A dispirited electorate marks the end of the 2024 presidential campaign, and a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
A dispirited electorate marks the end of the 2024 presidential campaign, with three-quarters of likely voters saying the country is seriously off on the wrong track, six in 10 dissatisfied with their choice of candidates – and a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Harris has 49% support among likely voters in this final-weekend ABC News/Ipsos poll, Trump 46%. Reflecting the country’s locked-in polarization, support for these candidates hasn’t changed significantly since Harris stepped in to replace Joe Biden last summer.
Harris was +2 in early October, +4 (a slight edge) last week and is +3 in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates with fieldwork by Ipsos. That scant 3-point difference with Trump matches the average Democratic-Republican gap in the last eight presidential elections, of which Democrats won the popular vote in seven. Regardless, the result leaves a wide-open field for the vagaries of the Electoral College.
One dynamic behind these results is early voting. In data as of Friday morning, 38% said they’d already voted, and they went for Harris by 56-38%. That compares with 62-33% among early voters last week, and it’s closer in this group than the Democrats want.
See PDF for full results. Not happy
Satisfaction with the contest, the economy and the country’s direction overall are in short supply. Seventy-four percent of likely voters say the country is headed seriously off on the wrong track – the most just before a presidential election since 2008. Half of Harris supporters say so, rising to nearly all, 98%, of Trump’s.
Dissatisfaction partly reflects economic attitudes. Forty-two percent of likely voters say they’re less well off financially than when Biden took office, vs. just 19% better off. The worse-off number has been at or near its highest in data since 1986 all year, reflecting the 40-year high in inflation experienced on Biden’s watch.
Here political divisions are especially profound, marking the connection between political views and economic ones. Seventy-eight percent of Trump supporters say they’ve become less well off under Biden. Among Harris supporters, just 8% go there.
On the other hand, in another measure – satisfaction with the choice of major-party candidates – partisans find a place to agree. Sixty percent are dissatisfied with the choice of Harris or Trump, including 61 % of Harris supporters and 57% of those backing Trump.
