With just over two months to go until the election, Vice President Kamala Harris has taken a slim lead over former President Trump in national polls and has made gains in several key states that previously seemed locked for Trump.
Poll after poll shows the race essentially tied, with leads for Trump or Harris often within the margin of error.
Harris would take 45% of the vote nationally, compared with Trump's 41%, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll of registered voters released on Thursday. Her margin over Trump widened to 13 percentage points among women and Hispanic voters, the poll showed.
Harris leads Trump 48% to 47% in a head-to-head matchup, according to a Wall Street Journal poll Thursday, which noted the vice president holds a 2-point advantage when independent and third-party candidates are included in the poll.
And in a USA Today/Suffolk University poll, also released Thursday, Harris has a 48% to 43% lead over Trump.
The new round of polls, released after Harris' campaign at the Democratic National Convention concluded, reflect a dramatic shift in the state of the race since President Biden dropped out just over a month ago.
The Trump campaign anticipated the surge in support for Harris after the Democratic National Convention, saying in a statement before her acceptance speech on August 22: “These surges do not last.” The campaign noted that it had also predicted a “honeymoon” period of positive polls and good press following Harris’ nomination, adding that it blamed the media, which it said had “decided to extend the honeymoon for over 4 weeks.”
Narrow margins in key states
Both the Trump and Harris campaigns have focused on key states that are likely to determine the election. Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, campaigned in Georgia and North Carolina this week and announced a “reproductive freedom bus tour” of several battleground states, set to begin next week. Meanwhile, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, visited Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll found Trump leading Harris 45% to 43% among registered voters in the seven battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and Nevada. But a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll showed Harris leading or tied with Trump in the same states.
A Fox News poll conducted over the weekend showed Harris leading by one percentage point in Arizona and by two points in Georgia and Nevada. Trump had a one-point lead in North Carolina, according to the Fox News poll.
The Fox News poll shows Harris maintaining the same level of support that enabled President Biden to win the election in 2020; she held slim leads in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, while Trump won North Carolina. In the 2024 campaign, Trump had held commanding leads in all four Sun Belt states before Biden dropped out, according to Fox News polls conducted earlier this year.
Harris maintained a 1-point lead in all four states even when third-party candidates Chase Oliver, Jill Stein and Cornel West were included, according to the Fox News poll.
Issues that concern voters
According to the Fox News poll, more and more Americans trust Harris on issues such as abortion, health care, uniting the country, fighting for the people and achieving necessary changes. But Trump is the preferred candidate on issues such as border security and immigration, the economy and the war between Israel and Hamas, according to the poll.
Voters who spoke to Reuters/Ipsos pollsters agreed that Trump would have a better approach to managing the U.S. economy (45% to 35%) for Harris), but on abortion policy they preferred the vice president by a margin of 47% to 31%.
When it comes to democracy and election integrity, 68% of voters polled by ABC News/Ipsos said Harris would likely accept the election results, compared with just 29% who said the same about Trump. As for voters themselves, 81% said they would accept the outcome, no matter who won.
Pro-Palestinian voters continue to show discontent
Harris’ numbers, however, are not as encouraging. The Council on American-Islamic Relations found in a poll released Thursday that 29.4% of American Muslims intend to vote for Harris, nearly matching their support for Green Party candidate Stein at 29.1%. The results reveal that American Muslims are continuing to press their grievances over the Biden-Harris administration’s policies in Gaza.
Trump voters accounted for 11.2% of respondents, with smaller percentages for West and Oliver. About 16% said they were undecided.
During the Democratic primaries in the spring, many Muslim and pro-Palestinian voters showed their displeasure with Biden by voting “uncommitted.” This was especially true in Michigan, a key state where Biden won by less than 3% of the vote in 2020 and home to the country’s largest population of Arab Americans. More than 13% of voters voted uncommitted in the state’s February primary.
Stein, a third-party candidate with little chance of winning, frequently runs in presidential elections without garnering much support nationwide. But CAIR’s poll shows she offers an outlet for disaffected Americans to voice their discontent. Still, Harris’s prospects among American Muslims are an improvement over Biden’s. In an earlier survey of 2,500 American Muslims, CAIR found they supported Biden by 7.3%, compared with 4.9% for Trump. Overwhelming support went to third-party candidates: Stein, at 36%, and West, at 25.2%.
The RFK Jr. effect
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race last week and endorsed Trump, pundits wondered how his decision would affect the two front-runners. Early polls show Kennedy’s remaining support, which had dwindled after Biden dropped out and Harris became the Democratic nominee, is shifting toward Trump.
The Fox News poll found that three in four voters who had a favorable view of Kennedy now support Trump.
