Vice President Kamala Harris has gained a significant lead in the 2024 presidential election following last week’s Democratic National Convention, according to the latest polls from Florida Atlantic University’s Political Communication and Public Opinion Research Lab (PolCom Lab).
Harris is four percentage points ahead of former President Donald Trump among U.S. voters, according to a poll released Tuesday by PolCom Lab and Mainstreet Research USA. Of the 929 registered voters surveyed between August 23 and 25, 47 percent supported Harris, while 43 percent of respondents said they would support Trump for president. Harris’ lead is just outside the poll’s margin of error of 3.2 percentage points.
The vice president had the same lead among likely voters surveyed by PolCom Lab: 49 percent supported Harris, while 45 percent supported Trump.
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The results represent a significant jump for Harris, who was trailing Trump by five percentage points (49 percent to 44 percent) just a month ago, according to a PolCom Lab poll conducted in the days before Harris entered the 2024 presidential race on July 21. In a separate poll conducted in late July, Harris and Trump were tied at 46 percent in a neck-and-neck race among U.S. voters.
Harris has been particularly successful among self-identified independent voters included in the PolCom Lab sample. While in July the voting bloc was fairly evenly split between the two candidates (45 percent Harris and 43 percent Trump), the latest poll shows that Harris is supported by 48 percent of independents, while Trump is supported by 35 percent.
Newsweek has emailed Trump’s campaign team and asked for comment.
Tuesday’s poll follows Harris’ formal nomination at the DNC last week, along with her running mate and vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. It also comes after independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his 2024 campaign and dropped his support for Trump late last week.
Kennedy’s decision, however, has not seemed to have any impact on the momentum of Harris’ campaign for weeks. According to a poll released Monday by Angus Reid Global, Harris has a five-point lead over Trump among registered voters (47 percent to 42 percent).
Harris also led Trump by four percentage points in a Morning Consult poll released this week (48 percent to 44 percent). The same poll also found that voters’ approval ratings for Walz jumped after the convention — in the days following the convention, 42 percent of registered voters said they had a favorable opinion of the vice presidential candidate, compared to Walz’s 39 percent approval rating before the convention.
According to FiveThirtyEight, the vice president has been ahead of Trump by an average of 3.5 percentage points in national polls since Tuesday.
