New poll shows Harris leading Trump in 3 key US election battleground states
Survey shows Republican nominee trailing the VP by 4% in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, amid surging support for Democratic ticket since Biden quit race
WASHINGTON – US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris leads Republican former President Donald Trump in three battleground states – Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – by four points, according to polls by the New York Times and Siena College.
Harris is ahead of Trump by four percentage points in those three states, 50% to 46% among likely voters in each state, according to the surveys conducted from August 5-9.
The margin of sampling error among likely voters was plus or minus 4.8 percentage points in Michigan, plus or minus 4.2 points in Pennsylvania and plus or minus 4.3 points in Wisconsin, the report added. In total, 1,973 likely voters were interviewed for those polls.
Democratic US President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid on July 21 and endorsed Harris for the November 5 vote against Trump after a disastrous debate performance against Trump in late June.
Harris’s takeover has reenergized a campaign that had faltered badly amid Democrats’ doubts about Biden’s chances of defeating Trump or his ability to continue to govern had he won.
US support for Israel’s war in Gaza — which began after Hamas’s October 7 attack in which Palestinian terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages — has led to large protests and opposition against the Biden administration in those states, especially in Michigan from some liberal, Muslim-American and Arab-American groups.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 39,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 331.
Unsatisfied with Biden’s handling of the war, about 200,000 people from those three states were “uncommitted” to supporting him in the Democratic primaries, citing Gaza policy. Harris has made some forceful public comments on Palestinian human rights and expressed a tonal shift, even though she has displayed no substantive policy differences from Biden on Gaza.
Polls showed that Trump had built a lead over Biden, including in battleground states, after Biden’s debate performance, but Harris’s entry to the race has changed the dynamic.
An Ipsos poll published on Thursday showed Harris led Trump nationally 42% to 37% in the race for the November 5 election. That online nationwide poll of 2,045 US adults was conducted August 2-7 and had a margin of error of around 3 percentage points.
