Vice President Kamala Harris has gained on former President Donald Trump in the New York Times’ latest poll.
When asked if the 2024 election were held today, 46 percent of the 1,142 likely voters surveyed by the Times and Siena College said that they would vote for Harris while 48 percent said they would back Trump. The former president’s 2-point lead is within the poll’s margin of error, meaning that the candidates are in a virtual tie.
The survey was conducted in the 48 hours following Harris’s campaign launch. The vice president has received a wave of support from Democrats after President Joe Biden suspended his reelection campaign on Sunday and subsequently endorsed Harris to take his place at the top of the party’s ticket.
Thursday’s poll is a good sign for Democrats, who for weeks were divided among themselves over if Biden should remain in the race. In a Times/Siena poll conducted in the days following the first presidential debate (June 28 to July 2), Biden was trailing Trump by 6 percentage points among likely voters.
In the days leading up to Biden’s decision to drop out of the election, the former president had taken his biggest lead over Biden in national polling, according to analysis from FiveThirtyEight.
The Times’ survey released on Thursday also found that 70 percent of respondents who indicated that they were a Democrat or Democratic-leaning voter said that the party should “unite behind” Harris quickly to make her the formal nominee. The Democratic National Convention will kick-off in Chicago on August 15, although the convention’s rules committee passed a proposal on Wednesday that will allow delegates to begin virtually voting on a presidential nominee at the start of next, per a report from the Associated Press.
While data is still relatively limited on how Harris could fare against Trump in November, several polls released this week have shown that the vice president is preferred by key demographics, including union members and women voters. Reuters and Ipsos also released a poll on Wednesday that found a majority of Americans think that Trump, who turned 78 last month, is too old to work in government, one of the major points of criticism that plagued Biden at 81 years old.
Trump’s campaign cautioned in a memo earlier this week about a potential “Harris Honeymoon” in polling in response to the vice president’s entry into the presidential race. The note, written by Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, said that while Democrats may experience a boost in polling over the next several weeks, the “fundamentals of the race stay the same.”
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign via email on Thursday for additional comment.
In recent days, the former president has attacked Harris—who he calls “Lyin’ Kamala”—for being “more radical” than Biden and has attempted to blame her for the White House policies along the U.S. southern boarder.
Harris’s campaign message has focused on her past experience as a local prosecutor and state attorney general in California, telling supporters at her first rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday that she “knows Donald Trump’s type.” The former president was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in May and was found liable of sexual assault and defamation in the spring of 2023.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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