Vice President Kamala Harris has scored her fifth polling win in 24 hours, narrowing former President Donald Trump‘s lead with just over 100 days left until Election Day.
A poll released on Friday by The Wall Street Journal found that Harris had all but eliminated Trump’s lead, with the vice president trailing the former president by a 49 percent to 47 percent margin in a head-to-head matchup. The poll has a 3.1 percent margin of error.
When independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy is included, the poll found that Harris overtakes Trump and has a slight lead, 45 percent to 44 percent. Kennedy was the choice of only 4 percent of respondents, while 5 percent were undecided.
President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris on July 21, was losing to Trump by 6-point margins in both head-to-head and multi-candidate versions of the Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier this month.
While early polling suggests that a Trump-Harris contest will likely be close, the momentum seems to have quickly shifted to Harris. The vice president has amassed mostly small but significant gains in at least four other polls of battleground states and young voters on Thursday and Friday.
Dan Lamb, a senior lecturer at the Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University, told Newsweek, “Harris won the week with strong speeches, viral social media” and important endorsements, predicting that her polling position may improve further in the near future.
“It’s hard to see the buzz letting up, with attention turning to her VP pick and the DNC’s delegate voting starting in early August,” Lamb added. “After that comes the DNC convention. The next several weeks could be very favorable for her polling.”
Grant Davis Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University, told Newsweek that he was “not surprised to see the race tighten a bit” because “Harris is not Biden, and Biden was on a pretty bad glide path.”
“Harris also has some of the traits that a lot of Democrats were looking for,” Reeher said. “Her early performance has been good, and she’s picking up some good endorsements. The money is coming in. All this has been widely reported in the press, which furthers the impression of new viability.”
“So it’s not surprising that this would give you a bump,” he continued. “What I don’t see, however, is her making up the ground in the battleground states. But some newer polling may come out that shows this. Still, based on what we can see, she has some ground to make up.”
An Emerson College/The Hill poll of battlegrounds states released on Thursday found that Trump was leading Harris in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania and tied with the vice president in Wisconsin.
However, a version of the poll taken earlier this month with Biden as the Democratic candidate showed Trump had significantly larger leads, while the former president was leading Biden in Wisconsin by 4 percent.
A Fox News poll released on Friday suggested that Trump is losing ground in Michigan. Harris and Trump were tied in the new poll at 49 percent each, with a version of the poll taken in April showing that Biden trailed the former president by 49 percent to 46 percent.
A University of New Hampshire poll released on Thursday found that Harris had opened up a 7-point head-to-head lead over Trump in New Hampshire. Previous polling of a hypothetical Trump-Harris race had shown the vice president slightly behind the former president, while Biden and Trump were tied.
Additionally, a new Axios/Generation Lab poll of young voters found that Harris was crushing Trump in the 18-34 demographic. The poll, which was released on Thursday, showed that the vice president was preferred by 60 percent of young voters, while 40 percent preferred Trump. Biden had a 6-point lead over Trump.
Reeher suggested that early Democratic “enthusiasm” for Harris’ candidacy could be fueled by a perception that she is to the left of Biden on issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which may boost her standing among certain demographics but could ultimately hurt her chances in November.
“If that is an impression that takes hold, she will have a very tough time in the battleground states, especially among the working and middle-class white voters,” Reeher warned. “I’ll be watching the convention speeches for indications about this issue. I’m sure this is being thought through.”
While the picture may change in coming weeks, Trump continues to hold a clear overall polling advantage over Harris as of Friday.
Trump is also the favorite among bookmakers, with betting website Polymarket giving him a 59 percent chance of winning the election and Harris a 40 percent chance at the time of publication.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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