Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign must be feeling pretty good about a new wave of polls since the recent presidential debate. In just the last few days, we’ve seen Harris up in both national polls and surveys of swing states against former President Donald Trump. It’s an encouraging sign in what is still shaping up to be a close race with just over six weeks until Election Day.
In just the last few days, we’ve seen Harris up in both national polls and surveys of swing states against former President Donald Trump.
We don’t have time to walk through every single survey here, but here’s a snapshot. Morning Consult had Harris up 6 points nationally in its survey released Tuesday, 1 point higher than in the snap poll it conducted the day after last week’s debate. Another poll from Reuters/Ipsos that dropped last Friday showed Harris leading Trump 47% to 42% among registered voters. And the latest New York Times/Siena College poll sees a tie nationally among likely voters, with each candidate pulling 47% of those surveyed.
Things look even better for Harris in the battleground state polls, in which she had been comparatively weaker than in national surveys prior to the debate. The NYT’s poll of Pennsylvania has Harris up 4 percentage points over Trump among likely voters, roughly the same as in August. Tuesday had a poll from Suffolk University/USA Today showing a 3-point lead for Harris in the Keystone State. And almost all of the polls from Marist College and Quinnipiac University of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin show Harris leading, except for Quinnipiac’s Wisconsin poll, which joins a new AARP survey in showing a tie.
While most headlines tend to focus on “who’s winning,” I want to remind readers that polls are also important for helping answer “but why?” The Suffolk/USA Today survey, for example, included 21 voters who supported former President Joe Biden in 2020 but aren’t backing Harris. When asked why, five said it was because of the economy/inflation, five said it was because they don’t know Harris’ policies, and five said it was because they’re still undecided. Another two each said it was because of the administration’s Gaza policy and the border/immigration.
That’s a very small sample size, but it speaks to how small a group those potential swing voters are. It also, though, shows there’s still room for the Harris campaign to win over some of those former Biden supporters who aren’t fully on board yet. If the problem that five of them had is that they don’t know her policies, that means there’s still time to educate them. The same is true for the five voters in the sample who said they’re still undecided. And those 10 potential voters are more than all nine who backed Trump in 2020 and don’t anymore, only one of whom said they’re still undecided.
A few words of caution though before anyone gets too ebullient. First, most of these polls’ results are still within their margins of error. Pollsters are very up-front about these gaps in the math that could throw off their results. For example, the Times/Siena national poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3%, so the reality could be Harris is up as high as 50% to 44% or Trump leads by the same amount. Further, while Morning Consult on Thursday said that state-level polling shows Harris surging post-debate, that’s not a guaranteed trend through November. As Axios’ Hans Nichols noted in June after Biden’s less-than-stellar performance, historically these kinds of bumps have varying durations. But it’s still very much a welcome boost of momentum for Harris as the campaign begins to hit the homestretch. Furthermore, this is the exact thing that you want to see when there are key races up for grabs that will determine Senate control. Likewise, that upward trend line is all the more important when Democrats most likely have the advantage on mobilizing people to the polls, as the GOP suffers from Trump’s counterproductive orders to divert resources from the party’s ground game. There’s still a lot that can happen between now and Nov. 5, but for now it’s Harris with the wind at her back as Trump struggles to keep up.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW Daily. 
