New polls coming out of three key battleground states indicate that Vice President Harris is ahead of former President Trump.
According to polls released this weekend by Siena College for the New York Times, Harris tops Trump by four points – 50% to 46% – among likely voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The surveys, conducted August 5-9, are the latest to indicate the transformation of the presidential race in the wake of Harris replacing President Biden at the top of the Democratic Party’s national ticket last month.
Trump saw his polling edge over Biden expand in the wake of late June’s disastrous debate performance by the president, which spurred questions over whether the 81-year-old Biden was physically and mentally up to another four years in the White House.
Democrats quickly coalesced around Harris after Biden ended his re-election bid on July 21, amid growing calls from within his own party for the president to drop out of the race.
In the three weeks since Biden’s blockbuster announcement, a slew of national and key swing state polls have indicated it’s a margin-of-error race between Harris and Trump.
According to the new surveys, in a multi-candidate field that also includes Democrat turned independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and independent Cornel West, Harris edges Trump by two-points in Pennsylvania and holds a five-point lead in Michigan and six points in Wisconsin.
Kennedy, who earlier this year enjoyed support in the teens in some polling, registered in the mid-single digits in the new surveys.
The polls were conducted slightly before and mostly after the vice president on Tuesday announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on the Democrats’ 2024 ticket.
The two teamed up for large rallies Tuesday evening in Pennsylvania, and Wednesday in Wisconsin and Michigan.
The three states are known as the Democrats’ ‘blue wall,’ which the party reliably won in presidential elections for nearly a quarter-century before Trump narrowly carried them in capturing the White House eight years ago.
In 2020, President Biden won back all three states with razor-thin margins as he defeated Trump, and the states remain extremely competitive in the 2024 presidential election.
The New York Times Times/Siena College polls were conducted between Aug. 5-8 with 619 registered voters in Michigan and 661 in Wisconsin. The Pennsylvania survey was conducted between Aug. 6-9 with 693 registered voters.
The sampling error for each survey was plus or minus 4.8 percentage points in Michigan, plus or minus 4.3 percentage points in Wisconsin and plus or minus 4.2 percentage points in Pennsylvania.
Besides the bump in polling, Harris has also enjoyed a surge in fundraising since replacing Biden at the top of the Democrats’ ticket and again after naming Walz as her running mate.
Trump campaign chief pollster and top adviser Tony Fabrizio argues that the surge for Harris won’t last.
‘We are witnessing a kind of out of body experience where we have suspended reality for a couple of weeks,’ Fabrizio told reporters at a Trump campaign briefing on Thursday.
