Fresh national polling shows swing-state voters are more likely to support Donald Trump than the overall population, offering some clarity on whether he can overcome Kamala Harris in three weeks.
The Harvard-Harris survey conducted between Oct. 11 and 13 finds that while the vice president leads by a single point overall with the 2,596 likely voters polled, it’s a different matter with the 898 battleground voters in the seven states that will almost certainly decide the election.
In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which together have a trove of 93 electoral votes, the former president is up 48% to 46%, with 6% undecided or leaning toward a third-party candidate.
Trump is stronger with independent voters, leading 44% to 40% among the swing cohort in swing states. Voters who have made up their minds already also back Trump, 52% to 47%, leaving Harris to rely on voters “still weighing their choices.”
Among those wafflers, she’s up 41% to 28%, with 31% unsure.
Key to Trump’s performance in this poll is his appeal to places and demographics Republicans have ceded for decades.
The former president shows strength with urban voters, with 42% support; if that holds, it inverts a long-standing theory Republicans can’t win big cities.
Trump also demonstrates strength with black voters, taking 22%, which would be a dramatic improvement on his 13% with that group four years ago and 12% in his 2016 victory.
Finally, the survey shows the ex-prez making gains with college-educated voters, who have been a source of strength for Harris in other polling, as he ties her at 49% with the booksmart set.
Trump is also performing well with early voters, as Republicans and GOP-leaning independents seem to have made their peace with casting ballots before Election Day, thus reversing a structural advantage for Democrats during the 2020 pandemic election.
While Harris is +8 in the overall early vote, it’s a different story in the battlegrounds, where Trump leads 48% to 47% among those who want to cast ballots days or weeks before they’re counted.
Democrats have a +7 advantage in the early vote overall this cycle — down from a 19-point edge in 2020.
Voters also have questions about the veep’s shambolic interviews of late, including a heavily edited “60 Minutes” interview.
Eighty-five percent of voters, including 88% of Republicans, 87% of Democrats and 80% of independents, want the full transcript of the interview whose aired version deviated sharply from the preview when it came to the Biden-Harris administration’s much-scrutinized and largely unpalatable positions on Israel’s regional conflicts.
Independents are notably sour on Harris’ softball media strategy, which includes fluffy games of footsie with “heavyweights” like the sex-chat fest Call Her Daddy and hoary shock jock Howard Stern in addition to the sympathetically edited CBS sitdown: 54% of unaligned voters say the interviews have hurt her, and 55% believe they raise questions about her readiness to be president — a damning indictment for a career politician with national prominence for the last four years as an elected leader and nearly two years as a candidate before that.
All told, these are not the numbers Harris wants in the stretch run, as her campaign’s compulsory “joy” message mutates into 2016-style anxiety — and as the vibes go sour and dark amid existential questions about whether the woman one heartbeat away has what it takes to do the job.
