New polls from three key swing states suggest Vice President Harris is ahead of former President Trump.
According to polls released this weekend by Siena College for the New York Times, Harris leads Trump by four percentage points among likely voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – 50% to 46%.
The polls, conducted August 5-9, are the most recent to indicate the shift in the presidential race following Harris’ replacement of Biden at the top of the Democratic Party’s national candidate list last month.
Trump’s lead over Biden widened in the polls after the president’s disastrous performance in the US debate in late June, raising questions about whether the 81-year-old Biden is physically and mentally fit to remain in the White House for another four years.
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Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, walk on stage together during a campaign rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 6, 2024. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
After Biden abandoned his re-election bid on July 21, Democrats quickly rallied around Harris, with more and more voices from his own party calling on the president to drop out of the race.
In the three weeks since Biden’s groundbreaking announcement, numerous national polls and surveys in key swing states have suggested that this is a Harris-Trump race with a small margin of error.
Harris and Walz are battling it out with Trump and Vance in the battle of the contested states
According to the new polls, Harris is two percentage points ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania, five percentage points ahead in Michigan and six percentage points ahead in Wisconsin in a multi-candidate field that also includes Democrat and now independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent Cornel West.
Kennedy, who had approval ratings in the double-digit percentage range in some polls at the beginning of the year, achieved an approval rating in the mid-single digits in the new surveys.
Republican running mate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, left, greets Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Saturday, Aug. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/John Bazemore) (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
The polls were conducted shortly before and largely after the vice president announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her Democratic running mate for 2024 on Tuesday.
The two joined forces for large rallies in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night and in Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday.
The three states are known as the Democrats’ “blue wall.” For nearly a quarter of a century, the party reliably won presidential elections in these states before Trump entered the White House with a narrow majority eight years ago.
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In 2020, President Biden won back all three states by a razor-thin margin and defeated Trump, and competition between the states remains extremely tough in the 2024 presidential election.
The New York Times and Siena College polls were conducted between August 5 and 8 with 619 registered voters in Michigan and 661 in Wisconsin. The Pennsylvania poll was conducted between August 6 and 9 with 693 registered voters.
Former President Trump is ready to debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. (Photographer: Dustin Chambers/Bloomberg via Getty Images | Photographer: Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The sampling error for each poll was plus/minus 4.8 percentage points in Michigan, plus/minus 4.3 percentage points in Wisconsin, and plus/minus 4.2 percentage points in Pennsylvania.
In addition to her gains in the polls, Harris has also seen an increase in her fundraising since she replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket and named Walz as her running mate.
Tony Fabrizio, chief pollster and top adviser to Trump’s campaign, believes Harris’ positive momentum will not last.
“We are witnessing a kind of out-of-body experience where we block out reality for a few weeks,” Fabrizio told reporters at a Trump campaign briefing on Thursday.
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