Former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris enter the homestretch of the campaign in a tight race, and with their only scheduled debate looming on Tuesday, Ms. Harris faces a sizable share of voters who still say they need to know more about her.
A national poll of likely voters by The New York Times and Siena College found Mr. Trump leading Ms. Harris, 48 percent to 47 percent, within the poll’s three-percentage-point margin of error and largely unchanged from a Times/Siena poll taken in late July just after President Biden dropped his re-election bid. Mr. Trump may have had a rough month following the president’s departure and amid the burst of excitement that Ms. Harris brought Democrats, but the poll suggests his support remains remarkably resilient.
[The result is surprising, Nate Cohn writes. But it’s also plausible the poll is the first to capture a shift back toward Donald Trump.]
The national results are in line with polls in the seven battleground states that will decide the presidential election, where Ms. Harris is tied with Mr. Trump or holds slim leads, according to New York Times polling averages. Taken together, they show a tight race that remains either candidate’s to win or lose.
Only a little over eight weeks remain in the shortest presidential election in modern American history. Both candidates have scant opportunity to shift the electorate, but for Mr. Trump, opinions are largely fixed. Ms. Harris is still unknown to many.
In that sense, the new poll underscores the risks and potential rewards, particularly facing Ms. Harris, on Tuesday night, when she and Mr. Trump will face off on ABC News. The survey found that 28 percent of likely voters said they felt they needed to know more about Ms. Harris, while only 9 percent said they needed to know more about Mr. Trump.
These voters, when taken with the 5 percent of voters who said they were undecided or did not lean toward either major-party candidate, paint a portrait of an electorate that could be more fluid than it seems. Some who are considering Ms. Harris said they still hoped to learn more before solidifying their decision, and two-thirds of those who want to know more said they were eager to learn about her policies, specifically.
“I don’t know what Kamala’s plans are,” said Dawn Conley, a 48-year-old small-business owner in Knoxville, Tenn., who is leaning toward Mr. Trump but is not completely decided. “It’s kind of hard to make a decision when you don’t know what the other party’s platform is going to be.”
Overall, the poll may bring Democratic exuberance back to earth after a buoyant party convention in Chicago last month and rapid gains in support for Ms. Harris after Mr. Biden’s poor showing in the polls.
Ms. Harris held on to some of the gains she has made with key groups with whom Mr. Biden had been slipping — such as women, young voters and Latino voters — but fell short of traditional Democratic strength. She continues to struggle to build a solid lead with Latino voters, a crucial demographic.
If November is about change, Ms. Harris will need to make the case that she can deliver it. More than 60 percent of likely voters said the next president should represent a major change from Mr. Biden, but only 25 percent said the vice president represented that change, while 53 percent said Mr. Trump, the former president, did.
“I don’t see how Kamala Harris instead of Trump would bring change,” said Steven Osborne, a 43-year-old plumber and Trump supporter in Branson, Mo. “I mean, she’s Joe Biden’s vice president. How can she be seen as different?”
Another warning sign for Democrats: 47 percent of likely voters viewed Ms. Harris as too liberal, compared with 32 percent who saw Mr. Trump as too conservative.
On the plus side for Ms. Harris, the Democrats’ hammering away at Project 2025 as a blueprint for another Trump presidency has sunk in. The former president has tried hard to distance himself from the document, drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation with input from Trump allies, which lays out plans for a second Trump presidency.
Among the many recommendations in the 900-page document, Project 2025 proposes to criminalize pornography, disband the Commerce and Education departments, reject the idea of abortion as health care and shred climate protections.
Three-quarters of likely voters said they had heard about Project 2025, and of those, 63 percent said they opposed it.
“It’s a horrible affront to American democracy,” said John Fisher, 71, a retiree in the pivotal swing area of Delaware County, Pa., outside Philadelphia, and a registered Republican who is supporting Ms. Harris. “It’s a disgrace.”
Mr. Trump’s distancing aside, 71 percent of those who have heard of Project 2025 said they believed that the former president would try to enact some or most of the policies that it espouses.
