Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are locked in a tight race in key battleground states, according to new polls from the Cook Political Report and the bipartisan team at BSG and GS Strategy Group released Wednesday.
The polls, conducted between July 26 and August 2, show that Mr.me Harris leads or ties among likely voters in six of the seven swing states polled — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In Nevada, Trump leads by a narrow margin. That’s a marked change from the same polls in May — when Biden was still in the race — which showed Trump leading by a solid margin or a tie in all seven swing states.
The turnaround in North Carolina is particularly striking. Mr. Trump held one of his biggest leads there in May, and the candidates are now neck and neck.
PHOTO LOGAN CYRUS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in North Carolina on July 24.
The new surveys also suggest that third-party candidates may be less important. The inclusion of candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party, did not change the overall results in key states.
A remodeled race
These results are similar to those of recent polls by New York Times/Siena College, which show that Mme Harris has slight leads in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, another indicator of how the presidential race has been reshaped in a matter of weeks.
Cook’s surveys, conducted shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Kamala Harris to succeed him, show that the vice president’s approval ratings jumped 13 percentage points as voters got to know her as the Democratic Party’s new nominee.
Most of this progress has been made by Democrats, but Mme Harris also made gains among men who identify as independent, though that group still views her more negatively than positively, overall.
There is some good news for Donald Trump. Undecided voters, who represent a relatively small share of the electorate, have more confidence in Mr. Trump on economic policy and border security and are more sensitive to inflation than the electorate as a whole.
They are also more concerned about M’s abilityme Harris to serve as president is as old as Mr. Trump. If elected, Mr. Trump, 78, will be the oldest president ever inaugurated.
This article was published in the New York Times.
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