As former US president Donald Trump and vice-president Kamala Harris enter the homestretch of the election campaign in a tight race, and with their only scheduled debate looming on Tuesday, Harris faces a sizeable share of voters who still say they need to know more about her.
A national poll of likely voters by the New York Times and Siena College found Trump leading Harris, 48 per cent to 47 per cent, within the poll’s 3-percentage-point margin of error and largely unchanged from a Times/Siena poll taken in late July just after President Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid. Trump may have had a rough month after the president’s departure and amid the burst of excitement that Harris brought Democrats, but the poll suggests his support remains remarkably resilient.
The national results are in line with polls in the seven battleground states that will decide the presidential election, where Harris is tied with Trump or holds slim leads, according to Times polling averages. Taken together, they show a tight race that remains either candidate’s to win or lose.
Only a little more than eight weeks remain in the shortest presidential election in modern American history. Both candidates have scant opportunity to shift the electorate, but for Trump, opinions are largely fixed. Harris is still unknown to many.
In that sense, the new poll underscores the risks and potential rewards, particularly facing Harris, on Tuesday night, when she and Trump will face off on ABC News. The survey found that 28 per cent of likely voters said they felt they needed to know more about Harris, while only 9 per cent said they needed to know more about Trump.
These voters, when taken with the 5 per cent of voters who said they were undecided or did not lean toward either major-party candidate, paint a portrait of an electorate that could be more fluid than it seems. Some who are considering Harris said they still hoped to learn more before solidifying their decision, and two-thirds of those who want to know more said they were eager to learn about her policies, specifically.
Overall, the poll may bring Democratic exuberance back to earth after a buoyant party convention in Chicago last month and rapid gains in support for Harris after Biden’s poor showing in the polls.
Harris held on to some of the gains she has made with key groups with whom Biden had been slipping – such as women, young voters and Latino voters – but fell short of traditional Democratic strength. She continues to struggle to build a solid lead with Latino voters, a crucial demographic.
If November is about change, Harris will need to make the case that she can deliver it. More than 60 per cent of likely voters said the next president should represent a major change from Biden, but only 25 per cent said the vice-president represented that change, while 53 per cent said Trump did.
Another warning sign for Democrats: 47 per cent of likely voters viewed Harris as too liberal, compared with 32 per cent who saw Trump as too conservative.
On the plus side for Harris, the Democrats’ hammering away at Project 2025 as a blueprint for another Trump presidency has sunk in. Trump has tried hard to distance himself from the document, drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation with input from Trump allies, which lays out plans for a second Trump presidency.
Among the many recommendations in the 900-page document, Project 2025 proposes to criminalise pornography, disband the Commerce and Education departments, reject the idea of abortion as healthcare, and shred climate protections.
Three-fourths of likely voters said they had heard about Project 2025, and of those, 63% said they opposed it.
Trump’s distancing aside, 71 per cent of those who have heard of Project 2025 said they believed that the former president would try to enact some or most of the policies that it espouses.
Working in Trump’s favour is the fact that voters remain largely pessimistic about the direction of the country. Just 30 per cent of likely voters said the country was on the right track, largely unchanged since July. But among voters who thought the country was headed in the wrong direction, 71 per cent were optimistic that things would get back on the right track, an improvement since 2022, when voters were more pessimistic about the nation’s direction.
Democrats have a slight edge when it comes to enthusiasm for voting: 91% of Democrats said they were enthusiastic, compared with 85% of Republicans.
Trump holds a 13-percentage-point advantage on the issue that remains most important to voters: the economy. Harris holds a 15-percentage-point advantage on another leading issue: abortion.
Harris faces a challenge with voters who hold her responsible for the Biden administration’s handling of some issues. About half of voters, largely Republicans, said Harris bore at least some blame for rising prices and problems during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And nearly two-thirds of voters, from across the political spectrum, said she bore at least some blame for problems at the Mexican border.
On abortion, Trump, who appointed three of the supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, has muddied the waters a bit. It is Harris’ strongest issue, with 54 per cent of voters trusting her to handle it, compared with 39 per cent who trust Trump. Yet, 16 per cent of Democrats and nearly half of independents said they did not think the former president would try to pass a law restricting abortion access nationwide.
At the same time, attacks on Trump’s character and fitness for office may not be working. Voters were only slightly more likely to view the former president – who was impeached twice and convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal that threatened his 2016 presidential campaign – as a riskier choice for the country than Harris. Fifty-four per cent viewed Trump as a risky choice, compared with 52 per cent who said the same about Harris.
Meanwhile, Trump has made light of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s apparently sarcastic statement recently that he supported Harris. The Republican Party’s candidate was reacting to comments made on Thursday by Russia’s president, who, when asked for his thoughts on the US election, noted that Joe Biden had asked his supporters to back the vice-president and added: “we will do the same, we will support her”.
“She laughs so expressively and infectiously that it means that everything is fine with her,” Putin said with a smile before suggesting this could mean she would refrain from further sanctions against Russia.
“He endorsed Kamala,” Trump said. “I was very offended by that. I wonder why he endorsed Kamala. No, he’s a chess player.” – New York Times