Harris surges ahead of Trump in latest national poll but swing states remain toss-up

Harris appears to have been boosted by previous ‘double haters’ of Trump and Biden

A new national poll reveals Kamala Harris taking a clear lead for the first time, another sign that the Democratic presidential candidate continues to enjoy an advantage in momentum over her opponent Donald Trump with less than 50 days until the election.

An NBC News survey, published Sunday, shows Harris up five percentage points over Trump, boosted by what appears to be formerly undecided voters who had previously indicated they supported neither the Republican candidate nor his former opponent, Joe Biden.

The share of those so-called “double-haters” dropped from 12 percent in July to 7 percent in the September poll. Harris, meanwhile, has improved by six points from Biden’s standing in the July poll. NBC’s last survey was released just a week before Biden announced that he was dropping out of the presidential race.

Kamala Harris campaigns in Madison, Wisconsin, last week, one of several swing states set to determine the course of the 2024 election (AFP via Getty Images)

Trump, meanwhile, has seen his numbers remain virtually unchanged over the past 60 days. He has dropped 1 percentage point in the NBC poll, well within the survey’s margin of error. This latest survey followed his onstage rant at the September 10 debate against Harris, where he baselessly accused Haitian migrants of stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.

However the former president still holds key advantages in the Electoral College, which will decide the winner of the presidential election.

Despite Harris’s surge in national polling, she remains in nail-biter races across individual battleground states, according to another poll published this weekend by The Hill/HarrisX. In that survey, Harris trails her opponent in Arizona and Georgia - two states that she and Joe Biden won in 2020. The Vice President has not seen the same kind of marked improvement in polling in battlegrounds as she has exhibited nationally.

Across a handful of other states crucial for the final outcome — Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin and Michigan — Harris holds a 1-2 point lead in the Hill/HarrisX poll, indicating that while the vice president may hold a popular vote lead she still remains in real danger of losing the presidency.

One area where Harris holds a serious advantage over Trump is money. On Friday, the Trump team announced that it had raised $44.5m in August while Harris’s campaign raised more $190m in that month.

Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said on Thursday that the presidential race is still “a margin of error race. It’s a tie.”

The NBC poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters across all 50 states; it has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.