President Biden’s historic announcement that he was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race has upset a race that had been largely stagnant until last month.
Polls have begun to trickle in the days since Biden’s decision, offering clues about how the race between Vice President Harris, the leading contender for the Democratic nomination, and former President Trump will play out.
Overall, this is good news for Harris and the Democratic Party. Some polls have her running at least somewhat better than incumbent Biden did against Trump before he left office. But election projections remain offline while analysts recalibrate their models for the new matchups, and time is needed to get a better sense of what these numbers mean heading into November.
Scott Tranter, director of data science at Decision Desk HQ, said it’s possible to argue that either Trump or Harris has the advantage in the race, highlighting how unclear the race is.
“There’s going to be one or two good things on both sides. That’s the nature of a true 50-50 race,” he said.
In the weeks before Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump just over a month ago, the general trend in the polls was that the two candidates were neck and neck nationally, with Trump holding a slight lead. In about a half-dozen battleground states that were likely to determine the winner of the election, Trump had a clearer lead.
But things have started to shift somewhat since the debate, with Trump widening his lead in national and state polls, and polls in traditionally liberal states like New Hampshire and Maine have also started to show Biden’s lead over Trump shrinking, giving Republicans hope they may be able to gain ground and expand their influence.
Trump’s lead in national polls has notably grown as calls, both publicly and privately, have grown among Democrats for Biden to drop out of the race. On July 21, when Biden announced he was ending his reelection bid, the Republican nominee was leading by 3.3 points in the average of national polls from Decision Desk HQ and The Hill.
Trump has never held such a large average lead in an election campaign before.
After Biden withdrew, election forecasting models stopped working. DDHQ’s national polling average has Trump leading Harris by two points, but it includes relatively few polls released since last Sunday.
Democrats have been quick to embrace Harris as a front-runner over the past week, starting with Biden’s immediate endorsement of her after Biden announced he was ending his campaign, and that seems to be reflected in several polls released in the past week showing growing support for the Democratic candidate.
One of the first national polls released after Harris announced her candidacy showed her leading Trump nationally. A Reuters/Ipsos poll gave her a 2-point lead, within the margin of error. The same poll conducted a week earlier had Trump leading Biden by 2 points and tied with Harris.
Equally notable is Harris’ four-point lead in a three-way race that also includes independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In head-to-head contests in which Biden led Trump, there were numerous instances in which the former president’s standing against Biden improved when respondents were allowed to choose between other candidates.
A majority of respondents described Harris as “mentally astute and able to handle challenges,” seven percentage points higher than the share who said the same about Trump, while only one-fifth said the same about Biden.
According to a poll released Thursday by The New York Times and Siena College, FiveThirtyEight Ranking The most reliable polling organizations say Biden has a one-point lead over Trump among likely voters, 48% to 47%, and a two-point lead among registered voters — both much narrower than the six-point lead Trump had among likely voters and nine-point lead among registered voters in the last poll before Biden withdrew.
Similarly, an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll shows Trump and Harris roughly tied in support, with Trump leading by one point.
As some of these polls began to roll in, Trump’s polling firm released a memo predicting a “Harris honeymoon” period in which Harris’ poll numbers would rise as she received more media coverage, but he said this would be temporary and would not change the “fundamentals” of the campaign.
Tranter agreed that Harris is in a “honeymoon phase,” but noted that how long that phase lasts may be key. Even if it only lasted 60 days, he said, early voting would have already begun. He said Harris has momentum that could be reversed, but could still affect the outcome.
Polls of key battleground states have also shown Harris matching Trump’s lead and, in some cases, outperforming Biden in states where her approval rating is drifting slightly away from Biden’s.
An Emerson College poll and The Hill poll released last week showed Trump leading Harris in most key states, but with leads within the margin of error in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, where Biden consistently trailed Trump throughout the campaign. Trump and Harris are tied in Wisconsin and Harris has a 5-point lead in Arizona.
Overall, these numbers are a big improvement for the Democrat compared to a similar poll of Biden conducted earlier this month, in which Harris beat Biden by 3 points in Michigan and Pennsylvania, 4 points in Arizona and Wisconsin, and 5 points in Georgia.
Fox News polls of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — three states that went to Trump in 2016 and Biden again in 2020 — showed the race to be similarly tight, with Trump leading by one point in Wisconsin and tied with Harris in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Tranter noted that Democratic states such as Virginia and Minnesota, where some polls had suggested Trump might make inroads against Biden, have “rapidly swung back” in favor of Harris, at least initially.
“At the national level, Harris is still behind Trump, but the gap is much smaller than the gap Biden was behind Trump by,” he said. “So in individual battleground states, we should see this trend continue.”
As the competition intensified, so did the popularity of Harris and Trump.
Following the assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania this month, Trump’s favorable rating among DDHQ and The Hill rose to 45 percent, while his unfavorable rating dropped from 57 percent to 51 percent.
As calls for Biden to step down have grown, Harris’ approval rating has notably risen, to 44 percent in the polling average. That rise has also been seen in polls over the past week, with 7 in 10 Democratic respondents in a Times/Siena poll saying they want the party to unify around Harris.
Tranter said Harris’ favorability rating is better than Biden’s, but not quite as high as Trump’s — both are slightly lower on the favorability scale, but within range.
Still, all of those numbers came before the Trump-Harris race had really begun, as Ms. Harris was just starting to ramp up her campaign with rallies and radio ads, and Republicans have stepped up their attacks on her after previously running against another candidate.
Harris’ campaigning could boost her approval ratings, but the attacks could also hurt them.
“There are still a few innings left in this season cycle and I don’t know if those numbers will go up or down, but I think they’re just as likely to go up or down,” Tranter said.
