5 takeaways from this week’s Trump-Harris polls

The polls are coming thick and fast with less than six weeks to go before Election Day.

Vice President Harris has seen broadly favorable polling results this week — with some caveats.

Harris now leads former President Trump in the national polling average maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) by 4.2 percentage points. As of Friday evening, DDHQ was giving Harris a 56 percent chance of prevailing in November.

But even that finding demonstrates just how close the race remains. A 56 percent chance is little better than a coin flip.

The election will almost certainly come down to seven battleground states. Neither candidate has a lead of 3 points or greater in any of those states in The Hill/DDHQ averages. In three of the seven — Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina — the margin, one way or another, is less than 1 point.

Here are the main takeaways from this week’s polls.

The big picture is positive for Harris

National polls can provide a broad guide to the state of the race, even though they have their shortcomings as an exact predictor.

After all, Hillary Clinton won the national vote by more than 2 points over Trump in 2016, only to lose the election.

Still, the signs are encouraging for Harris.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week put the vice president up by 6 points, a Morning Consult poll by 5 points and a CBS News/YouGov poll by 4 points.

Those results reassure Democrats that Harris’s initial rise in the polls after securing the presidential nomination was not a sugar high that is likely to meet an abrupt end.

The national standings also suggest that Harris is at least staying on parity with Trump in the “air wars” as both sides throw millions of dollars into TV ads against each other.

Still, there were a couple of polls that were much less rosy for the vice president. A Quinnipiac University poll showed the race tied nationally, while a CNN/SSRS survey gave Harris just a 1-point edge.

Harris turns Southeastern battlegrounds into a true jump-ball

Harris appears to be making inroads in two of the battleground states that the Trump campaign has long been most confident of winning.

Trump’s lead in both North Carolina and Georgia is now under a single percentage point, according to The Hill/DDHQ averages. He leads by six-tenths of a point in North Carolina and just two-tenths of a point in Georgia.

Bloomberg/Morning Consult polls even show Harris up by 2 points in North Carolina, and a tied race in Georgia.

This is significant for a number of reasons.

First, both states are among the reddest of the battlegrounds. North Carolina is the only one of the seven battleground states that Trump carried in 2020. Biden won Georgia but was the first Democrat to do so since former President Clinton in 1992.

Secondly, the two Southern states becoming truly competitive broadens Harris’s path to the White House. If she could carry both, she could even afford to lose Pennsylvania, the largest of the swing states. In that scenario, North Carolina, Georgia and Michigan would be enough to win her the election, barring major upsets elsewhere.

Thirdly, her relative strength in polling in the Southern states could indicate a surge of Black voter enthusiasm for the candidate vying to be the first female Black president.

A bright spot for Trump — Arizona

The battleground-state picture is becoming more sharply defined, as would be expected this close to Election Day.

A notable bright spot for Trump is Arizona, where a couple of polls this week have shown him comfortably in the lead.

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed Trump leading by 6 points in the Grand Canyon State, and a New York Times/Siena College poll put him up by 5 points.

Arizona is still competitive to be sure. A couple of other recent polls, from Marist College and Fox News, showed Trump with narrow leads of 2 points and 3 points, respectively.

Still, the overall picture is one in which the Trump campaign will be feeling increasingly confident in a state Biden won by a tiny margin — just three-tenths of a percentage point — in 2020.

That could also point to the salience of the border issue in Arizona. Harris journeyed to the state on Friday to visit the border — and to try to toughen her image on the issue.

The big prize of Pennsylvania — a tiny edge for Harris

Pennsylvania, with its 19 Electoral College votes, is an absolutely crucial battle in the quest for the White House.

Harris is leading there by 1.3 percentage points in the Hill/DDHQ average — and a small fraction more in the polling average maintained by Nate Silver’s “Silver Bulletin.”

That’s good news for the vice president, but there are major caveats.

Harris is benefiting in the polling averages from the Bloomberg/Morning Consult survey, which delivered unusually good results for her across several states. In Pennsylvania, the Bloomberg poll put Harris up by 5 points among likely voters. That’s a stark contrast to four other recent polls in the Keystone State, every one of which showed the race exactly tied.

Also, Pennsylvania was the site of a critical polling miss back in 2016. The final RealClearPolitics polling average in the state put Clinton up by roughly 2 points. In the end, Trump’s actual vote share was almost 4 points higher than predicted, enabling him to carry the state.

A 1-point edge is better than nothing for Harris. But its importance shouldn’t be exaggerated.

Trump’s edge on the economy looks to be eroding

Beneath the surface of the headline polling numbers, there are some signs that Trump’s previous edge on the economy is eroding.

A Washington Post analysis this week showed Trump’s average edge on the question of which candidate would best manage the economy had been cut in half, from 12 points to 6 points, since President Biden was the Democratic nominee.

That may be because of Harris’s focus on the topic, or because of a broader enthusiasm for her candidacy.

Given that the economy generally ranks as voters’ most important issue, it’s a notable shift.

But it’s equally notable that Trump still holds an edge — just one that has been reduced in scale.

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