New Keystone State polling suggests unaligned voters could be the key to a very narrow victory for Donald Trump.
The former president won 2016’s race in Pennsylvania by fewer than 45,000 votes, only to lose in 2020 to “Scranton Joe” Biden by a little more than 80,000.
This time around, Trump is narrowly ahead of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in a two-person race, 46.6% to 46%, with 4.1% undecided and 3% saying they’d prefer another candidate, in this Insider Advantage survey of 800 likely voters conducted Aug. 18 and 19.
Trump’s slender 0.6% lead is well inside the margin of error of +/- 3.46%, and it’s even smaller than the 0.72% win he had over Hillary Clinton eight years ago, when he carried all but 11 of the state’s 67 counties.
Whether it’s a slender win or not, though, his campaign would happily take it either way.
Key to Trump’s performance in this poll is a very important group of persuadable voters in this battleground state: the independents.
Despite weeks of unrelentingly positive coverage for the Democratic nominee in the wake of her usurpation of the ticket’s top spot, this survey’s 256 unaligned voters are breaking for Trump, 47.8% to 37.7%.
An additional 7.9% are undecided, while 6.5% say they back another candidate. But if Trump can top 50% with indy voters, it’s a positive for his campaign and a likely sign he could have similar success in other states.
This is especially crucial given that most of them say they will vote: 65.2% of independents say they’re enthusiastic about voting, with another 32.6% saying they plan to vote but are not enthusiastic, and another 2.2% claim to have no opinion on whether they will vote.
That’s the good news for Trump here, but as one might expect in a poll where not even 1 percentage point separates the candidates, concerns also abound.
The primary one for Trump and Republicans is that Harris, who has been a candidate for roughly four weeks, has more of a command of her own party than Trump, who has been running for or serving as president for nearly a decade.
Harris has 87.7% support among Democrats, while 7.6% say they back Trump, 2.5% back another candidate, and 2.1% say they’re undecided.
While Trump has a comparable level of intraparty support at 84.3%, Harris is persuading more Republicans in this survey: 12.1% say they back her right now, a potentially worrying sign for the GOP.
And there’s not much room for either candidate to gain with Republicans: 2.1% say they are undecided, while 1.5% say they want another candidate.
As with most other polls of this race, the Insider Advantage survey suggests a gender gap, though it’s one that may concern Harris more than Trump. The vice president has 49.8% support with women, falling short of majority status, with Trump at 41.5%.
Trump has 52% support with men, good for a 10.1% lead over Harris.
Trump has plurality support with white voters at 49.8% against 44.4% for the veep, while Harris is backed by 76.3% of black voters (with an anemic 9.9% backing Trump). One hundred percent of African Americans and 98% of whites say they will vote in November.
But the real wild card in this Pennsylvania poll may be the state’s Hispanic population.
While Trump leads Harris 44.2% to 31% among Latinos, 19% say they are undecided and 5.8% back another candidate.
With so much of this race locked in according to this survey, it appears whoever brings Hispanics and independent voters onside will prevail.
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