Key Takeaways
- Kamala Harris is surging ahead of Trump in national and swing state polls.
- Harris’s campaign has energized voters, reversing Biden’s previous deficits in key states.
- Polls show Harris gaining support from Black voters, white women with degrees, and independents.
A lot of new studies show one important trend: Kamala Harris is now ahead in the race for the White House. Since Harris took over for President Joe Biden as the front-runner on the Democratic ticket a little more than four weeks ago, her campaign has given tired voters and a once-struggling Democratic party a burst of youthful energy and interest.
That boost has helped Harris move ahead of Trump in national polls and even slightly edge ahead of Trump in key swing states. A new poll from the Cook Political Report Swing State Project found that Harris has taken a small lead over Trump in almost all fight -ground states.
The study, which came out on Wednesday, shows that Harris is ahead of Trump by two points overall. There are also third-party candidates running in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
And in those places where the candidates ran against each other, Harris was ahead by one point over the Republican. That lead is still very small, but it shows how far Harris has come since Biden was her boss. According to the same poll done in May, Trump had a 5-point lead over Biden in close states and a 3-point lead over Biden in head-to-head matches.
The Cook poll says that in a horse race, Harris is ahead of Trump by between 2 and 5 points in every battleground state. The only state where the two are tied is Georgia. This was in May. Trump was ahead everywhere except Wisconsin, where he was tied with Biden.
All polls show that Harris is making progress in the very close 2024 race. The most recent polls from the New York Times and Siena College also show that Harris is ahead of the former president by four points in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all of which are very important swing states.
Early versions of the poll showed that Biden had a small lead in Wisconsin when she was running against Trump. He also trailed in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Even in Florida, which used to be thought of as a swing state but has become more red over the past few years, Harris has cut Trump’s lead. A poll from Florida Atlantic University released on Wednesday shows that Trump has a 3-point lead over Harris among potential voters in Florida. This is half of the lead he had over Biden when the poll was done in June.
Harris is making progress in more places than just swing states. A study by FiveThirtyEight found that Harris has been ahead of Trump by an average of 2.7 points in 14 national polls.
FiveThirtyEight says that back in the days after Biden dropped out of the race, Harris only had an average nationwide lead of 0.8 points over Trump.
In a national poll released last week by NPR, PBS News, and Marist, Harris slowly gained ground on Trump and now leads him by three points in both a horserace and a head-to-head battle. That’s four points more than Harris was in the same poll not long after she took over for Biden; Trump was ahead by one point at that time.
A poll by NPR, PBS News, and Marist showed that Harris is ahead with black voters, white women with college degrees, and independent women voters. NPR said that since she took over the Democratic ticket, her support with these groups has grown by 20 to 30 points.
Many things about Harris are going better than they were for Biden before he dropped out of the race. A study by analyst Nate Silver found that when placed against Trump, Harris is doing 7.2 points better than Biden in national state-level polls.
All the excitement about Harris’s new campaign has made Trump angry, and Republicans say it’s just the honeymoon phase. She will also be hoping that her rise in the polls doesn’t just end there and that she can ride that wave of support through a shorter campaign season and into the White House.