The polls emerged after a chaotic few weeks in the 2024 presidential election and point to a new hyper-competitive race.
The elevation of Vice President Kamala Harris shook the race and slowed the former president’s momentum donald trump could have been seen leaving the Republican convention and the assassination attempt that preceded it. Although polls showed Trump was building a lead over President Joe Biden After last month’s debate, that lead evaporated mostly against Harris in the new round of polls conducted since she became the almost certain Democratic nominee.
The new poll shows how much the scenario has changed since Biden dropped out last Sunday. For months, the race seemed decided and Biden’s modest deficit entering the debate threatened to shrink even further. That has now changed.
Trump still maintains a small lead over Harris – but the race is now close, which was not the case with the Biden vs. Trump contest after the debate. Later this week, new research from The New York Times/Siena College (Trump +1 over Harris), Wall Street Journal (Trump +2) and CNN (Trump +3) all represent a narrowing of Trump’s 6-point lead in all three post-debate polls.
Looking at the horse race alone, it is difficult to gauge whether opinions about Trump changed after the assassination attempt, or whether he was rejected by the Republican Party convention and senatorial selection. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate
But if we look deeper, we can see some signs that Trump is viewed differently now than he was before the assassination attempt. Likewise, the crosstabulations show how Harris closed the gap with the Republican nominee, performing stronger with traditionally Democratic groups, among whom Biden trailed far behind.
Here are five takeaways from the latest numbers:
Harris began to rebuild a more traditional Democratic coalition
A change in the Democratic candidate resonated with the electorate and, at least initially, restored traditional demographic patterns.
Even before his debate flop, Biden had struggled to keep key elements of the Democratic base in the fold: support had declined significantly among young voters, black voters, Latino voters and other reliable supporters of past Democratic candidates, including Biden in 2020.
Harris brought some of those voters back into the fold. In the New York Times/Siena survey, for example, it is running harder than Biden had all year among young and black voters, while keeping pace with Biden among older and white voters, where his numbers were more durable.
That doesn’t mean Trump’s gains have completely disappeared in a matter of days, now that he’s running against a 59-year-old black woman instead of an 81-year-old white man. Harris is still falling short of Biden’s 2020 numbers among young and Black voters, and the former president is still well ahead of his 2016 and 2020 numbers among those groups.
Harris has more paths to 270 electoral votes than Biden
As the electorate shifts, Harris creates more potential paths to the White House.
For Biden, the election seemed Rust belt or bust. But Harris’s stronger numbers among black and Latino voters could translate into better prospects in some of the Sun Belt states where she trailed Trump well: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.
The Biden campaign was still actively contesting those states, but its public polling deficits had been significant even before the debate. There are very few polls so far in Sun Belt swing states, but the shifts taking place in national polls suggest that Harris could put those states back in play.
Biden was still in the game, at least before the debate, in the “Blue Wall” states that were competitive and decisive in 2016 and 2020. And a set of new Fox News polls released Friday show Harris and Trump neck and neck in Michigan, Pennsylvania It is Wisconsin.
And polls in states with similar demographic profiles also suggest that Harris is getting closer to Biden’s 2020 winning numbers — and not the crushing, devastating defeat that some Democrats feared if Biden had stayed in the race after the debate. A Fox News Minnesota Poll showed Harris 6 points ahead of Trump, similar to Biden’s 7-point victory. Two searches in New Hampshire this week gave the vice president clues that basically matched Biden four years ago. Trump’s allies have argued in recent weeks that these states were among a number of blue-trending states that have been put into play.
Harris appears to be closing this out. She has work to do to catch up to Trump, but she already has more options than Biden.
Trump is more popular than ever in the last four years
While Harris’ takeover of the news cycle may have blunted any Trump surge in the horse race polls following last week’s assassination attempt and convention, there is still evidence of a bump in the former president’s favorability ratings.
In poll after poll, Trump has received favorable ratings at or near the highest level on record.
It’s not a very high bar: Even when he won the 2016 election, more voters consistently said they viewed Trump unfavorably than viewed him favorably—he had some electoral success despite his image. Trump is still underwater, but his image rating is much closer to 50-50 than it has been at virtually any point in his political career.
In the Wall Street Journal poll, his favorable/unfavorable rating was 47%/50%. This is a significant change: in nine previous polls, dating from November 2021, the percentage of voters with an unfavorable opinion of Trump had always been at least 10 points higher than the percentage who viewed him favorably.
Some of Trump’s numbers in the early weeks of the pandemic rival his current position. But at this point, four years ago, his image had declined. And despite everything that had happened since then, he hadn’t recovered – until now.
Biden’s retirement is extremely popular
In this era of polarization, it is difficult to imagine that Biden and his 39 percent approval rating could do anything that was almost unanimously popular.
But his decision to end his moribund campaign is welcomed across the political spectrum.
More than three in four likely voters in the New York Times/Siena poll said they were excited or satisfied with Biden dropping out. The numbers were similar in Fox News state polls, including in Pennsylvania, where 78% of voters said they approved of Biden dropping out.
Biden’s decision is receiving bipartisan praise: the vast majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents support his departure. But ironically, it’s Democratic voters who are most excited about this. Significantly more Democratic voters than Republican voters in the Fox News Pennsylvania poll, 86% to 69%, approve of Biden dropping out, despite Republicans’ general antipathy toward the president.
RFK Jr. is in freefall
With Trump’s post-convention recovery, the Democrats’ change of candidate and their own mistakes, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s numbers are up.
In the New York Times/Siena poll, Kennedy was at 5%, down from 8% just after the Biden-Trump debate. He is at 4% in the Wall Street Journal poll, down from 7% in the previous survey.
Kennedy criticized last month when he fell short of CNN’s criteria for a debate invite: He got 15 percent in three polls (needing four) and fell well shy of the cable network’s threshold for ballot access (Kennedy argued which was unfair, as many states do not certify independent candidates until the end of the year).
And now, even though he has been elected in more states, it looks like the voting threshold for the next debate will be his undoing. He needs to earn 15 percent in four qualifying polls from Aug. 1 to September. 3 to be able to compete in the ABC News debate on September 10, and he’s not even close to that right now.
Kennedy and several third-party candidates have courted a significant portion of voters who viewed Biden and Trump unfavorably. But these so-called double haters are increasingly rare now, thanks to Trump’s improving outlook and Harris’s stronger image than Biden.
These developments may not last: Trump may return to his consistently weak image, and Harris’ honeymoon with the public may be short-lived, especially in the face of emerging Republican attacks.
But for now, more voters like at least one of the candidates and fewer say they will hold their noses in November. After months of heading toward a grim rematch of 2020, the election was abruptly annulled and there is much more uncertainty about its trajectory from here. Right now, at the start of the Harris-Trump race, the race appears tight.
