Poll shows a tight race in Pennsylvania, with warning signs for Harris among older voters

Vice President Kamala Harris is neck-and-neck with former President Donald Trump in the all-important battleground state of Pennsylvania, according to a new survey shared first with POLITICO.

Harris is winning 49 percent of likely voters, compared with 47 percent for Trump and 2 percent for other candidates, the poll done by a bipartisan team for AARP found. Three percent are undecided.

The survey, completed from Sept. 17 to 24 by landline, cell phone and text-to-web, is the first conducted by AARP in the state since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, and the extent to which it shows Harris has improved Democrats’ chances is staggering.

Biden was down 5 percentage points overall in that April survey. Among voters aged 18 to 49, he was behind by 1 point; she is now ahead by 14. He was losing independents by 6 points; she is winning them by 9. With Democrats, women, suburban voters, rural voters and even voters without a college degree, she is outperforming Biden.

There is a major voting bloc, though, among which she has slipped: seniors. Harris is losing voters aged 65 and older by 7 points, compared with 1 point for Biden.

“Harris' biggest weakness is older voters. It is the biggest share of the electorate, and she is behind,” said Republican pollster Bob Ward, whose firm, Fabrizio Ward, helped conduct the AARP survey and also polls for the Trump campaign.

The economy appears to be a big reason why older voters prefer Trump to Harris. For voters aged 50 and up who ranked inflation and high prices as a top issue, Trump has a 54-point lead.

Jeffrey Liszt, a Democratic pollster whose firm Impact Research joined Ward’s to conduct the AARP survey, said Harris’ greatest challenge is the fact that Trump’s retrospective job rating is higher than hers. And “a big piece of that is the economy,” he said.

“It's been a core strength of Donald Trump's that he's got this branding around being a businessman and having been on ‘The Apprentice,’” said Liszt, whose firm polls for Harris’ campaign. “When you look back at the job that people think that he did, his job rating is better than hers. And again, that's her core vulnerability and his core strength.”

Fifty percent of likely voters retrospectively approve of Trump’s job performance as president, while 49 percent disapprove. For Harris, 45 percent approve of the job she’s done as vice president, and 52 percent disapprove. Liszt noted that this runs opposite to their personal popularity, where Trump is underwater by 7 percentage points, compared with only 3 points for Harris.

Liszt said Trump’s challenges are Harris’ strong performance among independents and her consolidation of younger voters and older Black voters, two traditionally Democratic voting blocs that had been skeptical of Biden's candidacy. Ward, meanwhile, said that if Trump “could expand his margins among older voters, particularly older women, he's got a good chance to pull ahead in this race.”

The gender gap in the poll is eye-popping and in line with other surveys that show a wide divergence between men and women's vote preference in the presidential race. Harris leads among women by 19 points, while Trump is ahead with men by 16 points. However, among women voters aged 50 and older, the candidates are tied.

In addition to the presidential election, AARP also surveyed other statewide races, including the Senate contest, where Democratic incumbent Bob Casey leads GOP challenger Dave McCormick 49 percent to 45 percent among likely voters.

The poll also found close races for a pair of down-ballot elections: for state attorney general and state treasurer.

The AARP survey interviewed 1,398 likely voters, including an oversample of 470 likely voters aged 50 and up. The margin of error among overall likely voters is plus or minus 4 percentage points. For those voters 50 and up, it is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.