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The polls are in after a chaotic few weeks in the 2024 presidential election, and they point to a newly hyper-competitive race.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ elevation has jolted the race and blunted the momentum former President Donald Trump could have seen coming out of the Republican convention and the assassination attempt that preceded it. Though polling showed Trump building a lead over President Joe Biden following their debate last month, that advantage has mostly evaporated against Harris in the fresh round of surveys conducted since she became the all-but-certain Democratic nominee.
The new polling shows just how much the landscape has shifted since Biden dropped out last Sunday. For months, the contest appeared set, and Biden’s modest deficit going into the debate threatened to decline further. That’s now changed.
Trump still maintains a slim edge over Harris — but the race is now close, which was not the case for the Biden-vs.-Trump contest after the debate. Just this week, new polls from The New York Times/Siena College (Trump +1 over Harris), The Wall Street Journal (Trump +2) and CNN (Trump +3) all represent tightening from 6-point Trump leads in all three polls following the debate.
Looking only at the horserace, it’s difficult to evaluate whether opinions of Trump shifted after the assassination attempt, or whether he received a bounce out of the GOP convention and his selection of Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate
But look deeper, and one can see some signs that Trump is viewed differently now than he was before the assassination attempt. Similarly, the crosstabs show how Harris has closed the gap with the Republican nominee, performing stronger with traditionally Democratic groups among whom Biden had lagged badly.
Here are five takeaways from the latest numbers:
Harris has started to rebuild a more traditional Democratic coalition
A switch in the Democratic candidate has rippled through the electorate and, at least initially, restored traditional demographic patterns.
Even before his debate debacle, Biden had struggled to keep key elements of the Democratic base in the fold: Support had eroded significantly among young voters, Black voters, Latino voters and other reliable supporters of Democratic candidates in the past, including Biden in 2020.
Harris has brought some of those voters back into the fold. In the New York Times/Siena poll, for example, she is running stronger than Biden has all year among young voters and voters of color while mostly keeping pace with Biden among older and white voters, where his numbers had been more durable.
That doesn’t mean Trump’s gains have entirely disappeared in a matter of days now that he’s running against a 59-year-old woman of color instead of an 81-year-old white man. Harris is still short of Biden’s 2020 numbers among young voters and voters of color, and the former president is still running well ahead of his 2016 and 2020 numbers among those groups.
Harris has more paths to 270 electoral votes than Biden did
As she shifts the electorate, Harris is creating more potential pathways to the White House.
For Biden, the election was looking like Rust Belt or bust. But Harris’ stronger numbers among Black and Latino voters could translate to better prospects in some of the Sun Belt states where he had fallen well behind Trump: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.
Biden’s campaign was still actively contesting those states, but his deficits in public polling had been significant even before the debate. There’s very little polling so far in the Sun Belt swing states, but the changes taking place in the national polling suggest Harris could put those states back into play.
Biden was still in the ballgame, at least before the debate, in the “Blue Wall” states that were competitive and decisive in both 2016 and 2020. And a set of new Fox News polls out Friday show Harris and Trump neck-and-neck in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
And polls in states with similar demographic profiles also suggest Harris is inching closer to Biden’s winning 2020 numbers — and not toward the devastating, landslide loss that some Democrats had feared if Biden had stayed in the race after the debate. A Fox News poll in Minnesota showed Harris 6 points ahead of Trump, similar to Biden’s 7-point win. Two polls in New Hampshire this week gave the vice president leads that essentially matched Biden four years ago. Trump allies had argued in recent weeks that those states were among a slew of blue-leaning states that had been put in play.
Harris seems to be shutting that down. She has work to do to catch up to Trump, but she already has more options than Biden did.
Trump is more popular than at any point in the last four years
While Harris’ takeover of the news cycle may have blunted any Trump bump in the horserace polling after the assassination attempt and last week’s convention, there’s still evidence of one in the former president’s favorability ratings.
In poll after poll, Trump has notched favorable ratings at or near his highest ever recorded.
It’s not a terribly high bar: Even when he won the 2016 election, more voters have consistently said they view Trump unfavorably than view him favorably — he’s had some electoral success despite his image. Trump’s still underwater, but his image rating is a lot closer to 50-50 than it has been at virtually any time in his political career.
In the Wall Street Journal poll, his favorable/unfavorable rating was 47 percent/50 percent. That’s a significant shift: In nine previous polls dating back to 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 standing. But by this time four years ago, his image had declined. And in all that’s happened since then, it hadn’t recovered — until now.
Biden’s retirement is wildly popular
In this era of polarization, it’s hard to imagine that Biden and his 39-percent approval rating could do anything that would be almost unanimously popular.
But his decision to pull the plug on his moribund campaign is well received across the political spectrum.
More than three-in-four likely voters in the New York Times/Siena poll said they were enthusiastic or satisfied that Biden had dropped out. The numbers were similar in the Fox News state polls, including in Pennsylvania, where 78 percent of voters said they approved of Biden dropping out.
Biden’s decision is earning bipartisan praise: Large majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents support him stepping aside. But, ironically, it’s Democratic voters who are more enthusiastic about it. Significantly more Democratic voters than GOP voters in the Fox News Pennsylvania poll, 86 percent versus 69 percent, approve of Biden dropping out, despite Republicans’ general antipathy toward the president.
RFK Jr. is in freefall
With Trump’s post-convention bounce, Democrats’ candidate switch and his own missteps, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s numbers are dropping like a rock.
In the New York Times/Siena poll, Kennedy was at 5 percent, down from 8 percent right after the Biden-Trump debate. He’s at 4 percent in the Wall Street Journal poll, down from 7 percent in the previous poll.
Kennedy cried foul last month when he fell short of CNN’s criteria for a debate invitation: He earned 15 percent in three polls (needing four) and was well shy of the cable network’s threshold for ballot access (Kennedy argued it was unfair, since many states don’t certify independent candidates until later in the year).
And now, even as he’s gotten on the ballot in more states, it appears that the polling threshold for the next debate will be his undoing. He needs to earn 15 percent in four qualifying polls from Aug. 1-Sept. 3 to be able to compete in the ABC News debate on Sept. 10, and he’s nowhere near that right now.
Kennedy and various third-party candidates have been courting the significant share of voters who viewed both Biden and Trump unfavorably. But these so-called double haters are increasingly rare now, thanks to improved views of Trump and Harris’ stronger image than Biden.
Those developments might not last: Trump could fall back to his consistently poor image, and Harris’ honeymoon with the public could be short-lived, especially in the face of nascent Republican attacks.
But, for now, more voters like at least one of the candidates, and fewer say they’ll be holding their noses in November. After months of careening toward a dismal rematch of 2020, the election has been abruptly upended, and there is a lot more uncertainty about its trajectory from here. Right now, at the outset of the Harris-Trump contest, it looks like a close race.
