while a You Gov/Yahoo survey had them tied at 46% each.
While still trailing, the trend represents momentum for Harris, who has started her campaign with a rush of enthusiasm this week after being endorsed by most leading Democratic figures, including Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives. She is also believed to be close to gaining the endorsement of Barack Obama.
An aggregate of polls compiled by the Hill and Decision Desk HQ – and based on 80 polls – has Trump on 47.8% to 45.7% for Harris, a difference again within the margin of error that could essentially mean the two are tied.
That’s a narrower gap than the 3.3-point gap that had opened up in Trump’s favor over Biden using the same aggregating methods.
Patrick Murray, director of the polling institute at Monmouth University, said the movement in Harris’s direction – although slight – indicated that the contest had been significantly reset by Biden’s withdrawal, though much more data is likely to be needed over the coming weeks before a firmer picture emerges.
“Because of the intense polarisation in the American electorate, you should never expect a lot of movement from any event, because so many people are just so dug down into their Democratic or Republican trenches that nothing will move them. So you’re always fighting over a very small chunk of the persuadable electorate,” he said.
“Therefore, the fact that the numbers have moved a few points suggest that there has been a reset of this election, although it doesn’t tell us exactly what the trajectory is. It just simply tells us that we’ve got a new election that we’re looking at right now.”
Nevertheless, the improved Democratic numbers seem to justify the pressure put on Biden to remove himself from the party ticket following last month’s baleful debate performance, which triggered a loss of confidence in his candidacy and a downward trend in his already stagnant polling numbers.
“There’s no question in the last month that the trajectory in a Biden-Trump race was going in Trump’s favor,” Murray said. “Whether Democrats made the right choice or not, we won’t know until November, but it was certainly the right choice at the time because it didn’t look like Biden was going to be able to turn this around.
“The polling is telling me … that voters are willing to take a fresh look at this campaign with Harris at the top of the ticket.”
The clearest indication of that is the jump in support from young voters following the sudden turnaround in the Democrat campaign.
An Axios/Generation Lab poll conducted this week among voters aged 18-34 showed Harris leading Trump by 20 points, 60% to 40. This represented a quantum jump on Biden’s small 6% lead. Some 45% among the cohort said they had a positive opinion of Harris, compared with 33% who said the same about Biden – and 34% who felt positively about Trump.
Millennial and gen Z voters were a key component of Biden’s 2020 win over Trump, turning out in large numbers. There are indications that Harris – with her focus on the threats to women’s rights to abortion and stress on upholding freedoms in general – plans to target younger voters.
Among swing states, Trump’s biggest lead is in Arizona, where he holds a five-point, 49-44, advantage over Harris, according to polling conducted by Emerson College Polling and the Hill. Arizona, where the flow of migrants over the frontier with Mexico is a key election issue, is home to Mark Kelly, a popular Democratic US senator for the state, who is one of several figures under consideration to be Harris’s running mate.
Trump leads Harris by 46 to 45 points in Michigan, and 48 to 46 points in both Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to the same poll – smaller margins than he generally commanded over Biden in the weeks following the 27 June debate.
Swing-state polling trends could be instrumental in Harris’s choice of a running mate in the coming weeks, particularly given that two candidates in the running include the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, and Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. Biden won both states in 2020, along with Georgia and Arizona.
“The first rule of choosing a running mate is to do no harm, because there’s very little gain that you will get from a running mate, but there’s a lot of harm that can be done,” said Murray, who suggested Trump’s choice of JD Vance as his vice-presidential candidate might fall into this category, given the notoriety being generated by his hardline anti-abortion positions and derogatory past comments on childless women.
“On Kamala Harris’s side, she probably should be looking at somebody who brings a key swing state with them.”
