Vice President Kamala Harris has pulled her party back into contention in several key battleground states after taking the reins of the presidential ticket and becoming the presumptive nominee for the Democrats .
A new Emerson poll released on Thursday shows Harris putting an end to the bleeding her predecessor was suffering for weeks across five key states: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. She still trails Donald Trump in each state, but she’s now within just a few percentage points — ground she has a chance of making up over the next 100-plus days until the general election.
The key bit is her marked improvement over Joe Biden . The Harris campaign didn’t unveil its first ad until Thursday, after the Emerson poll was taken, meaning the numbers are virtually unaffected by anything she has done since taking the wheel.
Her entrance alone has given Democrats a boost in each of those states over Emerson’s poll taken earlier in July. Her numbers were up over Biden’s by four percentage points in Wisconsin and Arizona, three percentage points in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and five percentage points in Georgia. Younger voters in particular were among her biggest gains.
The result comes the same day a Morning Consult poll showed Harris narrowly ahead of Trump with voters nationally, and a New York Times/ Siena College poll showed Harris cutting the Democrats’ national polling deficit down from six percentage points earlier this month to just one percentage point today.
The Republican nominee has seen his momentum stall in the immediate wake of the Trumpified Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where he spent four days boosting his profile. Harris, meanwhile, has seen a fundraising surge to the tune of $126 million in four days and watched as her party has lined up behind her rather than begin a painful open primary process.
The sudden shift in the race’s dynamic has resulted in Trump crying foul and complaining in Truth Social posts that his party wasted millions of dollars running against Joe Biden before Democrats held their own nominating convention. Harris will be crowned her party’s nominee, at least ceremoniously, at the Democrats’ convention in August.
Her first ad released on Thursday leaned heavily into the concept of freedom — economic freedom, safety from gun violence, as well as abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights. It was also set to a Beyonce soundtrack, signalling the energy of her campaign in the wake of Biden’s decision on Sunday to finally heed calls urging him to step aside.
A Trump campaign spokeperson pointed to the former president’s continued lead in each of the five swing states in a polling memo sent to reporters on Monday, prior to the release of the latest Emerson poll (which was taken on Monday and Tuesday).
“Even if Democrat Party insiders and donors are able to successfully annoint disgraced border czar Kamala Harris as the new nominee — disenfranchising millions of Democrat primary voters in the process — it won’t save them. Democrats can’t name a single state where Kamala Harris would perform better than Crooked Joe would have. In fact, President Trump crushes Kamala Harris in every poll,” said Dylan Johnson.
The Emerson poll’s credibility interval for each state was 3.4 percentage points.
After a devastating debate performance knocked Biden out of the race in a dragged-out cycle that began back in June, Harris is currently set to debate her opponent for the first time some time in September. The two campaigns have been invited to a debate by Fox News on September 17.
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