Working in Mr. Trump’s favor is the fact that voters remain largely pessimistic about the direction of the country. Just 30 percent of likely voters said the country was on the right track, largely unchanged since July. But among voters who thought the country was headed in the wrong direction, 71 percent were optimistic that things would get back on the right track, an improvement since 2022, when voters were more pessimistic about the nation’s direction.
Democrats do have a slight edge when it comes to enthusiasm for voting: 91 percent of Democrats said they were enthusiastic, compared with 85 percent of Republicans.
[Follow the latest polls and see updated polling averages of the Harris vs. Trump matchup.]
“Oh, heavens, when it was Biden and Trump, it was the first time in my entire life I was like, I don’t know if I can vote this year,” said Carol Ploeger, 68, of Provo, Utah, who added that she would be voting for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in her life. “I feel like she’s got new blood, she’s younger, she knows what the American people need because she came from humble beginnings.”
Mr. Trump holds a 13-percentage-point advantage on the issue that remains most important to voters: the economy. Ms. Harris holds a 15-percentage-point advantage on another leading issue: abortion.
Ms. Harris faces a challenge with voters who hold her responsible for the Biden administration’s handling of some issues. About half of voters, largely Republicans, said Harris bore at least some blame for rising prices and problems during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And nearly two-thirds of voters, from across the political spectrum, said she bore at least some blame for problems at the southwestern border.
Matthew Tucker, a 31-year-old vaccine scientist in Cambridge, Mass., said he intended to vote for Ms. Harris and he did not vote in 2020. But he said he felt that the vice president bore responsibility for the problems at the border.
“It’s not like I’d lay it all on her,” he said, “but I’m not sure that I heard enough about her trying to deal with that. And I would like to hear more from Democrats or Republicans on more creative solutions to that problem, rather than just putting up walls.”
On abortion, Mr. Trump, who appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, has muddied the waters a bit. It is Ms. Harris’s strongest issue, with 54 percent of voters trusting her to handle it, compared with 39 percent who trust Mr. Trump. Yet 16 percent of Democrats and nearly half of independents said they did not think the former president would try to pass a law restricting abortion access nationwide.
At the same time, attacks on Mr. Trump’s character and fitness for office may not be working. Voters were only slightly more likely to view the former president — who was impeached twice and convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal that threatened his 2016 presidential campaign — as a riskier choice for the country than Ms. Harris. Fifty-four percent viewed Mr. Trump as a risky choice, compared with 52 percent who said the same about Ms. Harris.
The survey found that 70 percent of voters said that Mr. Trump had said something they found offensive. Nearly half of Trump voters said that they had been offended by him at some point but that they would still vote for him.
There was a sharp division on when voters found Mr. Trump’s comments offensive. Ninety-four percent of Ms. Harris’s voters said that Mr. Trump had said something they found offensive, with 78 percent saying that he had offended them recently. While a majority of Mr. Trump’s voters said he had never offended them, 37 percent of them said he had but not recently.
Here are the key things to know about this Times/Siena poll:
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Interviewers spoke with 1,695 registered voters across the country from Sept. 3 to 6, 2024.
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Times/Siena polls are conducted by telephone, using live interviewers, in both English and Spanish. About 96 percent of respondents were contacted on a cellphone for this poll.
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Voters are selected for the survey from a list of registered voters. The list contains information on the demographic characteristics of every registered voter, allowing us to make sure we reach the right number of voters of each party, race and region. For this poll, interviewers placed nearly 194,000 calls to nearly 104,000 voters.
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To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups that are underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. You can see more information about the characteristics of the respondents and the weighted sample at the bottom of the results and methodology page, under “Composition of the Sample.”
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The poll’s margin of sampling error among likely voters is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points. In theory, this means that the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, though many other challenges create additional sources of error. When computing the difference between two values — such as a candidate’s lead in a race — the margin of error is twice as large.
You can see full results and a detailed methodology here. If you want to read more about how and why The Times/Siena Poll is conducted, you can see answers to frequently asked questions and submit your own questions here.
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