Harris vs. Trump polls show Kamala is surging in battleground states, not just national polling. While Joe Biden’s path to 270 electoral votes was narrow, new polling shows Harris made all the crucial states in the 2024 election competitive again.
The sharp improvement over Joe Biden’s position in the national popular-vote polls that Kamala Harris has achieved since the Great Switcheroo of July 21 has justifiably gotten a lot of attention. After all, in today’s hyper-polarized environment, a nearly-six-point swing from a race where Trump was leading Biden (per the FiveThirtyEight averages) by 3.2 percent nationally to one where Harris is leading Trump by 2.6 percent is a very big deal, reflecting a big uptick in Democratic enthusiasm and a significant drop in the “double hater” vote (and correspondingly, in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s support).
But as we were reminded in the Republican victories of 2000 and 2016, and Donald Trump’s near-miss in 2020, presidential elections are decided in the Electoral College rather than the popular vote, which national polls estimate. And Kamala Harris’s most significant accomplishment in the last three and a half weeks has been to climb into a highly competitive position with Trump in the seven battleground states where the deal will ultimately go down.
To be clear, Biden’s chronically poor performance in five of these states was a big part of the panic afflicting Democrats even before his terrible debate performance on June 27 and subsequent waffling over withdrawal. On the day Biden did fold his tent (July 21), in the FiveThirtyEight averages Trump was leading him by 5.5 percent (45.0 to 39.5 percent) in Arizona; by 5.8 percent (44.5 to 39.7 percent) in Nevada; by 5.9 percent (45.1 to 39.2 percent) in Georgia; by 6.9 percent (45.6 to 38.7 percent) in North Carolina; and by 4.4 percent (45.5 to 41.1 percent) in Pennsylvania. Biden was also trailing Trump in Michigan (42.4 percent to 43.
